Rob Griffiths

If you’ve ordered a new iPad, you may be wondering what to do with your old one. One option, of course, is to keep it, perhaps passing it along to a friend or relative. Another option, though (as Lex Friedman pointed out in his guide to disposing of old iPads), is to sell that older device for cold hard cash—or at least a gift card or two.

There are several outfits out there—including a mix of old-school retailers, online giants, and companies you’ve never heard of before reading this story—that will pay for used iPads.

When Apple first released the Magic Trackpad($69; Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ), my initial response was something of a yawn. While gesture support seemed useful on my desktop Mac Pro, I wasn't willing to give up on my mouse (a Razer DeathAdder) and its five customized buttons. With those buttons, and some help from various utilities, my mouse handled a variety of tasks, including drilling down into Finder folders, searching the Web, displaying a program's menus at the mouse location, and switching between all my open windows. Giving all that up, to simply gain gesture support on a slick-looking input device just wasn't worth it in my book. (Haven't seen gestures before? Check out this video demonstrating them on a MacBook trackpad.)

But then I stumbled across Andreas Hegenberg's BetterTouchTool (donation requested). The BetterTouchTool utility allows you to define your own gestures and actions. In addition to its not-yet-final support for the Magic Trackpad, BetterTouchTool works with many third-party trackpads and Apple's Magic Mouse. It even lets you assign various actions to keyboard shortcuts. For me, the key feature was the ability to assign actions to newly-available gestures. This (along with my existing utilities) would allow me to replicate the functionality of my multi-button mouse while gaining the gesture features of the Magic Trackpad.

Microsoft Excel 2011 is packed with new features, but three areas in particular are worth taking some time to learn.

1. Themes and Cell Styles spruce up your spreadsheets

After Apple recently refreshed its iMac line with chips from Intel's Core i Series, some users might be left wondering which processor would work best for them.

Apple announced in late July that it is adopting Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 chips for its iMac line of desktop computers. The move meant Apple was casting aside Intel's older Core 2 series of chips for the newer versions.

Printing from Microsoft Excel may seem like an obvious operation, with no need of further explanation--just press Command-P, Return, and head to the printer to pick up your document.

The reality, though, is that Excel's print function is quite powerful, but you have to do a bit of digging to take full advantage of its capabilities. Here are just a few of the options open to you when you print with Excel.

Printing from Microsoft Excel may seem like an obvious operation, with no need of further explanation--just press Command-P, Return, and head to the printer to pick up your document.

The reality, though, is that Excel's print function is quite powerful, but you have to do a bit of digging to take full advantage of its capabilities. Here are just a few of the options open to you when you print with Excel.

Editor's note: Macworld Senior Contributor Rob Griffiths was our representative at the MacTech conference in L.A. this week.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the first-ever MacTech Conference, held at the Universal Studios Sheraton in the greater Los Angeles area.

What a time for Apple to announce the discontinuation of the Xserve than right in the middle of a conference of Mac IT professionals and developers! But that was the story here at the first MacTech Conference.

Friday morning, before the conference's general sessions began, conference organizer Neil Ticktin mentioned that it was the end of the line for Xserve, and opened the floor to public discussion.

The king of the hill in today's storage world is the solid-state drive (SSD). These drives use flash memory, have no moving parts, offer incredible access speed, and can make a huge difference in the performance of your computer.--

Unfortunately, they're also size-restricted and still quite expensive--replacing a standard 320GB hard drive in a new $1499 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 512GB SSD will set you back an extra $1400, which is nearly the price of the entire machine. Yikes. You can save some cash by giving up capacity--you can go from a standard 320GB drive in that same MacBook Pro to a 128GB SSD for only $300 more (or 33 percent of the cost of that particular Mac).

On Wednesday, when Apple holds a Mac-focused event-you remember, those machines that Apple made before iPhones, iPods, and iPads took over?-it promises a look at the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7. Although this release hasn't been named, the invitation clearly shows a lion peeking out from behind a rotated Apple logo... so I'm guessing that Mac OS X 10.7 will be named Lynx. OK, just kidding on that one; clearly it's going to be Lion.

If you like word games, try this one...who's the king of the jungle? Yes, that's right-the lion. Despite having a few more cat names available, Apple chose to name the upcoming Mac OS X release after the big cheese, the top of the heap... so does that mean that this release is the one to top all others, the king of the OS X jungle, as it were? I'm not sure, but Apple tends not to do anything by chance, so I'd wager that Mac OS X 10.7 is going to be more feature-laden and drool-inducing than many past Mac OS X releases.

On Wednesday, when Apple holds a Mac-focused event--you remember, those machines that Apple made before iPhones, iPods, and iPads took over?--it promises a look at the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7. Although this release hasn't been named, the invitation clearly shows a lion peeking out from behind a rotated Apple logo... so I'm guessing that Mac OS X 10.7 will be named Lynx. OK, just kidding on that one; clearly it's going to be Lion.

If you like word games, try this one...who's the king of the jungle? Yes, that's right--the lion. Despite having a few more cat names available, Apple chose to name the upcoming Mac OS X release after the big cheese, the top of the heap... so does that mean that this release is the one to top all others, the king of the OS X jungle, as it were? I'm not sure, but Apple tends not to do anything by chance, so I'd wager that Mac OS X 10.7 is going to be more feature-laden and drool-inducing than many past Mac OS X releases.

For years, Excel 2008 has been teasing me: Every time I launched the app, I'd see that menu item, mocking me, tempting me to click. "Go ahead," it would whisper, "You know you want to. This time it'll work -- really, it will."

But selecting Tools -> Macros in Excel 2008 ( Macworld rated 3 out of 5 mice ) would only remind me, once again, that the Macros menu was but a mere shell of its former Excel 2004 self. It seemed to exist for no other reason than to annoy those of us who used and relied on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros. Sure, that menu might show you some really old macros, the ones written in the Excel 4.0 macro language. But it wouldn't show you anything written with VBA. And if the sheet you were looking at included VBA macros, they wouldn't run.