Quick Keyboard Shortcuts

I thought I would add a tip on doing some keyboard shortcuts, instead of having to use the mouse (or if your mouse stopped working).

CTRL = Control Key
ESC = Escape Key
TAB =  Tab Key
ALT = Alt Key

(CTRL+ESC) - This is a shortcut for the Start Menu or "the orb" on the bottom left of the screen
(Holding ALT while pressing TAB) - This scrolls through open programs on your computer
F5 - This refreshes web pages

That is all I have for now.

"I wish I knew how to..."

What kinds of things did you always want to do on the computer but you didn't know how to do it?  Do you have a problem with your computer or software and don't know how to fix it?  Or did you need help with something that you are trying to do, like with e-mail or excel?

I am writing this blog post to give you the chance to ask me for help on something or to give you a tip on something specific that you have a problem with.  Maybe your problem or tip will be shown on the next post.

If you wanted to share a computer tip of your own, that would be great too!  I love to learn new things and the computer world pretty much changes every single day.  

One tip before I leave this post: the HOME key on the keyboard will bring you to the beginning of a line when you are typing.  The END key on the keyboard will bring you to the very end of a line.  Have a wonderful day!

Change Date, Time, and Time Zone

Note: This tip is being done on Microsoft Windows 7.  Microsoft Windows Vista is very similar to this.

If somehow you are seeing the wrong date or time on your computer and cannot remember how to change the settings, here is how you do it.

Find the date and time on the bottom right of the screen and click on it.  You will see something like this:

Click on "Change date and time settings" to change either the date and time or the time zone.

Click on "Change date and time" to change either the date or the time or both.  You can click on "Change time zone" to change the time zone.

The screen above is where you can change the date and/or the time.  If you don't want to change it, click on the Cancel button.  Otherwise, clicking on the OK button will update the date and time to what you changed it to.

The screen shown above is where you can change the time zone.  I am in Minnesota, so I am in the Central time zone.  Sometimes you can have the wrong time just by not having the correct time zone.  The west coast is the Pacific time zone, then there is the Mountain Time Zone (Colorado is a state in this time zone).  After that, is the Central time zone, and then the Eastern time zone.  

Unable to open a Microsoft Office 2007 file

If you have ever come across an Excel file or a Word file from someone in an e-mail and you were unable to open it.  A good reason for this is that you do not have Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) installed on your system and you have an old version like Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier.

You can do 1 of 3 things to be able to open the file:
      1) Ask the sender of the e-mail to resend the file in an older format.  You can tell if a file is saved with the
          new format because an extra "x" will be attached at the end of the file.  (e.x. Excel2007.xlsx versus
          Excel2003.xls)
     2) Get a copy of Microsoft Office 2007 and install it
     3) Install the Microsoft Compatibility Pack from Microsoft

If you don't want to have someone reformat an Excel or Word file every time or you don't have the money to get a copy of Microsoft Office 2007, then the third option would be your best option.

The Microsoft Compatibility Pack can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&displaylang=en.  This gives you the ability to open Microsoft Office 2007 files while having an older version of Office, like Office XP or Office 2003.  Click on the Download button after clicking on the link at the installation will follow you through it.

Turning off the touchpad on a laptop computer

Some people like to use an external mouse on their laptop rather than having to deal with the touchpad or that little blue circle on the keyboard to move the cursor around the screen.  On a Dell laptop, you can hit the Function key and then F7 to stop the touchpad from working while you have an external mouse connected. 

You can get to your touchpad settings by going into your Control Panel and then go to Mouse.  It might also be on the bottom right of your screen on your taskbar.  After you click the Mouse option in the Control Panel, click on the touchpad picture to get to the options screen for the touchpad. 

For a Dell touchpad,

You can enable or disable the pointing stick (the blue thing on the keyboard) or the buttons for it.  You can also enable or disable the touchpad and the buttons for it.  If you want the touchpad to not work at all while you have an external mouse attached, click on the option that says "Disable TouchPad / Pointing Stick when external USB mouse is present".

Your options may be different depending on what brand of laptop that you own.  You may not even have a pointing stick (the blue circle on the keyboard).  I hope that this tip is helpful and have fun!

Copying something on the computer screen (Screen Capture)

This tip can be accomplished in any version of Windows

If you want to copy something from the screen, there are 2 ways to do this.  This is also known as Screen Capture.  If you want to copy the whole screen and put it in a Microsoft Word document or create a picture (jpg) of it, hold in the Control Key and then press the Print Screen key. (CTRL + Prnt Scrn).  Open up Microsoft Word and then either right click and click on Paste or hold down the Control key and press the V key (CTRL + V).  You should be able to resize the picture after you paste it.

Another place to paste a picture would be in Microsoft Paint.  You should be able to get to it by going to Start --> Run.  In the Run command window, type in "mspaint" without the quotes and hit the Enter key.  Microsoft Paint will open up.  Paste the same way that you did in Microsoft Word.  In Microsoft Paint, you can edit the photo however you would like.  Save the picture as a jpg file or whatever picture format you would like.

If you don't want to copy the entire screen and only the window that you are currently in, like a Error Message window that pops up unexpectedly, you hold down the Alt key and then press the Print Screen key. (ALT + Prnt Scrn).  You would paste the copy that you made from the keyboard shortcut the same way you did for the whole screen.  That is CTRL + V if you can't remember or right click and click on Paste from Menu.

Have fun grabbing pictures from your computer screen and pasting them in Microsoft Paint or Microsoft Word (or wherever you feel it should go).

Filtering E-mails in Hotmail

Have you ever wondered how to have certain e-mails go to a specific folder when they come in instead of going to your Inbox?  If you go to Hotmail options and follow these instructions, it should be pretty easy to do so.  Suppose you have e-mails coming from someone special and you want those e-mails in a folder for easy access.

The first thing to do is log into Hotmail and go to your mailbox.  Click on Options on the top right of the screen and then click on More Options.

You will be directed to another screen within Hotmail.  Find "Customize your mail" and then click on "Automatically sort e-mail into folders" underneath it.

 When you see the screen below, click on New Filter.  Note: if you already have an e-mail filter, it will show here too.

First, you need to choose what part of the e-mail you would like to filter from.  You can choose from 4 options:
     1) From Address - This is the e-mail address of the sender
     2) From Name - This is the name of the sender
     3) Subject - This is the subject of the e-mail
     4) To or Cc lines - This would be the recipient of the e-mail or anyone that was copied (Cc)

Next you will choose how the filter will work for the text that you supply.  There are 6 options for this:
     1) contains - if the specified portion of the e-mail contains any of the text supplied
     2) ends with - if the specified portion of the e-mail ends with the text supplied
     3) equals - if the specified portion of the e-mail equals the text supplied
     4) doesn't contain - if the specified portion of the e-mail does not contain the text supplied
     5) starts with - if the specified portion of the e-mail starts with the text supplied
     6) contains word - if the specified portion of the e-mail contains the whole word of the text supplied

Next you would type in the text (if you haven't done so already).  For example, you could say "Filter e-mails where the From Name starts with Sam".  If an e-mail came in from Sam Here, then the e-mail will be filtered.  After doing that first step, it's on to the second step.

The second step is "Where do you want to put the filtered messages".  There is an option for the Inbox, but since they are originally going into the Inbox, then I don't see why you would need this option.  The other options are Junk, New Folder, and Delete.  The Junk option would move the filtered e-mails into the Junk folder.  For the New Folder option, you specify the folder where the e-mails would go.  The last option you can choose is Delete, which is good if you just want to delete the e-mails as they come in.

Click on the Save option on the bottom right and then you will have your new filter set up.  There is an option to edit or remove a filter if you need to.

Creating a batch file

A batch file is something with the extension of ".bat" or ".cmd".  This file can be edited through Notepad to do multiple tasks like copying multiple files.  It can practically be used for anything, but I will show a sample batch file to copy multiple files from different directories.

Suppose when you make a picture CD and you don't want to use the Windows Explorer every time you put a new CD into your computer.  If there are no folders this works perfect.

Batch File:

Every line is like going into Microsoft DOS or the Command Prompt window and typing the lines.
The first line goes to the C Drive.
The second line makes a new directory named "New Pictures".  MD is the same as make directory.  If you have a space in a name, you have to surround the name with quotes.  If it was NewPictures, then the quotes would not be needed. 
The third line goes to the D Drive (or whichever drive is the CD drive)
The fourth line copies everything from the root of the CD drive over to the newly created directory, "New Pictures".  The asterisk is a wild character which means use everything.
The fifth line doesn't have to be there.  PAUSE means to wait for user input on the screen so you can see what is happening with the batch file.  If you did not have the PAUSE in there, then the Command Prompt window would go away right after the last line completed.

A lot more can be done with this file and you can do any DOS command that you know within the batch file.  The options are limitless for a batch file.

Creating a shortcut on your desktop

As easy as it may be for some people, creating a shortcut is pretty cumbersome to do for other people.  Microsoft Windows XP and above have made it really simple to create a shortcut onto your desktop.  Having to Right Click and then click on Create Shortcut to then have to copy it again and paste it to your desktop seems like a lot of extra unnecessary steps.

All you have to do is Right click on the file and then choose Send to -->  Desktop (create shortcut).  It actually creates the shortcut and puts it onto your desktop at the same time.  The Create Shortcut could be used if you wanted a shortcut not on your desktop, but I think that is where the majority of shortcuts end up going.

This was a quick tip and if you knew it already, that is great too!

Using Notepad to create an Excel spreadsheet

This tip is created with Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Excel 2007

If you ever wanted to create an Excel spreadsheet without having to deal with the complexity of Microsoft Excel, you can use Notepad (which is normally installed on all Microsoft computers).  The easy way to get to Notepad is to go to Start --> Run.  In the run command box, type notepad and then hit Enter key.

 

I created 4 rows in the Notepad.  Everything is also separated by commas.  The first line creates three columns named "Date", "Number", and "Name".  The 3 lines below is the data for the columns.  The commas represent the lines between each column if you were to see them in Microsoft Excel.  Go ahead and click File and then Save As.

 

 I saved the notepad as "New Notepad.csv".  The CSV extension means Comma Separated Value.  Since everything is separated by commas, this extension makes sense to use.  If you used TXT which means text file, Microsoft Excel would not recognize it (unless you imported it into Excel, but that is a different topic).  When there is a CSV at the end of the filename, Microsoft Excel is able to see that it uses commas to separate the values.  Let's open it up in Excel and see what happens.

As you can see, Microsoft Excel recognized the file and created a spreadsheet from the file.  From here, you can save the spreadsheet with an Excel extension.  This is a great way to create something quickly without having to tab over between the columns.

Notepad is also a great tool to just jot notes down without having to open up Microsoft Word.  There are always new and exciting ways to do things. 

Adding numbers in Microsoft Excel with a formula

Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Excel 2007 are being used in this tip

I don't know how many times I thought, "I wish I could add up numbers on a spreadsheet without having to manually add the numbers with a calculator".  Well, here is a way to do that with a formula in Microsoft Excel.  First you need to start a new Excel spreadsheet by opening up the program.  I started with this:

I started with a column named Numbers and put down some numbers below it.  In order to use a formula in Excel, you need to put the equals (=) sign before the formula.  This formula is: =SUM(A2:A8).  SUM tells Excel to add up the numbers.  A2:A8 is referring to a range of cells in the spreadsheet.  It is going to look at A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A7, and A8 (or A2 through A8).  It would look like this:

As you can see, the formula added up the numbers without having to use a calculator.  If you changed any of the numbers above the total, then the total would change automatically.  For example, if you changed A2 to 7, then the total would be 235. 

Another formula that can be used is the SUMIF formula.  This will add the numbers based on certain criteria.  Here is an example:

The formula ends up being =SUMIF(B2:B8,"Odd",A2:A8).  B2:B8 means to look at cells B2 through B8.  "Odd" is what I am looking for in the range specified.  A2:A8 is the range of the cells that will be added together. I have put Even and Odd in the second column.  This formula will add all of the numbers for cells A2 through A8 that have the word "Odd" in column B.  The Even total would look similar except you would change the word "Odd" in the formula to the word "Even".  The SUMIF formula is a good formula to use if you want to know the sum of numbers for a certain criteria.

I hope you have fun with this tip and I will write another great tip tomorrow!

Use a different font type for pictures

If you use Microsoft Word and you want to type pictures, all you have to do is change the font type.  The normal font type that is used is Arial or Calibri. If you do not have Microsoft Word, then there are other programs that can be used to type in different font types.  Here are the different font types that have pictures when you type a letter.  These would be great for icons also!

 Here is an example of the different fonts that are pictures.  These font types are Wingdings, Wingdings2, and Wingdings3.

The lowercase letters will give you different pictures than the uppercase letters.  Even apostrophes and commas turn into pictures!  I hope you like this tip and have fun!

Calculator on Windows 7

I just got Windows 7 installed onto my computer and I am loving it!  I am now seeing what is new that wasn't in Vista.  The calculator was in Vista and other operating systems.  You can get there the same way too.  To get to the calculator, you don't have to go to the program files --> accessories and blah blah blah.  That is a long and tedious way.  All you have to do is click on the Start Menu and then go to run.  Once in the run command, type in calc and then hit the Enter key.  Voila!  The calculator shows right up!  In Windows 7, you get a standard, scientific, programmer, and statistics calculators.  No need to go and find one, it is right here at your fingertips.

This was a quick tip brought to you by me, Keith!  Please let me know if you would like to see any special tip or even troubleshooting tips for a problem that you may have right now.

Clearing Internet Cookies to speed up the computer

This is all done on the Windows Vista operating system.

Are you thinking, what's an Internet cookie?  Well, an internet cookie is something that gets stored on the hard drive that is used by the Internet Browser.  The browser sees the cookie and is able to load that website information quicker.  That sounds like a good thing, but in reality a lot of cookies slow down the computer.  It's almost like if you ate too many cookies, you would slow down too.

In order to clear them out and help improve the performance of your computer, you will need to go to the Internet Options for whichever browser you are using.  I will show how to do this with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the two browsers that I use regularly.  The reason I use two is because some things only work in Mozilla Firefox and some other things only work in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer  (I am using version 8, but any version should work for this)

There are 2 ways to get to the Internet options for Internet Explorer.  
     1)  When you have Internet Explorer open, click on Tools and then Internet Options.
     2)  Click on Start --> Control Panel.  Double click Internet Options in the Control Panel. 
           Note: If you are using Windows Vista, then make sure you are on Classic View.
 Internet Options screen should look like this:

Click on the Delete button under Browsing History.  If you click on the option to delete browsing history on exit, then every time you exit out of Internet Explorer, all of your browser history will be erased.

This is where you can choose which things you would like to remove from your hard drive.  Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, and Browsing History have already been checked for you.  I recommend those options also.  You don't want to remove Form Data or Passwords unless you want to re-enter those things on specific websites.  Once you have chosen your options, click Delete.

Mozilla Firefox (I am using version 3.6, but any version should work for this)
There is only one way to remove the cookies from Mozilla Firefox.  While in Firefox, click on Tools, and then Clear Recent History (Ctrl+Shift+Del also works).  This will open up another window.

Last Hour is already selected for you.  You can choose between Last Hour, Last Two Hours, Last Four Hours, Today, or Everything.  Only choose Everything if you want to get rid of all Browsing History from Mozilla Firefox.  I would recommend choosing Browsing & Download History, Cookies, and Cache.  Click on Clear Now and everything that you have selected will be removed for Firefox.

Another tip done and I hope this has helped you understand cookies more.  Talking about cookies has made me hungry, so I am going to have some dinner.

Finding your IP address

This is all done with the operating system, Windows Vista

Sometimes you may want to know what your IP (Internet Protocol) address is.  This is the address that you connect to instead of the actual name (i.e. 127.0.0.1 is the same thing as LocalHost). First, go to your command prompt.  You can get there by clicking on the Start Menu, then run.  On the run prompt, type in cmd and hit the Enter key.  Or you can go this route:  Start --> All Programs --> Accessories --> Command Prompt.

When you get to the Command Prompt, type in "ipconfig/all" without the quotes.   Take a note of your host name and I can tell you about ping later in this post.  If you are using connecting through a wireless network, your IP address is under Wireless LAN adapter Wireless Network Connection.  It is the IPv4 Address.  If you are connecting through an Ethernet cable, then your IP address is under Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection.  It should be the same as the wireless, the IPv4 Address.

Now go back to the host name that you wrote down.  If you type in "ping [host name]" without the quotes (your host name goes in the brackets, but don't type the brackets), you will notice that the IP address that you found above shows up within the "Reply from..." text.  When you ping something, you are testing to see if you can connect to something.

If you type exit and then hit the Enter key, then the command prompt window will go away.  I find that the IP address is a good way to enter things in case the "name" doesn't work.  As a matter of fact, http://www.google.com is the same as 209.85.225.104 if you ping it.  Type in http://209.85.225.104 as a web address and it will bring you to the Google site.

I had fun with this tip and I will be back with more exciting tips for the computer!