Keyboard shortcut of the week: undo and redo

Just about every windows application has an 'undo' feature and most have a 'redo' feature. These are a lifesaver on those frequent occasions that we make a mistake in what we are doing, and in the case of 'redo', when we realise that we were right the first time.

The undo/redo feature will either be available as toolbar buttons (as shown) or from the 'Edit' menu. Alternatively there are, unsurprisingly, a couple of keyboard shortcuts for them. To undo the last thing you did hold down the Ctrl key and press Z; to redo the last thing you undid, hold down the Ctrl key and press Y.

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How to quickly enter lists of numbers, dates and times in Excel

Excel spreadsheets often have a column or a row of incremental data. That is, information in the form of a list of numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, etc), times (09:00, 10:00, 11:00, etc), the names of months or the days of the week. You could type all this information into the row or column yourself, or you can let Excel handle it for you.

To try this out open Excel and type 1 in any cell, and 2 in the cell below it. For lists of numbers you need to enter a couple of numbers so that Excel knows where to begin and what interval to use.

Select both the cells (by hovering the mouse pointer over the top of one, holding down the left button, moving to the other cell and letting go).

You will notice that there is a small square in the bottom right hand corner of the selection box. If you hover the mouse pointer over this square the pointer will change to a + symbol. If you hold down the left mouse button and drag downwards Excel will fill in the cells continuing the series of numbers.

You can do the same with larger increments too. The images to the left show the same process being used to generate is a list of numbers with an interval of 10.

But that is far from all you can do with this process. You can drag these lists in any direction so that you can create rows as well as columns. Also, you are not limited to numbers; you can produce lists of months, days of the week, and times. I have included a video in this post showing this feature of Excel in action creating a few of these lists.

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How to stop error messages closing down a program

A short-and-sweet tip today. Sometimes, a program will throw up an error message that will close the program when you click the 'OK' button. This inevitably happens when you are doing something important in that program and don't have time to sort the problem out. Sometimes, you can continue using the program even though it is throwing up errors. So all you need to do is move the error message to the edge of the screen by clicking on the title bar and holding the mouse button down while you move it to the edge of the screen. You can then return to the cause of the error later, when you are not quite so pressed for time.

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More spelling and grammar information from Word

I doubt many people do not make use the spellchecking facility in MS Word. Most people probably run a grammar check too. Nevertheless, few people will use Word's readability statistics report.

To switch this report on, open the 'Tools' menu in Word and click on 'Options', select the 'Spelling & Grammar' tab, tick the 'Show Readability Statistics' box, and click 'OK'.


Now, when you click on the 'Spelling and Grammar' button (shown left), Word will go through any errors it finds in the selected text, or the whole text if none is selected, and then it will show you the 'Readability Statistics' report.


This report is particularly useful to anyone who wishes to make their writing more legible. The report not only contains general information about the number of words, characters and sentences etc, but also the average number of sentences per paragraph, words per sentence and the like.

The bottom section includes three very useful measures. The first gives a percentage of the number of passive sentences in the selected text. As you may know, the active voice makes a text more readable, so it is best to avoid the passive voice when possible. There is a good tutorial about the difference between the voices here.

The second and third measures, the Flesch reading ease and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, show how difficult a text is to comprehend according to mathematical equations. More details on these equations and an explanation of the scales are available here.

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The 2nd Carnival of Computer Help and Advice

Firstly, let me thank everyone who submitted an article for inclusion on this carnival. I received forty-eight submissions and I am sorry that I could not include them all.

Getting us started this month, Ashutosh Mishra presents an article containing fourteen tips for making Windows run faster in Speed Up Your Computer at PC TON!C. In a similar vein Jose DeJesus MD gives advice for Tuning up Windows on his Physician Entrepreneur blog. Jose also identifies a common problem and a software solution for it in his article, Renaming All those Files Your Camera Makes.

While we are on the subject of software, "Here's a very useful free pdf download for you" says Andrew Edgington of Learn Photoshop Now with reference to Getting Started With Photoshop - Volume 1 and Volume 2. Nesher at Freeware Reviews wrote two excellent freeware round-up articles: the first a list of 18 Free Password Managers, the second 17 Free Utilities for PDF Files Reading. For the network analysts out there, Nim at dixlinx presents a review article of Wireshark - network protocol analyzer (packet sniffer) , which includes a useful video tutorial of the software in action. In the last software based article for this carnival, Steven Stoddard of Steve's Tech Guide tells you how to Secure Your Computer and Network With Free Software.

Steve's guide may be of use for those who answer 'yes' to jsanderz' question, Could Your Computer be Infected With a Virus? that was posed at Information Addicts. Similarly Aa'ed Alqarta offers the first part of an article advising on how to Analyze Malware-infections on your own – Part I at Extreme Security -- Do It Securely or Not at all!. The Emperor at The Tech Empire presents a way of getting past a problem that can result from a viral infection in his article Can't get to the Control Panel, Task Manager, or Registry Editor?.

Even without viral infections and malware wreaking havoc we can cause problems on our own computers. Accidentally deleting files is one such mistake, thankfully andyar85 at PC issues - DIY offers help in his article Retrieve deleted information from hard-drives. In his article HDD cloning/image backup, Andy also offers advice on (in his own words) "the best way to reinstall/install an operating system is to use the old one you are still running. Try these methods, you won't regret it." Prash also looks at operating systems in an article on his blog in an article in which he pits ubuntu vs windows.

Two 'look and feel' tips to round off this edition of the carnival, Shaswata Mukherjee shows us what to do if we Want to change windows to your name at Cool Computers Tricks and Tips, and James Lewitzke presents 5 Ways to Enhance Your Web Browsing Experience at Lightning Shock. James tells us "these tips are what I use to have a great online experience."

On that note, I hope this issue of the Carnival of Computer Help and Advice was also a great online experience. More next month.

p.s. If you would like to host the next carnival leave a comment on this post or use the contact form over at our Blog Carnival page. Cheers, K.

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Windows Folder Options Explained (Part 4)

Continued from part 3...

File Types
This tab contains a list of all the file types that Windows knows about and which programs are configured to open them if you double-click on their icons.


As the image shows, if a .doc document is double-clicked on it will open in MS Word. You can change the program that is associated with a file type by selecting its entry and pressing the 'Change...' button.

Occasionally you might want to delete file types from the list, if you do not use files of a certain type any more. Highlight the entry for the file type and press the 'Delete' button. This will reduce the size of the Registry (a file that contains most of the settings for Windows and other applications), but not by enough to have a significant impact on performance. So, the chances are that you will probably want to leave this list alone.

There is an option to create a new file type for the list, using the 'New' button, but frankly, you are better off just double clicking on a file of the new type and selecting a program to associate it with in the normal way.

Finally there is an 'Advanced' button, which is used to change the way that Windows creates, opens, and prints files of the selected type. It would be best to leave these settings alone unless you know what you are doing, and an explanation of these settings is beyond the scope of this series of articles.

Some versions of Windows will have a fourth tab in the Folder Options dialog box, called 'Offline Files'. This will not be covered within this series of articles as this would require me dealing with the larger issue of folder synchronisation. Something that I may return to in the future.

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Windows Folder Options Explained (Part 3)

Continued from part 2...

View Settings continued


Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)
This option is selected by default, to protect users from themselves, as is explained in the warning message that appears if you try to switch it off.


If you click 'Yes' on this dialog box you will be able to see these special system files. The image below shows various system files that are required by Windows to run, such as 'pagefile' which is the swap file which Windows users to manage memory. As the setting suggests, most users will want to leave this option selected.



Launch folder windows in a separate process
This setting, if selected, changes the way that Windows runs different instances of Explorer by running them in separate processes, so if one crashes the others should continue running. You may want to select this but according to user experience it seems to make little difference.


Managing pairs of Web pages and folders
This setting is made available when MS Office XP or 2003 is installed. It effects the way that web pages are saved by Internet Explorer: the default option - 'Show both parts and manage them individually' - saves the web page along with all the files it needs to operate in a folder and these can be manipulated like any other files; however, the other options 'Show and manage the pair as a single file' and 'Show both parts and manage as a single file' link the file and folder in such a way that if one is moved or deleted the other will be treated the same. The last of these options hides the folder which contains the associated files. This is a rather confusing option and is probably best left well alone.


Remember each folder's view settings
This setting is pretty self explanatory. If selected it will mean that each folder will retain whichever display options were applied the last time you accessed it in Explorer.


Restore previous folder windows at logon
If selected, this option will mean that Windows will open all the Explorer windows that you had open when you shut down or logged off your computer previously. Handy if you have to reboot a lot.


Show Control Panel in My Computer
Another self explanatory option. If selected the 'Control Panel' icon will be visible when you view 'My Computer' in Explorer.


Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color
NTFS is one of the file systems available in the various versions of Windows and is more feature-rich than the more common file system: FAT32. It includes the facility to compress files (like in zip files) in order to save hard drive space and the ability for the user to encrypt files so that other users will only see gibberish if they open them. If this option is selected the details about compressed files will be blue and those for encrypted files will be green.



Show pop-up description for folders and desktop items
If this option is turned off then the yellow pop-up descriptions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over a file or folder, as shown below, will no longer appear.



Use simple file sharing (Recommended)
If you wish to have more control over the way that you share files and folders with other users on your network you can switch this option off. For the vast majority of users is inadvisable to change this option. If you have the need for different users to able to access different files you can use this option.

The last part of this series will explain the File Types tab.

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