Some fun things to do to slow down your friends' productivity

Sometimes you notice that people you are in contact with work far too quickly. It can be an over-zealous boss or an over-ambitious employee or your brother in law who is organising a pub quiz you do not want to attend to. Here are some hints how you can send data for feedback to them to keep them busy for a long long time.

• If your Word document contains complicated tables, export it to PDF.
• If your Word document contains text only, it is unfortunately far too easy to extract it from a PDF with ctrl-A ctrl-V. To increase the challenge, use the encryption options for PDF and choose the option "Cannot Copy". You can do that in programs like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Indesign or Mac OS X's built in PDF export.
• Export PowerPoint documents as JPEG files. (Yes, there is a Save As option to export every single slide as JPEG!)
• For complex Excel formulas, copy them and then paste them as pictures in a mail.
• If you are lucky enough to use Microsoft Outlook as Mail client, send all mails with the option "Prevent Copying". Note that it only is fun, if the recipient has the same mail client. Other recipients will be able to copy the text like a normal mail.
• Share your data in HTML on some website, and use some of the methods described for example here to prevent copy from the site. That is not fool proof fun, however, as there are plenty of ways around the methods, like simply disabling javascript. Use only for computer neophytes, who are just learning to hate their computers.
• Pay special attention to long codes and IDs like ISBN or keys to WiFi networks - always send them as inline images, so the recipient has to retype them. It is all the more fun, if the rest of the text, which has no importance whatsoever, is normal characters that can be copied.
• Whenever you send text as images (and that should be often), make sure the text is slightly too small to read comfortably. If the reader easily can tell the difference between "H" and "N", you should probably decrease the font size.

If you only follow these simple rules, you will have plenty of fun with your friends. Not only that, after a very short time, you won't have any friends left to bore you.