| No,
I'm not getting lazy. It's just that there are so many little
hints and tips that I keep finding that I need a quick way
to include them here and this seemed a good idea. So here
goes: scroll a bit, add the page to your Favourites and come
back another day for more. Other notes here
Fixing
things that break at the end of lines that you really don't
want to break at the end of lines
The
advent of e-learning has also brought the advent of e-learning or
e-practitioners or e-anything with the e- bit often appearing on
its own at the end of a line and looking decidely unprofessional.
In the old days of ILT and even older days of English at school
we were taught not to let dates, names and the like break like that.
The solution is to use something called, believe it or not, a non-breaking
space or hyphen.
(NB
You may notice that I don't know how to stop spaces or hyphens breaking
on web pages! Sorry. I will find out.)
The
short-cuts in Word are:
Non-breaking
space (e.g. for dates) Ctrl+Shift+space
Non-breaking
hyphen: Ctrl+Shift+ -
More
detailed notes, including illustrations and otpions for replacing
large amounts of one item with another in documents, are available
here. As one option involves a simple
macro in Word, it may provide material for a task for IT students
too.
Sorting
files in XP folders
Did
you know that Windows Explorer has a method for sorting files into
smaller groups? For example, when icons are arranged by Name, you
can
choose to sort files into separate alphabetical groups.
To
experiment with this feature:
1.
Right-click Start and then click Explore.
2. Navigate to a folder containing lots of files.
3. Right-click on a space in the right-hand pane of Windows Explorer.
4. Click Arrange Icons By > Name and then tick Show In Groups.
The
files will now be displayed in separate alphabetical groups.
5. Right-click on a space in the right-hand pane of Windows Explorer
and then click Arrange Icons By > Size (leaving Show In Groups
ticked). The files will now be displayed in size order, with
headings such as "tiny", "medium", "large"
etc.
6. Now, try the same thing for the icon arrangement options: Type
and Modified.
Excel's
hidden tricks - part 1
However long you've spent using a program, chances
are that there are always some things hidden away that you didn't
know were there.
You
may have by-passed them when viewing menus or perhaps they aren't
there any way or aren't where you'd expect them to be.
While
most toolbar buttons do exactly what they promise to do when you
click them, a few of them have alternate personalities. These buttons
perform a different task when you hold the Shift key when clicking
on them. Here are the buttons that change behaviour and what they
change to do:
Shift
+ Open becomes Save As
Shift + Save becomes Open
Shift + Print becomes Print Preview
Shift + Print Preview becomes Print
Shift + Sort Ascending becomes Sort Descending
Shift + Sort Descending becomes Sort Ascending
Shift + Underline becomes Double Underline
Shift + Double Underline becomes Underline
In
theory, at least, if toolbar space is at a premium, you could remove
one of each pair of buttons and use one button for two tasks.
Undo
Microsoft
Office now has so many underlying bits of code trying to do you
work for you that undoing it can be a pain. I'm thinking about spelling
you don't want auto-corrected, dates you don't want extended, bullets
or numbers you prefer to do yourself and when you type (c) you really
don't want the © symbol. And so on. As soon as anything gets
changed that you want to leave the way it is press Ctrl+Z. It works
in quite a few other programmes too.
Trying
to use a USB printer with a parallel port?
Increasingly,
printers and many peripherals come equipped only with a USB connector.
Many computers are now fitted only with USB ports and the older
serial and parallel connectors are becoming less common. If you
have an older parallel printer or a serial modem and only USB ports
on your PC, USB to Serial/Parallel connectors are readily available.
I wish I'd sicovered this before giving my son a really good older
printer that I didn't think I could use with a recently purchased
pc. The replacement I bought for myself is nothing like as good.
No links for the adapter but your local supplier should have one.
Borrowing
text from web pages
You
see something on a web page and want to print it. You hit the Print
button and get x pages instead of one, hi-colour adverts and a strip
of text on the last page that has to be literally cut and pasted
against one of the others. Smarter people might select the bit they
want, Copy and Paste into Word. Then spend hours trying to delete
a whole load of odd boxes and framelines and adjusting formatting.
Really
smart people will select what they want and Copy as before but then
open up the ancient Notepad that every pc has somewhere. Press Ctrl+V
or Edit/Paste if you must. There! Just the text. Pure text. No odd
format, no strange line breaks. Simple. Either print from there
or Copy that and Paste into Word to work with further.
Dasher:
type without a keyboard!
You
have to see this to believe it. A tiny little programme developed
by Cambridge University. The Dasher project is supported by the
Gatsby Charitable Foundation, being initially designed to enable
people who can't use keyboards to enter text on a screen but which
will give you lots of training ideas across curriculum. Get the
tiny programme here.
^
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