╣   CDataNotesль"EАDirectX    АNew NoteВDirectX Upgrade If you play a lot of games on your PC, chances are that your games use DirectX. If that's the case, you should always be using the latest version. Not doing so could cause your PC's performance to suffer. Look at www.microsoft.com/directx to make sure. One note: This is a big file! Click here to access. http://www.microsoft.com/directx - Michael Vincent     АGeneral    АChange Icons For The Holidays!KIf you want to change icons on your desktop to reflect your holiday spirit, or lack thereof, then simply right-click the icon you want to change (Note: My Computer, Recycle Bin, Network Neighborhood and My Documents cannot be changed this way) and select Properties. Click the Change Icon button and either select a new icon and click OK, or select Browse and find one on your hard drive. Whenever you run across an interesting icon, you can download the icon files from the Internet and save it in a folder to use later, when the occasion or holiday arises. - Michael Vincent     А%Change Special Icons For The Holidays·Yesterday I discussed changing icons other than My Computer, Recycle Bin, Network Neighborhood, and My Documents. You need to use a different process to change these icons. Here's how you can add that holiday spirit to your desktop. Right-click on your desktop and select Properties. Select the Effects tab and find the icon you want to change. Browse to where you have saved the replacement icon, select it, and click OK. Click Apply, and the icon will put on its new face. - Michael Vincent     АChange The Sidebar BorderжYou may not care much for the default text box border on your Word sidebar--perhaps you would like a heavier border instead. So, let's take a look at how you can make your sidebar border a bit thicker. To do this, move the mouse pointer over the sidebar (text box) border. When the pointer changes to a four-headed arrow, right-click and choose Format Text Box. When the Format Text Box dialog box opens, click the Colors and Lines Tab. Now, click the up arrow at the right side of the 'Weight' spin box to increase the line thickness. When the line reaches the correct thickness, click OK to close the dialog box and apply your new border settings. - Sue Whitehouse     АChange Your CD Drive LettersїYou can change the drive letters of your CD/DVD player, should you feel so inclined. Go to the Control Panel, select the System icon and go to the Device Manager tab. Select the drive you want to change, and click the Settings tab. At the bottom, you will see the current drive letter, followed by two boxes called 'Start drive letter' and 'End drive letter.' Click the drop-down arrow in the 'Start Drive Letter' and choose the drive letter you want. Click Apply and reboot. - Michael Vincent     АChanging Your Splash PageзOpen Explorer and go to Windows\options\install, open win19.cab, and right-click SuLOGO.SYS. Paste it in another directory (preferably somewhere in My Documents). Now rename it logo.bmp and open it with an image editor such as Paint. When you're done mauling, er, editing it, save the changes and rename it to logo.sys and place it in your C:\ directory. Restart Windows and see your new logo! - Michael Vincent     АClick And Hold▄While in the right side of the Windows Explorer screen, left-click a folder or file you want to move, then hold the left mouse button down and drag it to the left side. Then, without releasing the mouse button, hold the file over a folder with a [+] sign and the folder will open up, revealing subfolders. You can continue this "drilling" process until you reach your destination, then release the mouse button and drop the file into its new home. - Michael Vincent     АClick And Shut Down№In Windows, right-click the desktop and select New. Select Shortcut and on the command line, type the following command: Rundll.exe user.exe, exitwindows Now when you click the icon, your computer will shut itself down. - Michael Vincent     А"Computer Definition Bits And Bytes├You hear these terms thrown around all the time: 32-bit, 16-bit, 40 Gigabytes, etc. So what exactly do these terms mean and how do they relate to Windows? The term Bit comes from "Binary Digit." In regular counting, we use base-10 counting. Computers use base-2. So, numbers are either 1 or 0. Each one of these 1s or 0s is called a bit. 8 bits is called a byte. So, 00000101 is a byte of 8 bits that translates to the number 5. Now, 16-bits means that instead of having numbers from 0 to 255 available in the 1-byte computer system, now you have numbers from 0 to 65,535! This gives your computer more "room" to work. A true 32-bit processing system means you will have numbers from 0 to 4,294,967,295 available to perform work. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes, but because of the base 2, translates to 1,024 bytes or 2^10; a megabyte is 2^20 or 1,048,576 bytes; and a gigabyte is 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Man, am I a nerd or what? - Michael Vincent     АComputer Definitions ResolutionWhen you are attempting to make your Windows screen more friendly and easy to use, often you are encouraged to make sure that your graphics have the correct "resolution." What exactly does this mean? Earlier this month, we discussed the 'pixel.' The resolution is the total number of pixels on a screen. For example, when changing the screen resolution in Windows, you may use 640 x 480 or 1024 x 768. This number is the number of pixels horizontally x vertically. So, for 640 x 480, the total number of pixels is 307,200. So why not make a screen have millions of pixels and get a great image? The reason for this is your computer must map and draw each pixel. This takes significant computer power. This is also why, when you set your resolution to 1280 x 1024, Windows will not allow the large color combinations. It just simply takes too much computing power. - Michael Vincent     А Dithering>From within the Windows Printer Properties screen, buried in the Graphics tab is an option called 'Dithering.' What exactly is dithering? Dithering is placing dots in relation to one another to create the "illusion" of various colors or gray tones. It is used to help increase image quality. - Michael Vincent     АOptimal Performance For Windows4To make sure Windows is using the latest and greatest 32-bit drivers for all of your hardware, go to the System Icon with the Control Panel and select the Performance tab. If it says 'Optimal Performance,' then you are fine. Otherwise, research each device to find the one that is not 32-bit. You may need to update the driver, replace the device, or choose 'Remove' and then use the Windows 'Add New Hardware' option in the Control Panel to allow Windows to reinstall the driver. Remember, you'll need to reboot if you change drivers. - Michael Vincent     АOptimize Your Registry╪The Registry is one of those things Windows simply cannot do without. The Registry acts as a repository in the form of a massive database of information about your computer and everything on it. Occasionally, however, because of frequent inserts and deletes, the registry can become unwieldy, with large holes in it. Think of it as a slice of Swiss cheese. You can manually optimize your registry in addition to the regular automatic optimization. To do so, just type: SCANREG /OPT at the DOS prompt. This compacts the Registry down and fills in the holes. Caveat: This procedure won't work from within Windows -- only at the DOS prompt. Also, the procedure will not work at all with Windows 95. - Michael Vincent     АInternet Explorer    АCustom IE Bookmark IconsqEver bookmark a Web site in Internet Explorer and then find that the bookmark you created has a custom icon? I've seen this a lot lately on some of my own favorite sites, and was wondering how it's accomplished. Turns out it's baby-simple and doesn't require anything other than you placing a single non-executable file in the root folder of your Web site. First, create a standard 48x48 bitmap icon using your favorite image- editing program, then name it favicon.ico and place it in the top-level directory of your Web site. If all goes well, IE should detect it automatically when you bookmark or browse the site.     АMicrosoft Excel    АA Default Excel ChartZThe easiest and quickest way to create a chart in Excel is to highlight the cell range you want to include in the chart and press F11. This creates the default column chart. Excel will create the chart on a separate Chart sheet. To test this, type data into cells A1 through C3 and then select the range and press F11. - Sue Whitehouse     АAdd Borders To Excel CellsЬYou can add a border around any cell or range of cells in Excel. This is a nice feature to use when you need to make a range of data stand out. To do this, all you have to do is select the cells to border and choose Format|Cells. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Border tab. Next click the Outline Preset and then click OK to apply the border and close the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     А'Add Special Symbols In The Excel HeaderкYou can add almost anything to the Excel header so the text will appear on your worksheet printouts. However, if you want to add something that contains an ampersand (&), such as Bob & Ray, your printout will display only Bob Ray. The problem is that Excel uses the ampersand as a code element. To print an ampersand in the header or footer, you must use a double ampersand. For example, Bob && Ray. - Sue Whitehouse     А(Add The Map Button To Your Excel ToolbarбIf you often use Excel's Map feature, then you may wish to place a Map button on the Excel toolbar. To do this, choose Tools|Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab. Now click Insert to select it and then locate the Map icon in the dialog box's right pane. Use the mouse to drag the icon to a location on the toolbar and release the mouse button. Click Close. - Sue Whitehouse     А)Adding A Background To An Excel WorksheetThere's nothing that says an Excel worksheet has to have a plain white background. Suppose you have a photograph file on your hard disk that you'd like to use as a worksheet background. Choose Format|Sheet|Background. When the Sheet Background dialog box opens, double-click the picture file that you'd like to use, double-click its icon. If you want to use a picture as your worksheet background, make sure the picture is not too dark or busy -- you don't want to obscure the worksheet data. - Sue Whitehouse     АAdding A Global Macro In Excel·In the past, we have discussed how to make a macro available to all your workbooks by saving the macro in personal.xls. Another way to make a macro available to all workbooks is to create an Add-in. If you save your workbook as an Add-in, only the macros are saved. However, in this case, the macros are hidden so no one can modify them, or even view them. To do this, write your macro then choose File/Save As. Click the arrow at the right side of the 'Save as type' list box and select Microsoft Excel Add-In (xla). Name your new Add-In and click Save to save it and close the dialog box. Excel will automatically save the Add-In in the correct folder. To use the Add-In, one must choose Tools/Add-In and select the new name. - Sue Whitehouse     А(Adding A Map Button To The Excel ToolbarУIf you use Excel's Map very often, you might find it convenient to place a Map button into the toolbar. To do this, choose Tools/Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab. Now, under 'Categories,' click on Insert to select it. Under 'Commands,' locate the Map icon and use the mouse to drag it to the toolbar. Click Close to dismiss the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     АAdding Comments To Excel CellsцWhen you send your worksheets to others via email or on floppy disks, you may be able to help others by providing them with notes on cells that some might consider a problem. This is an easy thing to do in Excel. All you need to do is click the cell in which you wish to place a note and choose Insert/Comment. A little entry box will open. Just type in your message and then click somewhere away from the entry box to close it. You will notice that there is now a small red triangle in the upper right corner of the cell. This indicates that a note is present for that cell. If you move your mouse over the cell, Excel will display the message. To delete a comment, right-click the cell and choose Delete Comment. - Sue Whitehouse     А#An Excel Button To Use With CautionТThere's a handy little Print button in the Excel toolbar. If you click that button, Excel will print the current worksheet. That's it--Excel prints the entire worksheet whether that's what you want or not. To have some input into your printing, choose File/Print, or press Ctrl + P. Either method will open the Print dialog box so you can tell Excel what you want printed. - Sue Whitehouse     А'Another Way To Edit Hyperlinks In ExcelВWhen you need to edit a hyperlink in Excel, you can right-click the cell and choose Hyperlink | Edit Hyperlink. However, suppose you simply want to edit the data in the cell and leave the hyperlink as is. The easiest way to do this is to use the arrow keys to select the cell and then press F2. Now you can edit the cell data without affecting the hyperlink. - Sue Whitehouse     А'Assigning An Excel Macro To The ToolbarвIn the last tip, we discussed how to record a macro. This time, let's look at how we can assign the new macro to a button in the Excel toolbar: Run the Excel workbook that contains your macro. Choose Tools | Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab (if necessary) and then select Macros from the Categories list. Now drag the Custom Button to the toolbar and click Modify Selection and choose Assign Macro. When the Assign Macro dialog box opens, double-click the macro name that you want to assign to the button. And in the Customize dialog box, click Close to dismiss the dialog box and record your assignment. - Sue Whitehouse     А#Automatically Insert A URL In Excel6When you want to insert a URL into an Excel worksheet, you can navigate to the URL in your browser, then copy the URL and paste it into the worksheet. There's another way though -- you can open the desired page in your browser, then go to Excel and click where you want the URL to appear in your worksheet. Press Ctrl + K to open the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. Next press Alt + Tab and select your browser. Press Alt + Tab again to return to Excel. The URL will appear in the Insert Hyperlink dialog. Just click OK and you're finished. - Sue Whitehouse     АColoring Excel Cells:It's very easy to color cells in Excel when the Drawing toolbar is active. All you have to do is select the cells you want to color and then click the arrow at the right side of the Fill Color button in the Drawing toolbar. To activate the Drawing toolbar, choose View|Toolbars|Drawing. - Sue Whitehouse     А3Concatenating Excel Cells Containing Dates And TextЄSuppose you'd like to combine two Excel cells. Let's say that cell A1 contains the text "Today's Date is," and cell D1 contains the date 12/31/01. Go to cell A4 and enter =a1&d1 then press Enter. What you'll get in cell A4 is "Today's Date is 37250." To concatenate a text cell and a date cell, you first have to convert the date to text. So go to cell A4 and type =a1&text(d1,"mm/dd/yy") then press Enter. Now cell A4 will display "Today's Date is 12/31/01." - Sue Whitehouse     А$Conditional Font Formatting In Excel Suppose you'd like to have people enter a dollar value between $0.01 and $1000.00 in cells A1 through A5. You'd like any values outside this range to appear in red rather than black. To set up this condition, select cells A1 through A5 and choose Format|Conditional Formatting. When the Conditional Formatting dialog box opens, click the arrow at the right side of the 'Condition 1' list box and select 'Cell Value Is.' Click the next list box and select 'Not Between.' Move to the first entry box (to the right of the 'Not Between' box) and enter 0.01. Press Tab to move to the next entry box and enter 1000.00. Next, click Format. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Font tab (if necessary) and then click the arrow at the right side of the 'Color' list box. Select red from the list and click OK. Back in the Conditional Formatting dialog box, click OK again. Next enter some numbers into cells A1 through A5 and you'll find that any value outside the selected range will appear in red. - Sue Whitehouse     АCreating An Excel ChartThere are times when a chart becomes the most effective way to present data. Charts aren't much of a problem for Excel. Here's how to create one. Open a blank worksheet and enter some data. Perhaps you could enter A B C D into cells A1 through A4, and then type 1 2 3 4 into cells B1 through B4. Now, select cells A1 through B4 and then choose Insert/Chart. When the Chart Wizard opens, accept the default settings and click Finish. Excel will place the chart on your current worksheet. - Sue Whitehouse     АCustom Number Formats For Excel Let's imagine that you must enter several hundred Social Security numbers into an Excel worksheet. You don't have to worry about getting the format right because Excel has a special format for Social Security numbers. To select the Social Security format, select the cells you want to use and then press Ctrl + 1 to open the Format Cells dialog box. When the dialog box opens, click the Number tab. Now, under 'Category' click 'Special.' Under 'Type' select 'Social Security Number' and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     А Doing Simple Arithmetic In Excel~When you want to simply add, subtract, or divide a few numbers in Excel, you can just type in an equal sign followed by the numbers. For example, if you want to add 96 and 23, you'd type =96+23 and press Enter. This is certainly simple enough, but if you'd rather not have to remember to type in that equal sign first, you can get Excel to drop the requirement. Just open a blank worksheet and choose Tools/Options. When the Options dialog box opens click the Transition tab. Select the check box labeled "Transition formula entry" and click OK. Now, you can simply enter 96 + 23 to get the result of 119. Note that you will now have to enter an apostrophe before a number that you want to enter as text. And if you're considering a move to Microsoft's Office XP, click here for EMAZING's new tip! http://click.emazing.com/ads/xp/officexp.html - Sue Whitehouse     АEditing Excel CommentsыIn the last tip, we discussed how to add comments to Excel cells. This time, let's suppose that you have a comment in one of the cells in your worksheet and you need to modify it to match some changes to the worksheet. Right-click the cell that contains the comment and choose Edit Comment. This opens the entry box with the current comment. You can now modify the text in any way you wish. When you finish editing, click outside the comment entry box to close it. - Sue Whitehouse     АEmail An Excel Worksheet&An easy way to get a worksheet to someone outside your building, is to email it. All you have to do is save your worksheet and then choose File|Send To|Mail Recipient (as Attachment). When your email program opens, select the recipient, type in a note, and click Send. - Sue Whitehouse     А%Enter Multiple Lines In An Excel CellWhen you're adding titles to an Excel worksheet, you may often find that using more than one line in a cell improves your worksheet's appearance. For example, if you would like to enter names in Column A, you could enter the first name on one line of the cell, then enter the last name on the next line. To try this, click cell A1 and type John Quincy Now press Alt + Enter and type Doe. There you are -- two lines in the same cell. Excel will adjust the cell height to accommodate the text. - Sue Whitehouse     А$Entering Compound Fractions In ExcelЦWe have discussed in previous tips how to enter fractions in Excel: Simply enter a zero and a space before the fraction. If you fail to enter the zero, and enter something such as 7/8, Excel will think you're entering a date. To enter a compound fraction, enter the whole number first, then a space, and then your fraction. For example, you would enter 12 2/3 as 12 space 2/3. - Sue Whitehouse     АEntering Dates In ExcelПSome people are confused about how Excel 2000 deals with dates. Although it might always be best to enter dates in four-digit year format, there is no real problem with the two digit format as long as you know how Excel will handle them. Excel interprets all two digit dates between 00 and 29 as 2000 to 2029. All dates between 30 and 99 are interpreted as 1930 to 1999. - Sue Whitehouse     АEntering Excel Formulas>Entering Excel Formulas Excel has no special requirements when it comes to entering formulas. The one always necessary item is the equal sign (=). All formulas must begin with an equal sign. Although Excel will display all formulas in uppercase in the Formula Bar, Excel doesn't care about the case at all. When you enter formulas, you can save yourself some trouble by just entering them in lowercase. All formulas (sum, average, etc.) place data cells in parentheses. For example =sum (a1:a5) works, but =sum a1:a5 won't work. - Sue Whitehouse     АExcel AutoSave ProblemsOAs several readers have pointed out, using AutoSave can easily cause one a bit of trouble. The reason is that Excel's Undo feature will not work after a Save. So if you make a mistake and AutoSave activates before you have time to press Ctrl + Z (Undo), then the Undo will fail. You won't have this problem if you activate the "Prompt before saving" option. Choose Tools | AutoSave. In the dialog box, select the check box labeled "Prompt before saving" and click OK. Excel will now ask if you want to save the workbook. If you have an error pending, click Skip. - Sue Whitehouse     А Excel BordersdOne way to produce a more attractive worksheet in Excel is to put a border around your data, or segments of your data. As an example, open a blank worksheet and type some data into several contiguous cells. Now, select the cells that contain data and choose Format/Cells. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Border tab. Let's click now on the 'Outline' preset and then click OK to close the dialog box and apply your new border. As you can see in the Border page of the Format Cells dialog box, you can select the type of border you want and also the color of the border. - Sue Whitehouse     АFont Scaling In Excel ChartsExcel uses an Auto Scale feature that automatically scales fonts in a chart upon resizing the chart. The problem is that making a chart significantly larger will enlarge the text too much. To disable the feature, right-click anywhere in the white background area of the chart and choose Format Chart Area. When the Format Chart Area dialog box opens, click the Font tab. Next deselect the "Auto scale" check box and then click OK to close the dialog box and accept your new selection. - Sue Whitehouse     АGo To The Last Cell In ExcelbAn easy way to get to the last cell in an Excel worksheet is to press Ctrl + End. However, you're in for a surprise if you press Ctrl + End in some worksheets: You may find yourself way outside of the work area sitting on a blank cell! This happens when you use a worksheet cell and then later the data. To check this out, run Excel and type data into cell H99. Now, delete the data in cell H99 and type data into cells A1 through C5. If you press Ctrl + End, Excel will take you to cell H99 even though it's blank, rather than to cell C5, which is probably where you want to go. - Sue Whitehouse     А Green Lines For Excel WorksheetsОIt's often easier to work with a large worksheet if we borrow from the old green-and-white print-out paper used by line printers. Although AutoFormat offers some designs that contain lines, none do the green-and-white shading that we're looking for. However, you can add this shading by using the Excel 2000 Conditional Formatting feature. To do this, select the range you want to apply the formatting to and then choose Format|Conditional Formatting. When the Conditional Formatting dialog box opens, click the arrow at the right side of the "Condition 1" list box and select Formula Is. Now press Tab to move to the entry box and type in =mod(row), 2)=1 Next click Format. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Patterns tab. Select light green and click OK. Back in the Conditional Formatting dialog box, click OK to close the dialog and save your changes. - Sue Whitehouse     АHiding Excel WorksheetsfSuppose you have some raw data on Sheet2 of your worksheet. You're going to display your workbook for a small group of people and you don't really want them to see the raw data. But, you don't want to delete the sheet either. In such a case, you can simply hide Sheet2 from view. Just click the Sheet2 tab at the bottom of the Excel window and then choose Format/Sheet/Hide and the sheet will disappear from view. When you need to unhide the sheet, choose Format/Sheet/Unhide. This opens a dialog box that displays all the hidden sheets. Just double-click the sheet you want to unhide. - Sue Whitehouse     АHow To Clear Excel Formatting2If you have modified the cell formats in a range of cells, and now need to get back to the original formatting without losing data, select the cells you want to clear and choose Edit|Clear|Formats. Doing so will take you back to the default format and will leave your data intact. - Sue Whitehouse     АHyperlinking ExcelmOne way to navigate a lengthy Excel worksheet is to use hyperlinks. Let's say that you want to first look at interim data 1 (let's say cell A1), then go to interim data 2 (D1), etc. What you can do is click the cell that contains interim data 1 (A1) and press Ctrl + K to create a hyperlink. When the Insert Hyperlink dialog box opens, type in the cell you want to go to (D1) and click OK. Now when you click in cell A1, Excel will navigate to cell D1. To remove a hyperlink, right-click the cell and choose Hyperlink | Edit Hyperlink. In the Edit Hyperlink dialog box, click Remove Link. - Sue Whitehouse     АImporting A Picture Into ExcelйThere are two ways to get a picture into an Excel worksheet--you can copy it from another program and then paste it into Excel, or you can import it as a file. To import a picture, click where you want the upper left hand corner of the picture to appear and then choose Insert/Picture/From File. When the Insert Picture dialog appears, locate the picture file you want to insert and double-click it. - Sue Whitehouse     АInserting A Column In ExceldSuppose you have a worksheet that already contains a bunch of data. Now you discover that you really need to add a new column C, moving the current column C (and all columns after C) to the right. To do this, click in column C and press Ctrl + Shift + Plus Sign (+). When the Insert dialog opens, select the 'Entire Column' radio button and click OK.     АLinking Excel Worksheets╕There are times when we can store some of our data on one worksheet and then link that data to another worksheet in the same workbook. As an example of how to do this, open a blank workbook and select Sheet3. Into cell A1, type 27 and press Enter. Now, click the Sheet1 tab and then click in cell A1. Type =sheet3!a1 and press Enter. Cell A1 on Sheet1 will now display 27 (the contents of cell A1 on Sheet3). - Sue Whitehouse     АMacros For Menus In ExcelїWhenever we've discussed macros in Excel (or Word), we've always described how to place macro button in the toolbar. However, you can place a command for a macro in one of your menus if you prefer. To see how this works, record a simple macro (Tools |Macro | Record New Macro). Once you've recorded a macro (anything will do for this), choose View | Toolbars | Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab. In the "Categories" list, click Macro. Click the menu you in which you want to add the new macro to (for example, you could click Tools) and then, under "Commands," grab "Custom Menu Item" and drag it to the desired location in the open menu. Click Modify Selection and name your new menu item. Click Close to close the Customize dialog box. Select your new menu item, for example, you may have used Tools | Test. When you click the new menu item, the Assign Macro dialog box opens. Double-click the macro name to assign it to your new menu item. - Sue Whitehouse     А Making Room For Headers In ExcelтWhen you need to use headers that turn out wider than the cells, you can increase the cell width, or you can set the header text on an angle and leave the cell width as it is. To do this, type in a header and then choose Format/Cells. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Alignment tab. Now you can use the Spin box labeled 'Degrees' to set your text angle. After you set the angle, click OK to save your setting and close the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     АMerging Cells In ExcelТYou want an attractive header in an Excel worksheet. The only problem you have is that the header spans several columns and it's difficult to center. What you need to do is use Merge and Center in Excel's toolbar: Type in your header, then select all of the cells that your header spans. Click the Merge and Center button (to the right of the Align Right button near default). - Sue Whitehouse     АMoving A Worksheet In ExcelLet's suppose you've created a workbook of three worksheets. Now that everything is in place, you see that Sheet 2 really should be the first sheet and Sheet 1 the second sheet. To move Sheet 2 so that it comes before Sheet 1, locate the sheet name tabs at the bottom of the workbook. Grab the Sheet 2 tab with the mouse and drag it to the left. When a small down arrow appears at the left side of the Sheet 1 tab, release the mouse button. Sheet 2 is now first and Sheet 1 is second. - Sue Whitehouse     АNaming A Worksheet In ExcelRWhen you want to name or rename a worksheet in Excel, you can right-click on the worksheet's tab and choose Rename. Another way to name or rename a worksheet is to simply double-click the tab you want to name. This highlights the text in the tab and allows you to type in a new name. Just press Enter when done. - Sue Whitehouse     АNaming Cells In Excel░Almost all Excel users know that you can name a range of cells. But did you realize that you can name a single cell in the same way? To test this, enter something in cell C5. Now select cell C5 and choose Insert | Name | Define. Type in Test and click OK. Next click somewhere away from cell C5 and then press Ctrl + G to open the Go To dialog box. Double-click Test and Excel will navigate to cell C5. - Sue Whitehouse     А6Naming Excel Ranges And How To Follow The Naming Rules█When working with a large worksheet, it's a good idea to name the ranges that you will use for your calculation. To see how this works, enter some numbers into a few cells and then choose Insert/Name/Define and type in a name (test is OK for this example). To prove that your named range is working, click somewhere away from the range and press Ctrl + G to open the Go To dialog box. Double-click Test, and Excel will go to the named range. There are some naming rules that you need to follow: - A name can contain up to 255 characters. - You must use a letter or an underscore for the first character. - After the first character, you can use letters, numbers, periods, or the underscore character. - Sue Whitehouse     АNavigating ExcelAs you develop a large worksheet, you may need to quickly navigate to the last cell. To do this, press Ctrl + End. This will take you to the last cell used by your worksheet. For example, if your last data cell is at L25, that's where Ctrl + End will take you. There is a bit of a catch to this. Suppose your last current cell is L25, but you had some data (now erased) in cell Z25. If you press Ctrl + End, you will find yourself at Z25. To get back to cell A1, press Ctrl + Home. - Sue Whitehouse     АNavigating To A Cell In ExcelWhen you need to move to a specific cell in an Excel worksheet, you can scroll to the area that contains the cell and then click it. However, if the cell you want to select is buried somewhere in a rather large worksheet, you might find it easier and quicker to use Excel's Go To command. Let's say you want to move to cell K324 in your worksheet. That's a lot of worksheet scrolling no matter how you do it. But you can press Ctrl + G, then type in K324 and press Enter and you're there. - Sue Whitehouse     АOrientation Selection In ExcelGLet's assume that there are basically two types of worksheets -- long and narrow, and short and wide. When you have a wide worksheet, you can probably view it better if you switch the worksheet's orientation to landscape. To do this, open a worksheet that contains some data and then choose File|Page Setup. When the Page Setup dialog box opens, select the radio button labeled 'Landscape' and then click OK. See if your worksheet fits the landscape orientation best. If not, choose File|Page Setup again. Select the 'Portrait' radio button and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АPrinting A Selection In ExcelУIf you have a worksheet that you only need to print a portion of, you can tell Excel what to print. All you have to do is select the portion of the worksheet that you want to print and choose File/Print Area/Set Print Area. To print your selection, choose File/Print and click OK when the Print dialog box opens. To remove a print area, choose File/Print Area/Clear Print Area. - Sue Whitehouse     АPrinting Excel WorksheetbWord is designed to create and print text documents. Therefore, it's very easy to see what will print on a Word page. On the other hand, Excel is designed to deal with mathematical data with very little attention to how a print-out will look. Since Excel is math-oriented, it's up to us to get usable print-outs. One way to make sure you'll get a good print-out is to always assign a print area to your worksheet. Suppose your data is contained in the area A1 through K25. Use the mouse to select A1 through K25 and choose File|Print Area|Set Print Area. Now print your worksheet. - Sue Whitehouse     А$Printing Large Spreadsheets In Excel In the last tip, we talked about setting an Excel worksheet's print area. The method we described works well for relatively small worksheets. However, there's no single method that will allow you to print large worksheets. You'll have to spend some time setting page breaks (choose Insert|Page Break). You can often make your worksheet print-out look better if you print it in landscape mode (wide sheet). To do this, choose File|Page Setup and select the "Landscape radio button" and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     А!Printing Multiple Excel WorkbooksТLet's say you arrive at work and the first thing you need to do is print a dozen Excel workbooks. You can open each one, then print it. But, you can print them all very quickly as long as all the files you need to print are in the same folder. To do this, run Excel and choose File/Open. In the Open dialog box, click one of the files you want to print. Next, press and hold down the Ctrl key while you select the other files you want to print. Now, click the Tools button in the upper-right corner of the Open dialog box and then choose Print from the menu. Excel will then open, print, and close each of the selected workbooks. - Sue Whitehouse     А Protecting Your Excel WorksheetsdYou want your coworkers to be able to look at a particular worksheet, but you don't want anyone but you making changes. To protect your worksheet from changes, choose Tools|Protection|Protect Sheet. When the Protect Sheet dialog box opens, type in a password. Re-enter the password when requested and then click OK. The only way you can modify a protected worksheet is to remove the protection. To remove protection, choose Tools|Protection|Unprotect Sheet and type in the password. DO NOT LOSE THE PASSWORD. We don't know of any way to recover a worksheet without the password. - Sue Whitehouse     АRecording A Macro In Excel,When you need to frequently repeat a series of key strokes or mouse clicks, you may find it convenient to record a macro instead. To do this, run Excel and choose Tools|Macro|Record New Macro. When the dialog box opens, type in a name for your macro (or just accept the default) and click OK. Now, go through all the mouse clicks and key strokes that you need for the selected operation. When you finish recording your new macro, click the Stop button. To use your new macro, press Alt + F8 and double-click the macro name. - Sue Whitehouse     АReviewing Comments In Excel/If you need to use comments in your Excel worksheets as an aid to others, you should look at the Reviewing toolbar. The Reviewing toolbar allows you to easily add and view comments in your worksheets. You can click a single button to display all the comments in the current worksheet. To place this toolbar in your Excel window, choose View|Toolbars|Reviewing. This will open Reviewing as a floating toolbar. However, if you use comments frequently, you can anchor the Reviewing toolbar at the top or bottom of the Excel window. - Sue Whitehouse     АSelecting A Range In Excel5Let's suppose that you're working with a long list of names in Excel and you want to select the entire list of names, but not the entire row. What you should do is click somewhere in the list and press Ctrl + Shift + * (asterisk). This will select only the cells that contain data. - Sue Whitehouse     АSet Decimal Places In Excel=There's a very easy way to set the decimal places in an Excel worksheet. All you have to do is press Ctrl + 1 to open the Format Cells dialog box. Then click Number (under 'Category'), set your desired number of decimal places, and click OK to close the dialog box and save your new setting. - Sue Whitehouse     А#Setting Excel's Default Data FolderWe are frequently asked how to change the default Excel data folder. Here's how: Let's say you've created a folder name c:\Excel Files. With the folder created, run Excel and choose Tools|Options. When the Options dialog box opens, click the General tab. Now click in the 'Default file location' entry box and replace the current entry with c:\Excel Files. Click OK to close the dialog box and save your new selection. Exit Excel and then run it again so that your change will take effect. - Sue Whitehouse     А/Setting The Decimal Place In An Excel WorksheetхExcel defaults to its 'General' number format. So, if you enter 1.00 into a cell, Excel displays it as 1. If you need to set a range of cells to a fixed decimal format, select the range and choose Format/Cells. When the Format Cells dialog box opens, click the Number tab and select Number from the 'Category' list. Use the 'Decimal places' spin box to set the number of places you want to use and then click OK to accept the setting and close the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     А"Single Document Interface In ExcelЪAlthough Word 2000 uses a true SDI (Single Document Interface) that opens each document in a separate window, Excel actually simulates the SDI. So if you'd rather have Excel open all documents in the same window, just as it used to do, choose Tools|Options. When the Options dialog box opens, click the View tab. Next deselect the check box labeled "Windows in Taskbar" and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АSorting Excel DataЙWhen you have columns of related data that you want in alphabetical order, you have to make sure that you keep the columns together. For example, you have this list that you want to sort, keeping the fruits (column A) and their prices (column C) together: Column A Column C Pears $1.29 Oranges $1.19 Kiwis $1.10 Bananas $1.49 Apples $0.99 In this case, you would select A1 through C5 and then choose Data|Sort. When the Sort dialog box opens, make sure Column A and 'Ascending' are selected and click OK. If you fail to select Column C along with Column A, the prices will no longer represent the correct fruit. - Sue Whitehouse     АMicrosoft Office 2000    АN)Cleaning Out Office 2000 Program ToolbarsbIt seems that we're always talking about adding buttons to the Word and Excel toolbars. Perhaps it's time to discuss how to remove buttons from the toolbars. To remove buttons from the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint toolbars, simply hold down the Alt key while you use the mouse to drag an unwanted button away from the toolbar. - Sue Whitehouse     АN0Create A New Folder In An MS Office 2000 Program7Here is a tip that works in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. When you're in the process of saving a file, and you see that you really need a new folder to place the file into, you don't have to leave the program and use Windows Explorer to create the folder. Suppose you choose File|Save As to save your new file. You can now click the Create New Folder button in the Save As toolbar. A dialog box will open, prompting you for a name for your folder. All you have to do is name your file and click Save to save it in the newly created folder. - Sue Whitehouse     АN&Finding Button Names In MS Office 2000¤We often describe how to use a particular function that requires you to click a toolbar button. It's difficult to describe some toolbar buttons adequately. It's almost impossible to describe them by position because our buttons aren't necessarily in the same position as yours. To determine toolbar button names, you can move the mouse pointer over a button and then wait a second or so (don't click the mouse button). The button will appear in a small box near the mouse pointer. - Sue Whitehouse     АN Living With The Office AssistantwSome people like the Office Assistant, and some people don't. Some like the Office Assistant some of the time, but not all of the time. If you want to rid yourself of the Office Assistant: Run Word (or Excel, or PowerPoint) and choose Help|Show the Office Assistant. When the Office Assistant opens, click Options. Deselect the check box labeled "Use the Office Assistant" and click OK. The Office Assistant won't bother you again unless you choose Help|Show the Office Assistant. If you like the Office Assistant some of the time, you can use Help|Show the Office Assistant to toggle it on and off. - Sue Whitehouse     АMicrosoft Paint    АS Paint TipЪWhile editing an image within Paint, it sometimes can become tedious and arduous to edit an image with a great deal of detail without making mistakes. While in Paint, click the magnifying glass, place the box over the area you want to edit and click. Now, that area is greatly magnified for more detailed editing. Now it's much easier to place Aunt Bertha's head on Mount Rushmore! - Michael Vincent     АMicrosoft PowerPoint    АU)A Black-And-White PowerPoint PresentationсSince one of the great features of PowerPoint is the nice color graphics, why would you want to convert a slideshow to black and white? So you can see how they would look printed on a black-and-white printer, of course! To preview your presentation in black and white, choose View|Black and White. Your primary slide will appear in black and white, and you see a color version in a slide miniature. To go back to color, choose View|Black and White again. - Sue Whitehouse     АU!A Falling Leaves PowerPoint Slide Here's an idea for an autumn slide: Create a slide with falling leaves that seem to pile up at the bottom of the slide. Here's how: -Run PowerPoint and then choose Insert|Picture|ClipArt. -When the Insert ClipArt dialog box opens, click the Seasons topic. In that group, you'll find some leaves of various colors. Insert one leaf of each color and then close the dialog box. -With all of the leaves still selected in your slide, choose Slide Show|Custom Animation. -Click the 'Entry animation and sound' list box and choose Crawl. -Click the list box to the right and choose From Top. -Click the Order & Timing tab and select the radio button labeled 'Automatically.' -Click the spin box up arrow once to set the timing to one second. -Click OK to close the dialog box and save your settings. -Use your mouse to separate all of the leaves and then drag them to the bottom of the slide. -Press F5 to view the slide show. -To add more leaves, follow the above procedure as many times as you wish. - Sue Whitehouse     АUA PowerPoint Valentine Slide&Are you planning for Valentine's Day 2003? If so, here's a simple Valentine's Day slide that you can make to use on your computer, or in a presentation. To create the slide, run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert|Picture|Clip Art. Locate a graphic of a heart and insert it onto the slide. With the heart in place, click AutoShapes|Block Arrows and select an arrow. Draw the arrow and move it over the center of the heart. Next click the Rectangle tool and draw a small rectangle over the tip of the arrow. With the rectangle still selected, click the arrow at the right side of the Fill Color button and choose a color that matches the heart. Click the arrow at the right side of the Line Color button and choose No Line. Now right-click the arrow and choose Custom Animation. Under "Entry animation and sound," select "Fly" and "From Left."Click the "Order & Timing" tab and select the radio button labeled "Automatically." Click OK to close the dialog box and then press F5 to see your animated slide in action. - Sue Whitehouse     АU Add Symbols To PowerPoint SlidesThere are several symbols that we all need to use. The primary ones are copyright, trademark, and registered. If AutoCorrect is activated, all you have to do is type (c) for the copyright symbol, (tm) for the trademark symbol, and (r) for the registered symbol. AutoCorrect will convert these codes to the correct symbols. However, if you don't have AutoCorrect activated, and don't wish to activate it, you can enter these symbols by holding down the Alt key while you enter the ANSI codes using your keyboard's number pad. To enter the copyright symbol, hold down Alt and type 0169 on the number pad. For the registered symbol, use Alt + 0174, and for the trademark symbol, type Alt + 0153. Note that these codes may not work in all fonts. - Sue Whitehouse     АU Animating PowerPoint Slide ShowsГLet's suppose that you would like to move a PowerPoint object very quickly from one point on a slide to another point. Many new PowerPoint users try to do this with multiple slides. However, the best way to handle a fast motion is to use only two slides--one with the object in its original position, and another with the object in its new position. It is interpreted as a very fast motion. To see how this works, run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert/Picture/ClipArt and select a picture. Move the picture to the center of the slide and then click the picture to select it. Next, press Ctrl + C to copy the picture to the Clipboard, and then press Ctrl + M + Enter to insert a new slide. Press Ctrl + V to copy the picture to the new slide. Now move the picture to the right side of the slide. Now, run the slide show to see how your animation looks. - Sue Whitehouse     АUDrawing Lines In PowerPoint▀You know that you can draw a perfectly straight line in PowerPoint by holding down the Shift key while you draw the line. But, did you know that you can also draw the straight line at a perfect angle as well? To try this, click the Line tool and then hold down the Shift key while you draw a line. Without releasing the mouse button or the Shift key, move the mouse to drag the line around in a circle. The line will snap into position every 15 degrees. - Sue Whitehouse     АUFormatting Shapes In PowerPoint╚When you place an AutoShape in a PowerPoint slide, you can select the slide and choose Format|AutoShape to open the Format AutoShape dialog box. You can then use the dialog box to modify the lines, colors, etc. You can also open the AutoShape dialog box with the right mouse button. Just right-click the shape and choose Format AutoShape. Here's an even quicker way to open Format AutoShape -- simply double-click the shape. - Sue Whitehouse     АU#Graduated Backgrounds In PowerPointA graduated background adds pizazz. To see how such a background looks on one of your slides, run PowerPoint and open the slide show. Choose Format | Background. When the Background dialog box opens, click the arrow at the right side of the list box and then select Fill Effects. In Fill Effects, click the Gradient tab. Now select the 'Preset' radio button. Next, click the arrow at the right side of the 'Preset colors' list box and make a selection. Click OK and then, back in Fill Effects, click Apply. - Sue Whitehouse     АUHiding PowerPoint SlidesLet's suppose that you're preparing for a big presentation. Here's a suggestion: create slides that show all of the data that you used to reach a conclusion. Create slides for any question that you think might arise. Nobody can anticipate all questions, but you'll have a pretty good idea. Now, you can hide all the extra slides that you won't need to display unless prompted by a question. Just navigate to a slide that you want to hide and choose Slide Show|Hide Slide. Now press F5 to run the show, and you'll find that the hidden slide won't automatically appear. If you need to show the hidden slides, then move the mouse and a button will appear in the bottom left of the window. Click this button and choose Go|By Title|your hidden slide name or number. - Sue Whitehouse     АUImporting Into PowerPointPMany people like to work in Word as much as possible and then import the Word document into PowerPoint. To do this, run Word and open the document you want to use in PowerPoint. Now choose File/Send To/Microsoft PowerPoint. This will open PowerPoint and load the current Word document into a new slide show. - Sue Whitehouse     АU&Insert Multiple Clip Art In PowerPointPWhen you choose Insert|Picture|Clip Art, you can insert a Clip Art picture into a PowerPoint slide by clicking the picture you want to use and then clicking the Insert clip button. However, if you drag the Clip Art to the slide, you can drag as many as you need before you close the Insert Clip Art dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     АU(Inserting Bullet-Free Text In PowerPointRWhen you enter text into a PowerPoint bulleted list, each line has a bullet. But, what do you do if you'd like to enter a line with no bullet? Normally, you type in a line and press Enter to move to the next line. However, if you type Shift + Enter, PowerPoint moves to the next line but doesn't insert a bullet. - Sue Whitehouse     АU Navigation Buttons In PowerPoint In the last tip, we talked about using hyperlinks in Excel. This time, let's look at how we can navigate in a PowerPoint slide show. If you choose to use them, PowerPoint has its own navigation buttons. To use these, open a slide and then choose Slide Show | Action Buttons and select the button you want to use. Use the mouse to draw the button. When you release the mouse button, PowerPoint opens the Action Settings dialog box. Select the actions you want to use and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АU!Opening PowerPoint's Slide Master'PowerPoint's Slide Master is the one slide that determines the style of all the slides in a given slide show. Any changes you make in the Slide Master will appear on each slide in the show. To open the Slide Master, choose View|Master|Slide Master. Alternatively, you can hold down the Shift key and click the Slide View button (just above the Draw button and the bottom left side of the PowerPoint window). To close the Slide Master and continue working on your slide show, click Close in the floating Master toolbar. - Sue Whitehouse     АUOrdering Graphics In PowerPoint√When you deal with more than one picture in a PowerPoint slide, you may need to change the picture order so the correct picture will appear over another picture. To investigate how this works, open a blank slide and choose Insert|Picture|Clip Art. Insert several pictures and then close the dialog box. Next move the edge of one picture over the other picture. Right-click the picture that appears on top and choose Order|Send to Back. The other picture will now appear on top. - Sue Whitehouse     АUPowerPoint Design TemplatesЪThere are tons of templates that come with PowerPoint 2000. The problem is that you may not find them all because they're not all installed. To install all of them (they require only a paltry 3 MB of disk space), insert your Office 2000 disc and click Start|Settings|Control Panel. When the Control Panel opens, double-click Add/Remove Programs. Now double-click on your Office 2000 installation (or whatever it's called). When the Office Setup dialog box opens, click Add or Remove Features. Click the small plus sign (+) at the left of Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows. Next, click Design Templates and choose "Run all from My Computer." Click Update Now to continue. When Setup completes, click OK, then click OK to close the Add/Remove dialog box. Close Control Panel. To see the templates, run PowerPoint and choose File|New. When the dialog opens, click the Design Templates tab. - Sue Whitehouse     АUPowerPoint Keyboard ShortcutsРThere are many standard keyboard shortcuts that apply to all Microsoft Office programs, and there are some that apply only to specific programs. For example, in PowerPoint you can press Ctrl + M + Enter to create a new blank slide just like your current slide. If you need to duplicate a slide, navigate to that slide and press Ctrl + D. And, to run a slide show, press F5. - Sue Whitehouse     АUPowerpoint MoviesаPowerPoint doesn't limit you to the custom animations you can apply to PowerPoint objects -- you can also insert short movies into PowerPoint slides. To check this out, run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert|Picture|ClipArt. When Insert ClipArt opens, click the Motion Clips tab. Next click Academic and insert the school bus cartoon. Press F5 to view the slide show. Cool, eh? - Sue Whitehouse     АUPowerPoint TablesРAlthough you can copy Word and Excel tables and paste them into PowerPoint slides, you can also create tables in PowerPoint. The PowerPoint slides are not quite the same as those in Word and Excel, but are comprised of OfficeArt shapes. To see how this works, run PowerPoint and open a blank slide. Choose Insert/Table. Click OK to accept the default two columns and two rows. - Sue Whitehouse     АUPowerPoint Text AnimationРAn eye-catching animation on a PowerPoint slide is to have the text "type in" as though it were being typed on a typewriter. PowerPoint even provides the typewriter sound for you! To check this out, open a blank slide and click the Text Box button in the Drawing toolbar (its icon looks like a printed sheet with a large A on its upper-left-hand corner). Add some text to the Text Box. Next, right-click the Text Box and choose Custom Animation. When the Custom Animation dialog box opens, click the arrow at the right side of the Introduce Text list box and select By Letter. Now, click the top list box under "Entry animation and sound" and select Appear from the list. Expand the second list box and select Typewriter as your sound. Click the Order & Timing tab and select the radio button labeled "Automatically" and then click OK. Now press F5 to run your slide show. - Sue Whitehouse     АU0Saving A PowerPoint Presentation As A Slide Show`If you would like to start a specific slide show without first having to 1.) open PowerPoint, then 2.) load the slide show, and then 3.) start the slide show, then what you need to do is save the file as a slide show. To do this, run PowerPoint and open the presentation that you want to use. Next choose File | Save As. When the Save As dialog opens, click the arrow at the right side of the "Save as type" list box and select PowerPoint Show (*.pps). Click Save to save your file as a slide show file with a pps file extension. To run the show, just double-click the pps file. - Sue Whitehouse     АU%Sending A Word Document To PowerPointSWhen you're developing a presentation that requires a considerable amount of text and a complex outline, you might want to write the outline and text in Word and then transfer that document to a PowerPoint slide. To do this, choose File|Send To|PowerPoint. This will open PowerPoint and insert your Word document. - Sue Whitehouse     АUSlide View In PowerPointWIn PowerPoint 97, when you opened a blank slide, all you would see was the blank slide. In PowerPoint 2000, opening a blank slide results in a slide view and an outline view. If you want the slide to consume more window space, you can click the Slide View icon at the bottom left of the PowerPoint window. This will result in a large slide view and a small outline view. If you don't want to see any of the outline view -- just the slide as in the old days of PowerPoint 97 -- press Ctrl while you click the Slide View button. This time you'll get only the slide view. - Sue Whitehouse     АMicrosoft Word    Аm!A Multitude Of Text Boxes In WordOText boxes are handy little critters. You can put text in them and then move them around wherever you want. If you find that you need a number of identical text boxes, here's an easy way to create them: Just click a text box and hold down Ctrl. Next drag a copy of the selected text box. Repeat as necessary. - Sue Whitehouse     АmA Table-To-Text Word MacroTSince we often encounter tables in Word documents that we usually have to convert to text, we decided to write a macro to speed up the job. This is a very short macro, so even if you don't use it often, it may prove worthwhile to you. To create the macro, run Word and press Alt + F11. When the VBS Editor opens, click the 'Modules' folder in the left pane (near the top) and choose Insert|Module. Now add the following to your new module. Sub Table() Selection.Tables(1).Select Selection.Rows.ConvertToText Separator:=wdSeparateByTabs, NestedTables:= True Selection.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Normal") Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1 End Sub Press Alt + Q to return to the Word document. To use the macro, click in the table you want to convert. Next, press Alt + F8 and double-click 'Table.' - Sue Whitehouse     АmA Title Case Word Macro▐Here's a Word macro that you can use to change your headings from whatever they are to Title Case. To enter the macro, run Word and press Alt + F11. When the Microsoft Visual Basic window opens, right-click the Modules folder and choose Insert|Module. Next enter the code shown below exactly as it appears here. Sub TitleCase() Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdLine Selection.EndKey Unit:=wdLine, Extend:=wdExtend Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1 End Sub Press Alt + Q to return to your Word document. Click the heading you want to convert to Title Case and press Alt + F8 to open the Macros dialog box. Double-click TitleCase to run your macro. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm&Activate The Reviewing Toolbar In WordDWhen you use Word's reviewing features, you might find it handy to have the Reviewing toolbar always available. To add the toolbar, choose View|Toolbars|Reviewing. Let's say that you want to track all changes to your document. With the Reviewing toolbar present, all you have to do is click the Track Changes button. This is the first button in the second section of the Reviewing toolbar. All modified text will appear in underlined red. You can now click the Next Change button and then click either the Accept Change or the Reject Change button. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm Add FootnotesаHaving to put footnotes into a document is a real hassle with some word processors, but not with Word. You don't even have to worry about formatting or numbering the footnotes. Click where you want the footnote to appear and then choose Insert/Footnote. When the Footnote and Endnote dialog box opens, click OK to select the default settings--Footnote and Automatic numbering. When the Footnote window opens, type in your footnote text. When you finish entering the footnote, click Close to close the Footnote window. You don't have to worry about footnote numbering if you move or delete a footnote--Word automatically renumbers them. To view a footnote citation from your document text, just move the mouse pointer over the citation number you wish to view. A pop-up box appears to display the footnote text. You can also choose View/Footnotes to open the Footnote window for viewing or editing. - Sue Whitehouse     АmAdd Pictures To Word DocumentsЙIf you have a photo or other picture that you'd like to insert into a Word document, then choose Insert|Picture|From File and then locate your picture. Double-click the picture to insert it. Once you've inserted the picture, you'll need to set the text wrapping, otherwise you'll have trouble placing the picture in your document. When you click the picture, the floating Picture toolbar will appear. Click the Text Wrapping button (its icon resembles a dog with lines drawn over it). Choose the type of text wrapping you want from the list. Now you can place your picture where you want it to appear in your document. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm+Adding A Horizontal Line To A Word DocumentWe were recently asked if it is possible to add a decorative horizontal line to a Word document. The answer is yes. In fact, Word offers a good selection of horizontal lines that range from decorative to downright gaudy. To add a line, click where you want the line to appear and choose Format|Borders and Shading. When the Borders and Shading dialog box opens, click Horizontal line. Double-click the line you want to use. Note that the line will drop as you add any text above it. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm)Adding Your New Word Macro To The ToolbarIn the last tip, we showed you how to create a Word macro to convert a table to text. You can run the macro by pressing Alt + F8 and then double-clicking the macro name. However, a macro is much easier to use if you add a button to the toolbar to run the macro. To do this, run Word and choose View|Toolbars|Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab. Now, under 'Categories,' click Macros. Your new macro should now appear in the right pane. Drag it to the toolbar and then click Modify Selection. Change the name to Table to Text and press Enter. Click Close to dismiss the dialog box. Now, you can simply click inside a table and then click the new 'Table to Text' button to convert the table to text. - Sue Whitehouse     АmAligning Text In Word╤Let's imagine that you have already written a rather long document. Now, you see that a portion of the text would look much better centered. You don't have to redo any part of your document. All you have to do is select the text you want to center and press Ctrl + E. You can apply any format to selected text. Select the text and press Ctrl + E to center the selection, Ctrl + L to align to the left, or Ctrl + R to align it to the right. - Sue Whitehouse     АmAutoFormat A Word DocumentЇWord will format your entire document for you. This is a great feature if you need to make sure you adhere to a standard format at all times. To use this feature, choose Format|AutoFormat. When the AutoFormat dialog box opens, you can decide whether to review each change or just let Word have its way. Click OK to proceed. Even if you choose to allow Word to automatically format your document, don't worry, you can always press Ctrl + Z (undo) to get back where you started. - Sue Whitehouse     АmAutoFormatting A Word Table╣If you need to use a table in a Word document, you can just choose Table/Insert Table and then click OK to accept the default table. To make your table look better with AutoFormat, click in the table to select it and choose Table/Table AutoFormat. When the Table AutoFormat dialog box opens, click a few of the selections under 'Formats.' When you find one you like, click OK to accept it and close the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     АmBacking Up Word DocumentscDo you worry about losing long and important Word documents? If so, you'll be happy to hear that Word has a solution for you. All you need to do is tell Word to always make backup copies of your documents. Here's how: Choose Tools | Options. When the Options dialog box opens, click the Save tab. Select the check box labeled "Always create backup copy" and click OK to record your selection and close the dialog box. Word will now create a backup copy of any file you save and assign to it the extension WBK. Word will update the WBK file whenever you save your primary DOC file. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm&Changing Bullet Size In Word Documents(When you want to make bullets really stand out, you can make them larger. To do this, choose Format | Bullets and Numbering. When the dialog box opens, click the Bulleted tab (if necessary) and then click the type of bullet you want to use. To make the bullets larger, click Customize. When the Customize Bulleted List dialog box opens, click the style bullet and then click Font. Select a large font size from the list and click OK. Back in the Bullets and Numbering, click OK to close the dialog box and apply your changes. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm(Changing To Fully Justified Text In WordnSometimes you need to change an entire Word document to fully justified. This is an action that doesn't require many steps -- all you have to do is press Ctrl + A to select the text and then click the Justify button in the Word toolbar. Although this operation requires only a few steps, we find that it's easier to use a simple macro for the job. To enter the macro, run Word and choose Alt + F11. Right-click Modules and choose Insert|Module. Now, enter the code as shown here. Sub FullJustify() Selection.WholeStory Selection.ParagraphFormat.Alignment = wdAlignParagraphJustify Application.GoBack Selection.MoveDown Unit:=wdLine, Count:=1 End Sub Press Ctrl + Q to get back to Word. To run your macro, press Alt + F8 and double-click the macro. In the next tip, we'll discuss how to add the macro to a toolbar button. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm!Convert Hyphens To Dashes In WordIf you don't normally allow Word to automatically generate em dashes (long dashes), and you need them in a specific document, then you can easily convert all double dashes in a document to em dashes using Word's Find and Replace option. Press Ctrl + H to open Find and Replace. Type two dashes into the "Find what" entry box. Press Tab to move to the "Replace with" entry box and enter ^+ (caret plus sign). Click Replace All to replace all occurrences of double dashes with em dashes. - Sue Whitehouse     АmCounting Words In WordУYou probably know that you can count the number of words in a document by simply choosing Tools|Word Count. In fact, this feature counts words, pages, paragraphs, and lines. There are times, though, when you need to count the words or lines in a portion of a document's text. What do you do in such a case? Just select the text you want to count and choose Tools|Word Count. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm Create Multiple Versions In WordLWhen you have several people working together on a document, you may wish to create different versions of that document to help you keep track of changes. To save a document as a version, each person should choose File/Versions. When the Versions dialog box opens, click Save Now. Add comments concerning any changes and click OK. To open a version, load the document you're working on and choose File/Versions. Double-click the version you want to open. As long as everyone on your writing/editing team uses versions, it's easy to keep track of who did what. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm'Creating A Holiday Newsletter With Word▐The family holiday newsletters have become popular items in recent years. Obviously, you can easily write a letter with Word, but how about sprucing your newsletter up a bit? You can add some nice holiday Clip Art. Just click where you want the Clip Art to appear and then choose Insert|Picture|Clip Art. When the Insert Clip Art dialog box opens, click Special Occasions to find illustrations that will add a little holiday spirit to your newsletter. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm$Creating A Table Of Contents In Word%If you want to use a table of contents (TOC) for some of your Word documents, you need to make sure you use style to format your document titles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc). As an example, let's say that we use Heading 1 for all our titles in a particular document. To add the TOC, click at the top of the document and choose Insert/Index and Tables. When the Index and Tables dialog box opens, click the Table of Contents tab. Now, accept the default settings and click OK to insert the TOC at the top of your document. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm$Creating New Default Margins In Word(You don't have to accept the default Word margins -- you can set a new default yourself. When you do this, make sure you don't set margins that your printer can't handle though. To set the default margins, choose File|Page Setup. When the dialog box opens, click the Margins tab. Set the margins the way you want and then click Default. A dialog box will warn you that you are about to make a change that will affect all new documents that are based on your Normal template. Click Yes to continue and save your new default. - Sue Whitehouse     АmCustom Bullets For Word/Although you may find that you're perfectly happy with the standard bullets that Word uses by default, you may sometimes need something a bit snappier. In such cases, you can select from wide variety of colorful bullets. Just select the text that you want to add your special bullets to, and then choose Format|Bullets and Numbering. When the dialog box opens, click the Bulleted tab. Next click Picture and select a new bullet from the list that appears. Click Insert Clip and your new selection will appear in your bulleted list. - Sue Whitehouse     АmCustomizing AutoCorrect In WordAlthough Word's AutoCorrect is a great feature, you may discover that some of the corrections don't fit in a given document. For example, there are times when you might need to use two uppercase letters at the beginning of a word. This happens frequently if you're writing about math or computer programming, for example. To turn off a specific AutoCorrect feature, choose Tools|AutoCorrect. When the dialog box opens, deselect the check box labeled "Correct TWo INitial CApitals" (in our example) and click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АmCustomizing The Word Toolbars╔In Word 2000, unlike in Word 97, the Standard and Formatting toolbars share a single row. Also note that menus show a basic set of commands, displaying the most recently used commands first. If you prefer the old look, you can change things quite easily. However, note that when you do this in Word 2000, the other Office 2000 programs will also look more like Office 97. To make the changes, choose Tools | Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Options tab. Deselect the check boxes labeled "Standard and Formatting toolbars share one row" and "Menus show recently used commands first" and then click OK to close the dialog box and accept your new selections. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm$Dealing With Spelling Errors In WordОYou know that you can press F7 to spell check a document or selection. But, since Word underlines potentially misspelled words as you work, you can take this opportunity to add a word to the custom dictionary or to AutoCorrect. When you enter a word that gets underlined by a squiggly red line, right-click the word and choose the correct spelling if the word is indeed incorrect. If the word is correctly spelled, click Add to add it to the custom dictionary. If the word is a typo and AutoCorrect is available when you right-click a word, you can use it to add the correct spelling (if available) to your AutoCorrect list. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm#Displaying The Word Drawing ToolbarЎBy default, Word displays the Standard and Formatting toolbars. There are times when you need other toolbars, though. For example, if you work with graphics, you might like to have the Drawing toolbar always available. To make the Drawing toolbar visible, right-click the toolbar and choose Drawing. The Drawing toolbar will now appear in the window. If you want to use it permanently, drag the toolbar to the bottom of the Word window. At some point, it will anchor in place. - Sue Whitehouse     АmDragging Text In WordШAlthough you can highlight a word or phrase in a Word document and drag it to a new location, consider using the right mouse button instead of the left. If you use the left mouse button, the text simply will get moved from the original location to a new spot. If you use the right mouse button, a menu will open offering you some choices. You can choose to move the text or copy it. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm.Dragging Word Text With The Right Mouse ButtonЫIf you select text in Word 2000 and then use the mouse to drag it to a new location, the text moves to that new location and it no longer exists at the original location. However, if you use the right mouse button to drag selected text to a new location, Word will open a menu offering you some choices. You can move the text, copy the text, create a hyperlink, or just create a link. - Sue Whitehouse     АmEditing Word StylesGThe Times New Roman typeface is the default font in Word. You can change the default to another font. To do this, click on some plain text in a Word document. Choose Format|Style. When the Style dialog box opens, click Modify. In the Modify Style dialog, click Format|Font. Choose a new typeface and font size and click OK. Back in Modify Style, select the check boxes labeled 'Add to template' and 'Automatically update' and click OK. At this point, you're back in the Style dialog box. Click Apply to apply the new style and close the dialog box. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm Exiting WordLThere are several ways to close Word, and other Office 2000 programs. You can: -choose File|Exit. -make sure the Word window is active and press Alt + F4. -click the Close box (the X in the upper right corner). -press Alt + Space and then choose Close from the menu. -press Alt + F + X sequentially. - Sue Whitehouse     АmGet Some Quick Help In WordКSuppose you see something on your Word screen that you're not sure about. One quick way to get help on a specific item is to use the 'What's This?' feature. To access this feature, choose Help|What's This? Your cursor will turn to a pointer with a question mark. Just click on the item that you're interested in. When you're finished with 'What's This?,' press Esc. - Sue Whitehouse     АmGetting Word To Do A Summary╟Did you know that Word can create a summary of your document for you? Although the summary may not be perfect (software isn't really intelligent), it will provide you with a good starting point. You can edit the Word-generated summary to create a good summary. To create a summary, open a document and choose Tools|AutoSummarize. When the AutoSummarize dialog box opens, click the type of summary you want and then click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АmHyperlinks In WordbAs its default setting, Word turns anything that looks like a URL or an email into a working hyperlink. This is great until you find that you mistyped a link and need to edit it. The correct way to edit a hyperlink is to highlight it and press Ctrl + K to open the Edit Hyperlink dialog box. Edit your link and then click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm*Inserting A Watermark Into A Word Document>A watermark is a very light graphic that appears on document pages. The normal text of the document appears over the watermark. For example, you might like to have your company logo appear as a watermark on some of your documents. To test this, open a blank document and choose Insert/Picture/Clip Art. When the Insert Clip Art dialog box opens, select a picture and insert it into the document. Size and locate the picture as you like. Right-click the picture and choose Format Picture. When the Format Picture dialog box appears, click the Picture tab (if necessary) and then click the arrow at the right side of the 'Color' list box. Select Watermark from the list. Next click the Layout tab and then double-click 'Behind text.' Finally, click OK to close the dialog box and save your watermark. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm&Inserting Bookmarks In A Word DocumentПWhen you need to work with large documents in Word, it's very helpful to bookmark sections of your document for quick navigation. To do this, click where you want a bookmark and choose Insert|Bookmark. Name your bookmark and click Add. To navigate to the bookmark, press Ctrl + G and under 'Go to what' select Bookmark. Now, under 'Bookmark name' you'll see your newly-added bookmark. Click 'Go To' to navigate to the bookmark. Click Close to close the dialog box. When you have more than one bookmark (and you probably will), click the arrow at the right side of the 'Bookmark name' list box and select your bookmark name. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm!Linking Data From A Word DocumentIWhen you want to use an Excel worksheet inside a Word document, you can simply paste the Excel worksheet into Word. However, if there's a chance that you might want to modify the worksheet in Excel, the best approach is to link the Excel document. To do this, run Excel and open the worksheet you want to use. Select the worksheet range that you want to link to and press Ctrl + C to copy it to the Clipboard. In Word, click where you want the worksheet to appear and choose Edit|Paste Special. When the dialog box opens, select the radio button labeled 'Paste link.' Next, select 'Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object' and click OK. Any changes you make in the worksheet in Excel will now also appear in the Word document. Note that the Excel worksheet must remain in its current folder so Word can locate it. - Sue Whitehouse     АmMore On Text Wrapping In Word$In the last tip, we described how to get text to wrap around a picture in Word documents. This time, let's look at how we can customize text wrapping to make text flow around a picture even more closely than selecting a tight wrap does. As before, run Word, add some text, and then choose Insert|Picture|Clip Art and insert a picture. Click the picture to select it and then click the Text Wrapping and choose Edit Wrap Points. You can now use the mouse to drag individual edit points and get exactly the fit you want. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm'Moving Or Removing Word Toolbar ButtonsРIf you don't like the Word toolbar and menu arrangement, you can move the buttons around to suit yourself. Suppose that you'd rather have the View menu at the right side, between Table and Window. Just hold down the Alt key and use the mouse to drag the View menu to the area between Table and Window, then release the mouse button. The menu may open when you do this. Pay no attention--it won't hurt a thing. You can change any menu or button location using this method. Just hold down Alt and drag. Suppose there are some button or menus that you don't want at all. Just hold down Alt and drag the item away from the toolbar. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm Opening Recent Documents In WordCYou can open files using the Recent list (File | Your Document Name). However, this isn't always satisfactory. There is a way to keep the most recently edited document at the top of the list. To sort your folder to keep the most recent document at the top, choose File | Open. When the dialog box opens, click the arrow at the right of the Views Button and choose Details. Next click the Modified header until the last edited document appears at the top of the file list. From this point on, the last edited document should always appear at the top. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm(Place A Macro Button In The Word ToolbarЯIn the last tip, we described a Word macro to change a Word document to fully justified. This time, let's assign that macro to a toolbar button. To do this, choose View|Toolbars|Customize. When the Customize dialog box opens, click the Commands tab. Under 'Categories,' click 'Macros.' Your new macro should now appear under 'Commands' in the right pane of the dialog box. Drag the macro to where you want it to appear in the toolbar and release the mouse button. Click Modify Selection and then choose Default Style. Click Close to close the dialog box. You can now click the new button to convert your document to fully justified text. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm&Preparing A Word Document For Printing!- Without A Printer* Let's imagine that you and your notebook computer are out on the road with no printer. Did you know that you can get everything ready to print - including checking the Page Preview and all -- and then print your document to a file? When you get back to your office, you can simply copy the print file to your printer. To do this, you must first set up a printer in Windows. Click Start|Settings|Printers. Double-click Add Printer and click Next. Select your printer (the printer you have back at the office) and click Next. If you're asked about changing the existing driver, select the radio button labeled "Keep existing driver" and click Next. Under "Available ports:" choose FILE and click Next. Name the new printer "File Printer" and click Finish (no test print necessary). To print your document in Word, choose File|Print. When the Print dialog box opens, select File Printer and click OK. Name your file and click OK. Back in the office, you can just copy your PRN files to the printer. - Sue Whitehouse     АmPrinting An Envelope With WordЭWe were recently asked if Word could print an envelope. Sure, you can print an envelope -- doesn't Word do everything? Put an envelope into your printer (how you do this depends on your printer). Now, choose Tools | Envelopes and Labels. When the Envelopes and Labels dialog box opens, enter the postal address into the Delivery Address and Return Address entry boxes. Click Print. - Sue Whitehouse     АmQuick Numbering In Word+When you want to add a numbered list to a Word document, click the Numbering button in the toolbar, or you can simply type a 1 followed by a period, then a space, and then your text. Press Enter and Word will supply the number 2 with a period and the proper spacing. - Sue Whitehouse     АmQuick Synonyms In WordЩThere is a quick way to get Word to suggest a synonym. Just right-click the word and choose Synonyms. If Word has some suggestions, you can select the one you want. If Word doesn't have any suggestions, you can select Thesaurus from the menu. Note that this method will not work with some document formatting. For example, words in numbered lists don't offer the Synonyms command. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSaving All Open Word Documents░Even though Word 2000 uses the single document interface, which means that all documents are open in separate windows, there is still a way for you to save all the documents at once. Just hold down the Shift key and choose File|Save All. If you want to close all the open documents, hold down Shift and choose File|Close All. These commands do not appear in the File menu unless you hold down Shift. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSelecting A Line In WordlYou can always select a line in Word by using the mouse, or by pressing the Shift key plus the arrow keys. However, there is an even easier way to select a line. Just move the mouse to the left of the targeted line until the mouse cursor turns to an arrow. Click once and Word will select the entire line. Not the sentence -- just the line. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm!Selecting An Entire Word DocumentThere are several ways to select an entire Word document. The most popular is probably the old Ctrl + A. It's simple and effective. One selection method that many Word users don't know is that you can hold down the Ctrl key and then click in the left margin of the document. You can click anywhere as long as you click to the left of the text. The best way to do this is to hold down Ctrl and then move the mouse cursor over to the left until it turns into an arrow. When the cursor becomes an arrow, click. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSelecting Text Columns In WordcYou most likely know that you can click at the top of a Word table to select the entire table. But what if you need to select columns of tabbed text that aren't in a table? To select columns of text, click where you want to begin your selection and then hold down the Alt key while you use the mouse to select the desired text. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSelecting Text In Word 2000pIf you need to select small amounts of text in a Word document, then use the mouse to select the text or the Shift + arrow keys. For really large text selections, click at the start of the text block that you want to select. Next release the mouse button and hold down the Shift key and click at the end of the text block you want to select. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm Selecting Text In Word Documents\There are a number of ways to select text in a Word document. For example, if you want to select a single word, you can double-click it. If you want to select a sentence, press and hold down Ctrl while you click once anywhere in the sentence. To select an entire paragraph, click three times (quickly) inside the paragraph. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm%Sending A Word Document To PowerPointSWhen you're developing a presentation that requires a considerable amount of text and a complex outline, you might want to write the outline and text in Word and then transfer that document to a PowerPoint slide. To do this, choose File|Send To|PowerPoint. This will open PowerPoint and insert your Word document. - Sue Whitehouse     Аm+Setting A Default Folder For Word DocumentsuAlthough Word defaults to My Documents as the folder for all your document files, you don't have to save all of your files in that folder. All you have to do is change the folder that Word uses. To do this, choose Tools|Options. When the Options dialog box opens, click the File Locations tab. In the dialog box, click Documents and then click Modify. Select a new folder and click OK. Back in Options, click OK to close the dialog box and save your new selection. The folder selection will remain in effect until you follow the same procedure to change it to a new folder, or back to My Documents. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSetting Zoom In WordRSuppose that you're writing a Word document using a font size of 10 points. This isn't especially easy for you to read on the screen, but you have to think about your printout, and 10 points are what you need. You're not stuck with reading that small font size on the screen because you can use Zoom. Choose View|Zoom. When the dialog box opens, use the spin box to set the amount of zoom you need. You can see the size in the Preview page as you increase the percentage. Decide what proportion of the page you want to see. When it looks about right to you, click OK. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSharing Word Documents╜Some of us need to share Word documents with people who don't use Word. For example, some of the people who need a copy of your document may use Word Perfect. The best approach is to choose File|Save As. When the Save As dialog opens, click the arrow at the right side of the "Save as type" list box. Select the type of document that you need if it's available. If there is no matching type for the target word processor, choose Rich Text Format (*.rtf) and save the file. RTF is readable by all commercial word processors, and most freeware processors as well. Note that you'll lose any special formatting when you save a Word file as anything other than a Word file. - Sue Whitehouse     АmSorting A Word Table`In the last tip, we showed you how to create a sample book list using a Word table. Now, let's look at how to sort that list. Let's say that you want to sort the list alphabetically by book title. Run Word and choose File/Open. Now, double-click Booklist.doc to open your Booklist document. Next, click in the table and choose Table/Select/Table. With the table selected, choose Table/Sort. When the Sort dialog box opens, click OK to accept the defaults (sort ascending by Column One). Since Column One is the book titles in our sample table, Word will now sort the table alphabetically by title. Of course, you could also sort by author or publisher. All you need to do is select the column you want to sort by in the Sort dialog box. Make sure you select the entire table before you sort--otherwise, you will lose the association between the columns.     АmSorting Word ListsFAlthough everyone knows that you can sort Excel data, many people don't realize that you can also sort data in Word. As an example of how this works, let's use the data from the last Excel tip. Enter the data as shown here, pressing Tab twice between the name and the price. Pears $1.29 Oranges $1.19 Kiwis $1.10 Bananas $1.49 Apples $0.99 Now select all the data and choose Table|Sort. When the dialog box opens, accept the default and click OK. This will put the data into alphabetical order and keep the prices aligned with the correct fruit. - Sue Whitehouse     А Removing Apps    АеI HATE MSN Messenger!╞MSN messenger is a really nice tool if you like instant messaging and all of its benefits. For some people, however, MSN Messenger is little more than an annoying toy that must be manually removed from the toolbar each time Windows starts. You can temporarily stop MSN Messenger from starting by starting MSNCONFIG from the Run command. Click the Startup tab, and uncheck the MSMSGS (or MSMGS) box. Click Apply and then OK. - Michael Vincent     АTools    АзChecking Graphics Acceleration╝To make sure your computer is using all of the Graphics Capabilities your hardware can provide, right-click your desktop and select Properties. Click the Settings tab and then the Advanced button. Select the Performance tab and move the slider all the way to the right. If your computer seems to slow down, move the slider to the left until things are acceptable. (You will need to reboot when you change this setting.) - Michael Vincent     АзClear Out The Recent FolderPIn Notepad, create a file called DelRcnt.bat and have the following line as the only entry on the file: Del \windows\recent\*.* Save the file and, using Explorer, create a shortcut to the file. Now, whenever you want to run the new file, simply double click the icon and your recent file will be cleared! - Michael Vincent     А Visual Basic    АкAvoid Windows XP-based errors╗Avoid Windows XP-based errors when using the Packaging & Deployment Wizard While the Package & Deployment Wizard (PDW) works just fine on Windows XP, you may encounter some errors when you try to install an XP-packaged app on an earlier OS, such as Windows 98. When you try to use the installation program, it may generate an error that says some of the files are out of date. It then asks to update the files. If you agree to update the files, Windows 98 reboots and generates the following error: The MSVCRT.DLL file is linked to missing export NTDLL.DLL RtlGetNtVersionNumbers To say the least, this behavior can cause extreme difficulty for end-users, especially if they don't have their OS backup disks handy. Fortunately, there's a workaround. Apparently, this problem occurs because the XP version of the PDW uses its own version of MSVCRT.DLL. It then tries to copy this DLL to the target machine. However, this DLL is incompatible with Windows 98 and will crash the system. To avoid this troublesome behavior, copy MSVCRT.DLL from the OS\System folder of the Visual Studio 6.0 CD to the \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VB98\Wizards\PDWizard\Redist folder on the XP machine.     А Windows 2000    Ам CLONE YOUR WIN2K PC WITH SYSPREPЖWhen the time comes to clone a Windows 2000 system, you'll need a little-known utility to get the job done: Sysprep. It's one of those tools that don't get a lot of press, but which solves a special knot of problems that plague many people: How to move or duplicate Win2K systems easily? Sysprep prepares a Win2K system -- hence the name -- for cloning or imaging. Cloning a system "as-is" doesn't always work for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the SID. Short for "Security IDentifier," the SID is an internal serial number generated by your copy of Windows 2000 when you set it up. The number is used to "tag" your copy of Windows 2000 to that particular computer, so that it can be differentiated from other computers on the network. SIDs are also used to uniquely tag user accounts. If you create a user account with a specific name, assign it certain permissions, and then delete that account and create another one with the same name, the new account won't have access to the previous set of permissions. They're not the same account, even though they have the same name. The same applies to a PC, in a sense: If you try to set up two machines with the same SID on a network, they'll clash and you won't be able to use either of them for network operations. Sysprep removes the SID and sets up your copy of Win2K so that the next time it's booted, it gets new user and workstation info, generates a fresh SID, and configures a few other internal settings that are relevant to your specific machine. It can also be set to redetect new hardware if you're moving to a machine that has a significantly different hardware setup. The whole process doesn't take more than a few minutes, barring the time needed to supply information at a few prompts. Actually, more than anything else, the Sysprep restart process resembles a stripped-down version of the second-stage install of Win2K itself (see http://www.winmag.com/windows/guides/win2000/16.htm). The one thing you can't yet do with Sysprep is clone a domain controller, however, but that's probably not something that could be done easily regardless. Sysprep runs as a command-line program, and its command-line switches give you a few basic options: -pnp: Used to force redetection of hardware. Because this requires drivers being present, you'll need to have the CD handy on the target system, or modify the config files to point to a network share (described in detail later in this article). If you're moving or copying the installation to another, radically different PC, you may want to take a look at this article, "Using the System Preparation Tool on Dissimilar Computers" (see http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q216/9/15.ASP ). -reboot: Automatically reboot after you're done. This is another nice "hands-free" option. -nosidgen: Don't make a SID. If you have software preloaded that depends on the SID for security, or you're having trouble with the cloning process, you may want to enable this. -quiet: No confirmation dialogs. Good if you're in a hurry and you know what you're doing. Modifying the behavior of the cloned file is something you'll want to do at some point. If you're restoring the image on a system that has no local copy of the Windows 2000 drivers and want to point to a network share where the drivers are located, for instance, that's something you need to configure manually. To make changes like that, you need to create a SYSPREP.INF file -- a plain text file with options in it -- and place it in the directory with the Sysprep executable before you run it. When you unpack Sysprep, there's already a sample Sysprep file, named BothSysprep.ini, which you can customize to your heart's content. Note that if you don't see these options in the file, you can simply add them manually using Notepad, one to a line. Here's a breakdown of the most common options in the file, by section: [unattended] InstallFilesPath: Lets you specify a local drive or a network share where the Windows 2000 install files can be found. OemPnPDriversPath: Lets you specify a local drive or a network share where you have your OEM Plug and Play drivers. These two above options are important if you're cloning out systems that need to detect new hardware, and you don't have local copies of the OS. If you're connecting to a network share that needs credentials, there's a way to specify them automatically in the file below. OemSkipEula: Set this to "Yes" to skip the license agreement screen, which I'm sure all of us know by heart. ExtendOemPartition: Set this to 1 and it automatically extends the system partition to the size of the disk during reboot. [guiunattended] Timezone: Set your timezone here. For those of us on the East Coast of the USA, we use Zone 35. OEMSkipWelcome: Set to 1 to skip the welcome screen. OEMSkipRegional: Set to 1 to skip the regional options screen, such as which language locale to use. [identification] DomainAdmin: Set this to the domain\username of an account with permission to add computer account to domain, such as "trake\w2kadmin." Use this only if you're reconnecting the machine to a domain. DomainAdminPassword: The password for the above account. JoinDomain: The domain to join. The $OEM$ directory can contain a file named cmdlines.txt, which allows you to specify additional commands to run at the conclusion of minisetup. These are all command-line commands, so you can run batch files, install additional applications after the image has been deployed, or whatever you like. You can gain a great deal of flexibility through creative use of $OEM$ -- if you've got drivers that need to be deployed on specific systems, for instance. Sysprep isn't without its pitfalls. When you actually run Sysprep, you'll get a warning that some security settings on the system are being modified. This only lasts until you complete the next reboot cycle; it's not a sign that your system is suddenly vulnerable to crackers. Note that Sysprep doesn't change access controls on Registry keys (see http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q251/0/42.ASP), so if you try to view keys with accounts that were modified during Sysprep, you may get an "Account unknown" error. Also, the program seems to have problems shutting down some systems when it's ready to reboot. I've found that the best way to avoid this is to make sure there is nothing running in the system tray, and and that any services that might be running something -- like a defragmenter or a print spooler -- should be stopped or idling. If the computer just sits around doing nothing for more than a minute, kill the power. I've found that by that time all the critical changes that need to be made are in fact already written to disk. There are third-party programs that perform many of the same duties as Sysprep, such as Norton GhostWalker SID Changer, but Microsoft won't provide support for a system that was cloned with a third-party utility (boo! hiss!), and some of these programs have problems. GhostWalker 5.1, for instance, can't deal with FAT32 partitions since it was originally written for NT 4.0, but I suspect its 6.0 upgrade fixes this problem. I have no particular love or hatred of these programs, but I'd test them in parallel with Sysprep to make sure that you can accomplish everything you need to do. If anyone has feedback about experiences with these third-party SID-changer utilities, feel free to write me and let me know.     Ам"CORRECT A (sm)ALL PATHPING PROBLEMLast issue I mentioned a nifty little network tool called Pathping. Apparently a couple of the options in Pathping -- the -T and -R switches -- are case-sensitive. They still work correctly; they just need to be passed with the correct case. So use -T and -R, not -t and -r.     Ам"PATHPING COMBINES PING AND TRACERT,Thanks to reader Alan Kaplan for this one: He alerted me to the presence of a relatively-unknown utility called Pathping.exe in Windows 2000. It's in the %systemroot%\system32 folder, and combines the functionality of TRACERT with PING. Run it against a domain name, and it traces the latency of each hop as well as details about any packet loss over a 400-second period for each node. When it's finished, it spits out a detailed report. Timeout values and various tagging options can be set through command-line switches; type pathping /? for details.     АмTAKE CONTROL OF UDMAВI'll be discussing today is the hoary question of IDE vs. SCSI in Win2K. The simple verdict is: Go SCSI if you can afford it, but today's IDE is cheap and fast, provided you tune Win2K to take advantage of it. In the bad old days, SCSI drives and controllers were far more reliable, more high-end, and more well, professional than IDE. Not to mention bigger -- always a good thing for a server -- but also much more expensive. Unfortunately, if you wanted to run a server, there really weren't any other choices around; at least none that you would probably be willing to stake your information on. As a result, support for IDE drives in Windows NT (3.5 and 3.51, mostly) was written in such a way that it was treated like a variety of SCSI controller. In fact, to this day, the BOOT.INI files in Win2K use an addressing scheme to locate the system files that owes more to the controller/device ID enumeration system of SCSI than anything else. Consequently, support for SCSI in NT and Win2K has always been a little more robust than support for the various flavors and implementations of the IDE/ATA spec. None of this is to say that NT/2K hasn't bothered to support IDE/ATA -- just that support for it out-of-the-box, at least, has been markedly different. For instance, each make and model of SCSI controller gets a devoted driver, while just about all IDE/ATA controllers are managed with the generic ATAPI.SYS driver. Part of this is out of neccessity, because almost no two SCSI controllers work the same way, while the IDE/ATA spec is supposed to be an industry-wide hardware standard. The reality is very different. In some cases, as with the Promise family of ATA controllers (both the most famous and infamous variety of such controller), there's a manufacturer-provided driver that needs to be loaded when you first install Win2K. Unfortunately, people often assume that ATA controllers are going to be universally interchangeable, and let the generic ATAPI.SYS driver run the shooting match. Not such a good idea. (Promise web site: http://www.promise.com) Another major reason IDE/ATA often gets shunned on higher-end machines, servers included, is because of the CPU cost for data throughput. The way IDE/ATA controllers function is by using a small percentage of the computer's CPU power to move the data through the PC's bus. SCSI controllers do all of the data movements themselves, leaving the CPU free to do other things. The last thing you want your server doing is wasting CPU power just slavishly moving data around. You want it to be crunching numbers and serving Web pages. The earlier versions of the IDE/ATA spec used a method known as programmed I/O to move the data, and there were four implementations, or "modes," of programmed I/O, each faster than the last: PIO 1, PIO2, and so on. Eventually, the IDE/ATA spec was rewritten to include a new type of data transfer system, Ultra DMA (Direct Memory Access). UDMA, as the name implies, works by having the disk controller open windows directly into the system's memory and moving data into and out of them on its own. The amount of CPU time involved is a fraction of what was needed for PIO, even with high-speed high-volume transfers. Today, the speed and reliability of IDE/ATA drives has exploded compared to what it was even five years ago. You can now get 100GB, 7200 RPM ATA drives that run anywhere from 66MB/sec to a mind-blowing 100MB/sec, for considerably less than the cost of a comparable SCSI drive. The cheapest Seagate 50GB 7200 RPM SCSI drive I could find was $500; a comparable IBM model -- same speed, same size, ATA/100 -- was $230! A note about 66 vs. 100: From what I've found, there's little practical difference between ATA/66 and ATA/100 performance, except when you're dealing with multi-drive scenarios -- and even the current PC buses can't really handle an ATA/66 drive going great guns. If you have ATA/100 -- great! Use it in good health. But don't dive off a cliff in despair if you just dropped $1,600 on a new ATA/66-equipped workstation, or you're building your own departmental server from scratch with same. Now we get to the practical applications. In my own work with various machines, I have found that with the proper care and planning, an ATA/66 or ATA/100-equipped server can substitute reasonably well for a SCSI-equipped server, especially if you're on a tight budget. Exceptions do of course exist: If you need hot-pluggable drives or other SCSI-only features, then go SCSI, by all means. The key words to the above are "with the proper care," since many people don't know how to get the most out of IDE/ATA on Windows 2000. For one thing, UDMA is neither enabled nor optimized by default in Win2K -- meaning that if you put a UDMA-enabled device in Win2K, you won't be getting the most out of it unless you explicitly tell Win2K to do so. The first thing to do is find out exactly what flavor of UDMA, if any, you have in your PC. The best way to do this is to get your manufacturer's specs and read them over. Most PCs shipped within the last year or so are ATA/66 or ATA/100; most shipped the year before that are ATA/66 or ATA/33. Next step is to see whether or not UDMA is enabled for the controller in question. To do this, right-click on My Computer in Win2K and select Properties; then choose Hardware and click on Device Manager. Expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" reference in the device tree, and right-click on the Primary IDE Channel. Get Properties. Under Advanced Settings you'll see two listings for each device on this IDE chain, each with a setting labeled "Transfer Mode." Set both to "DMA if available," hit OK, and then modify the properties of the second IDE channel the same way. When you're done, reboot. That's the first step. Once you have that in, you'll need to manually enable ATA/66 speed -- provided your system supports it -- through a Registry hack. (In other words, don't do this unless you're sure you have ATA/66 support or better.) Navigate to this Registry key: HKEYLOCALMACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A- E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\ There should be a DWORD key under \0000 named EnableUDMA66. If there isn't, create it and set it to 1. Reboot. If you want to, you can simply copy the following into a .REG file and double-click it to add it: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEYLOCALMACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A- E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000] "EnableUDMA66"=dword:00000001 Not initially enabling UDMA/66 support in Win2K appears to be a preventative measure to avoid data corruption, but it also has the downside of being irritatingly slow. To enable ATA/100 support, do all of the above, and also make sure you have Service Pack 1 installed. The SP1 version of ATAPI.SYS fixes problems people had with ATA/100 controllers. If you're installing Win2K clean on a system with an ATA/66 or ATA/100 controller, the odds are that Win2K's built-in driver set won't be able to work correctly -- or will drop back to ATA/33 compatibility mode at best. The safest thing to do in such a case is to use the manufacturer- provided driver. However, another sneaky trick can be used if you either don't have the driver or can't get Win2K to take it during setup. Part of the way the controller is able to identify what type of drive is plugged into it is via the signal cable. ATA/66 and ATA/100 cables have more grounding wires to dissipate noise, and are usually marked with blue connectors, blue cables, or both. Conventional IDE/ATA cables are black and grey. You can force the system to boot as plain old ATA by simply swapping the old variety of cable, or by disabling ATA/66 support on the controller if it has its own BIOS setup routine. Once you get Win2K running, you can substitute in the new (correct) driver, change the registry settings, change the BIOS and cables, and reboot. Naturally, one should never mix and match ATA/33, ATA/66 and ATA/100 devices on the same chain.     А Windows 98    А▒98 To 98SE - Fax!╒If you have recently upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 98SE, the your Fax software probably stopped working as well! This is because a critical file used to send/receive faxes has been eliminated for Microsoft Fax. Insert the Windows 98SE CD and either Browse (if this appears) or Explore the CD. Go to Tools, Oldwin95, Message, and US (or Intl or International version). Double-click the Awfax program icon to reinstall Microsoft fax. - Michael Vincent     А▒Create Compressed Folder:Within Explorer, select File and New. One of the options is "Compressed Folders." With this option you can automatically have files compressed within a folder, saving disk space. Note: This option is available in Windows 98, but only if you installed the Plus!98, and within Windows Me. - Michael Vincent     А▒ Disk Cleanup8Got a full or messy disk? Within My Computers, or Explorer, right-click a drive and select Properties. In the general tab you'll find a button called Disk Cleanup. This program can assist you in getting rid of files, programs, and Internet Temporary files that clutter your hard drive. - Michael Vincent     А Windows ME    А╡Add Program To Start MenuIf you have a program that you want on the Start menu, simply left-click and hold the program's icon and drag it to the Start button. Don't let the button go. Within seconds, the Start Menu will open, and you can drag the program or file. Release the Mouse button. Now click to different menus and sub menus until you find the right spot and drag your program to its new home. Once done, click the Start button to save your changes. To remove the program or folder, simply right-click it and select Delete. - Michael Vincent     А╡Defrag Command LinejDid you know that you could run defrag from the MSDOS command line from within Windows Me? Here is how you can defrag your hard drives with style! The general MSDOS command line entry is as follows: Defrag (x: or /all) [options] [/noprompt] [/concise or /detailed] (X: is the drive you want to defrag and /all: denotes that all non-removable drives will be defragmented) [options] /f: Defrag files and free space. /u: Defrag files. /q: Defrag free space. /noprompt: Do not display confirmation messages. /concise: Do not show details (default). /detailed: Show details view. - Michael Vincent     А╡Disk Cleanup ErrorIf you have compressed one of your hard drives in Windows Me, you may get an erroneous error within Disk Cleanup stating that you are below a certain threshold. Yet, when running the cleanup, no files are selected and no files are cleaned. Here's the solution to this false message. Go to System Tools and select Disk Cleanup. Select the Host drive in the dropdown box and select OK. Now click the Settings tab and clear the checkbox for the Disk Cleanup auto run. Click OK, and then click Yes. - Michael Vincent     А╡Personalized Menus (Me)xWhen you go into the Start button menu in Me, the menu list may be very short and loaded with small arrows beside the menu items. If you click on the arrows, suddenly the entire menu pops into view. You can turn off this nonsensical and seemingly random feature by clicking Start and going into Settings. Choose the Taskbar and Start Menu option. Next, choose the 'General Tab' and unselect the 'Use personalized menus' option. Now all menus and sub-menus will be visible from the get-go. This feature is new with Windows Me, so if you have an earlier version of Windows, you're out of luck with this one. - Michael Vincent