If you want to draw borders fast in Excel, you can hold down the Ctrl key, select all the areas that need borders and apply them in one swell foop!

I just realized this recently. It’s pretty fast, unless you’re trying to do a screen capture with buggy software.

Speaking of which, I just found a new straight-to-animated-gif program, called Cropper, that replaced the free-for-one-month-and-then-pay-$300 software (had it for a month.) Cropper works fine so far, except for one major bug. It’s not the most intuitive program, but on the flip side it works with no intermediate steps and produces a pretty small file.

Small enough, that is, that it loads pretty fast on my laptop. I’d be interested to hear from anybody about whether it started fast, or not, for them.

If you do use it, you’ll want to know about the bug. You can start a screenshot in at least two ways, double-clicking or pressing Alt-PrtSc. Double-clicking leaves the transparent blue selection layer on the screen, so I like the hotkey approach. But the bug is that the first time after opening Cropper, you need to start your capture by double-clicking or you’ll see the disheartening .Net runtime error screen.

After seeing it a few times the phrase “come a cropper” leapt to mind. But no worries, after double-clicking once you can use the hotkey for subsequent captures.

If anybody has any suggestions for animated gif software, I’m all ears.