Computer and Web Articles

One day a fellow by the name of Michael Scrivo got fed up with having to go through a series of windows to access his Outlook Calendar. Being that people use their calendars to organize their daily lives, he didn’t appreciate the unnecessary number of clicks it took just to access the Outlook calendar.

To address this nuisance, Michael developed a program called “Outlook on the Desktop,” which he now allows people to download and use for free. The program places Microsoft Outlook’s calendaring system right smack dab onto your monitor’s desktop. Your calendar is pinned there (so that no windows can show up behind it) and it stays there “all the time in plain sight so you can always see what’s upcoming.”

The Outlook calendar keeps all its functionality — such as direct editing, drag and drop file capabilities, and switching between calendar, inbox, contacts, and tasks views — and suddenly the task of staying organized takes far less effort.

Michael’s program runs on Windows XP and Vista with Microsoft Outlook 2000 SP3 or higher. Learn more at www.outlookonthedesktop.com.

Perhaps you’ve run into a situation like this: You’re type, type, typing away in Microsoft Word. Your letter/essay/review/article/report is coming along splendidly.

You finish up your brilliant conclusion, punch in the final period, and sit back in your chair.

And then you realize that your last few lines spilled over onto a new page — and my goodness does it ever look sloppy. Your document is just so perfect that you can’t remove any of the words — you spent far too much time carefully crafting them into grammatically gorgeous sentences. What to do?

Don’t waste time playing around with font-sizing or page margins. Let’s handle this in the easiest manner possible. Let’s shrink-to-fit, shall we? Click on File, then Print Preview. A new window will open — and you’re looking for the Shrink to Fit button.

Click the button and Word will instantly work a little bit of magic to reduce your document’s total number of pages by one. Pretty sweet, eh?

Hi there Photoshop users. Today I’m going to share the secret to getting out of a common predicament.

Let’s say you’re working on a file and you hit the Tab key to hide your palettes. You then hit the T key to enter text mode, you draw your text box, and you start typing away.

Then you finish typing. Uh oh. How are you supposed to get out of text editing mode?? If you hit Tab, your palettes won’t reappear because Photoshop assumes you’re trying to add a Tab space within your text box. Hitting the Esc key doesn’t do anything. Hitting the Enter key of course won’t do anything as your cursor will just bump down to the next line inside your text box. And you can’t hit the V key to turn your cursor into your black arrow because . .. . you’ll just end up typing the letter v inside your text box. Looks like you’re stuck, eh?

So what can you do? Something that took me far, far longer to figure out than I’d like to admit. You simply hold down the Ctrl key and then hit Enter. That’s it. You’re out of text editing mode and free to do whatever you’d like once again.

In the past month or so I’ve received several inquiries asking how to go about password-protecting PDF files — without using Adobe Acrobat.

The process of password protecting PDFs isn’t a difficult one, it just differs depending on whether you’re using a Mac or a PC.

If you own a Mac, PDFauxinfo is the program you’re looking for. (http://msyk.net/macos/pdfauxinfo/).

The wording on the site is a little confusing, but the program password-protects your PDF files like a champ.

If you use a PC, I recommend a fantastic free program called PDFCreator (http://tinyurl.com/qsp66).

PDFCreator is a little powerhouse that’ll do a substantial amount of what Adobe Acrobat does, including creating PDFs from any program that allows you to print, sending generated PDFs by e-mail, merging multiple PDFs into one file, and of course, password-protecting PDFs.

Here are two methods for selecting a large range of cells at once within Microsoft Excel.

The first method requires you to:

• Select the first cell.
• Press and hold down the Shift key.
• Select the last cell by clicking on it.
• Let go of the Shift key.

The second method requires you to:

• Select the first cell.
• Type the address of the last cell into the Name box (for example, D:32).
• Press Shift + Enter.

Try them both to see which method is easier for you.

If you’ve ever tried copying website addresses into Microsoft Word, you’ve likely experienced a bit of frustration upon finding that the pasted link was a different size, appeared to be a different font style, or ended up in the wrong place.

The secret to keeping your Word documents nice and organized while still including links to web pages or other documents is the keyboard combination of the Ctrl + k.

Go ahead and type a sentence in a new Word document. Next, highlight a few words of the sentence. Now, hit Ctrl + K and a little window pops open. This window allows you to type (or paste) in the address of a website or link to a different document located on your computer. Upon clicking the OK button, the text you highlighted will become a link that matches the rest of your document’s text.

Though it’s universally despised, plenty of people procrastinate when it comes to getting rid of Microsoft Word’s Office Assistant. You know the one - the bouncy paper clip (or perhaps on your computer he comes in the form of an overly-friendly dog?).

It only takes two easy steps and no more than about 8 seconds to make the Office Assistant go away - so you really have no excuses for complaining about how much you *wish* he’d just go away. All you need to do is click on the little fellow, then click on “Options.” Once you uncheck the “Use Office Assistant” check box, you’ll be able to work in peace once again.

Install this extension in your Firefox browser and you’ll instantly be able to do some super cool things with your favorite Google applications, including:

• Remove ads from google search results;
• Remove Gmail’s spam folder and invite box;
• Filter out sites that you never ever want to see (ever) again from Google’s search results;
• Remove click tracking;
• Anonymize your Google ID;
• Add favicons in your web search results; and
• Add links to results from other search engines.

Sound like it might be a useful extension for you? Learn more here: http://www.customizegoogle.com.

RoboForm is a clever little program that helps you reduce the amount of time you spend filling out web forms and logging on to subscription sites. Remember one master password, and RoboForm remembers the rest.

With RoboForm, completing long registration or checkout forms is a breeze; all you need to do is click on your RoboForm Identity (you can store more than one!) and the program fills in the entire form for you. The program even contains a feature called “Login” which allows you to go to a webpage, fill in a form and submit your information - all with one mouse click.

Interested? RoboForm can be downloaded for free from Download.com here: http://tinyurl.com/3d2wej.