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Technology
Info, Tips, FAQs Quick Tips - Quick Computer Tips
WINDOWS 2000: Shortcuts are Super Sleuths This tip applies to Windows 2000 Professional. Windows 2000 Professional's shortcuts are a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it comes to keeping track of moving files. If you create a shortcut to a file or program and then move the file or program to a different spot on your hard disk, the shortcut follows the file or folder to its new location. If your network is running the Windows 2000 Active Directory, the original can even have a new name and be on a different computer and the shortcut still works. Pretty cool, huh? ~~~~~
AutoSave's Limitations This eTip works in Word 2000, but it may also work in other versions of Word with little alteration. Give it a try! Word's AutoSave feature doesn't work the way most people think it does. This feature periodically makes a copy of your document and adds the .ASD extension to it. As time passes between the saves, you may have added a substantial amount to your document, but the changes are not in the .ASD document. These documents are temporary and are erased when your document is saved. More importantly, they are deleted when you close the file. AutoSave is designed to recover work in the case of a power outage or system crash. You should always save your document by using the Save command when you exit Word. If you want to turn on the AutoSave feature or just change the time interval on the saves, choose Tools, Options and select the Save tab. Enter the time interval that you want in the Automatic Save Every box. However, don't put more faith in AutoSave than it deserves. Often, it may save you significant amounts of time and work, but power outages, in particular, are difficult situations for Word to handle. After a power outage, Word frequently demonstrates the annoying habit of making an open file unrecoverable. Your best defense? Back up important work regularly and to other media sources (like a floppy or ZIP drive). ~~~~~
Business Tip: Shortcut To Organize Instead of creating hundreds of folders and constantly having to navigate through them to find current documents for projects on which you are currently working, create a high-level folder that houses shortcuts to lower folders so that you can traverse to where you need to be quickly. You can also use your desktop to house shortcuts to folders as well. Be careful; this can quickly become a source of great clutter. ~~~~~
Order Photo Prints Online Do you have some digital photos you'd like to frame? Don't rush down to your local photo counter, disk in hand. You can order prints right from your computer. Open the folder containing the photos from which you'd like to order prints. Under Picture Tasks, select Order prints online. Now just follow along with the Online Print Ordering Wizard. Click Next, select the pictures you want to order, click Next, choose a company, and so on, entering all the details for your order. The prints will be delivered to your door. ~~~~~
Assigning Styles In Word When you create a Word document, Word will often apply some formatting automatically. This is great, unless the formatting isn't what you want. To turn off this
automatic formatting feature, choose Tools|AutoCorrect. ~~~~~
Multiple Users #2 (Pre X) Let's start by opening the Multiple Users control panel. See that name? That's you. Where did it come from? The File Sharing control panel. Don't know your own password? Change it NOW in the File Sharing control panel before we continue. Now that you know your password, let's change the icon associated with your name and look at some other options. Double-click on your name and click OK to bring up the options dialog box. You can change your user name and password here too. Click the disclosure triangle at the bottom and click on the User Info tab. Click once on the image and understand that you can drag and drop or paste another image on top of the current one. More tomorrow. ~~~~~
Selecting Buried Objects in PowerPoint In our last tip, we showed you how to place clip art behind text on your presentation page: After adding the art to the page, place it where you want it, then right-click it and select Order, Send to Back. The trouble is, if that art ends up behind a larger object, such as a block of text, you can no longer select it with the mouse (clicking on the art selects the text in front of it). Tab to the rescue. Press Esc to exit a text box, if necessary, then press Tab (or Shift-Tab) to rotate through all objects on the page. When the clip art appears selected, it's as through you've clicked it with the mouse. (Tip-in-a-tip: To right-click the selected object, press Shift-F10.) ~~~~~
PRN Files Question:
Answer: Good luck! ~~~~~
Identifying Opera 6 You can tell Opera how you want it to appear on the Internet. To look into this feature, run Opera 6 and choose File|Preferences. When the Preferences dialog box opens, click Network. Now, click the arrow at the right side of the "Browser identification" list box and select one of the browsers in the list. You can choose Opera, Mozilla 5.0, Mozilla 4.78, Mozilla 3.0, or MSIE 5.0. After you make your selection, click OK to close the dialog box and apply your settings. ~~~~~
Setting Permissions with FrontPage To control who may edit your Website, you use FrontPage to specify administrators and authors. If you want your Website to appear only to authorized visitors, you can also create a list of people with browsing access. FrontPage provides for the following three levels of access: Administer: Giving someone Administer access makes him or her an administrator, and an administrator can create, edit, or delete Websites and pages and adjust a Website's permissions. Every Website must have at least one administrator. Author: An author can create, edit, or delete pages but cannot create or delete Websites or adjust the Website's permissions. Browse: A person with Browse access can only a view a Website with a Web browser; that person can't edit the Website or even open the site in FrontPage. ~~~~~
Stand-Alone Functions Although AND and OR are frequently used with the IF function, they can be used by themselves. The entry below results in the answer TRUE if both conditions are true, or FALSE if either condition is false: =AND(B7>10,D7="Sales") The next entry below results in the answer TRUE if either condition is true, or FALSE if both conditions are false: =OR(B7>10,D7="Sales") ~~~~~
Write Protection and Windows XP Write protection is supposed to be a helpful safety feature, but most people discover it through an abrupt bit of behavior on the computer's part. Windows XP stops the user short with the following threatening message while they are trying to copy a file to a floppy disk or CD: Cannot copy (name of file)!: The media is write protected. If you encounter this write-protect error, wait until the floppy drive stops making noise. Remove the disk, unwrite-protect the disk, and put it back in the drive. Then, repeat what you were doing before you were so rudely interrupted. ~~~~~
Extending the Clipboard This eTip works in Word X for the Macintosh, but it may also work in other versions of Word with little alteration. Give it a try! In most Macintosh programs, the Clipboard can hold only one item at a time, so cutting or copying a second item replaces the contents of the Clipboard. But Word X for Mac (like the other Office X applications, except Entourage X) extends the standard Clipboard so that it can now hold multiple items. You can show the Office Clipboard by choosing View, Office Clipboard. Cutting or copying text, a graphic, or a QuickTime movie places the item on the Office Clipboard. You can also drag and drop items from a document window to the Office Clipboard, and vice versa. Each item goes into a small box in the Clipboard's window. At the bottom of the Office Clipboard are two buttons and a pop-up menu that let you manage the Clipboard's contents. ~~~~~
If you want to minimize all of the open programs on your desktop, hold down the Windows key and press M. It will minimize all the screens that are showing and display a blank desktop. ~~~~~
Background Problems If you have a favorite photo that you have scanned into your PC and have tried with no success to create a Desktop Background, then your Scanner software may be defaulting the file type to an incompatible format. Scan in the picture, then instead of just saving the file, perform a "Save As" and change the format to BMP. Now, you can use this file type as your background. Check your Scanner's manual on specifics of changing the file type. ~~~~~
Selecting Objects In Excel Worksheets Let's suppose that you'd like to select all the cells in a worksheet that contain text. To see how this works, open a blank worksheet and enter some text into cells A1 and B1. Now, move to cells A2 and B2 and enter some numbers. With both text and numbers in your worksheet, press Ctrl + G to open the Go To dialog box. Click Special and then select the "Constants" radio button. Of the four check boxes (Numbers, Text, Logicals, Errors), leave only "Text" selected. Click OK and Excel will highlight only the Text entries. ~~~~~
F5 to Refresh Floppy Window Need to view the contents of multiple floppy disks in an open floppy drive window? There's an easy way to switch from one to the next. When you pop a new disk in your floppy drive, press F5 on your keyboard. The contents of the new disk replace those of the last. ~~~~~
Adjust Clip Art Brightness Two tips back, we showed you how to place clip art behind text on your presentation page: After adding the art to the page, place it where you want it, then right-click it and select Order, Send to Back. Does the art you added drown out the text in front of it? Lighten that picture up a bit, so it fades into the background. Select the picture by clicking it once, and you'll see the Picture toolbar floating on screen (if not, select View, Toolbars, Picture). Click the More Brightness button continuously until the picture is light enough to see the text in front of it clearly. (Tip-in-a-tip: If you make it too bright, use the Less Brightness button or click the Reset Picture button on the right side of the Picture toolbar.) ~~~~~
Multiple Users #3: Your 'Voice Password' (Pre X) With your Multiple User control panel open to the owner's dialog box, click on the Alternate Password tab and, if you have a microphone, create a voiceprint login. Here's how: Click on the Create Voiceprint tab, verify with your password, and then get ready to create your voice password. You can change the phrase and when you're ready, click Continue to create the voiceprint by repeating the phrase four times. Tomorrow we will add another user to the mix. ~~~~~
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