Tips & Tricks-December 2001

Tis the Holiday season, so this month's tips relate to the holidays-sort of.

I collect recipes and have for years. Aside from cookbooks, I have keyed some into the computer using my word processor. The problem is that I am not always careful about where I put the darn things. I should probably tell you that the My Documents folder on my computer contains 473 folders and sub-folders, 7,326 files and is over 2 gigabytes in size. It includes documents, pictures, webs, etc. I make some attempt to keep stuff in the appropriate folder, but sometimes I forget where I put stuff. There may be an easier way.

Suppose that you could find your recipes by searching for "*.recipes" instead of trying to figure out what you named the recipe followed by ".doc." The solution is to add a new file type to your system. In Windows 98, go to Start, Settings, Folder Options and in Windows ME, go to Explorer, Tools, Folder Options. Find the File Types tab and click "New Type." The "Add New File Type" dialog box appears. Fill in the appropriate boxes, Description and Associated Extensions. For example, Description: My Recipe Files, and Associated Extension: "recipe" with no spaces or periods. Then, in order to have the file open in Word, click on the "New" button under the "Actions" window. In the "New Action" dialog box, type "Open" and click on "Browse" to point to the winword.exe file on your hard drive (or whatever word processor you use.) Click "OK" then check any of the options that you want to include. Click on "OK" again. Now you can search for your recipes by typing "*.recipe" and when you find the one you want, you can double-click it to open the recipe in Word. Obviously, you can use the same technique for other files. (Note: You may have to vary the instructions slightly for ME.)

Do you communicate by email with your relatives? If you want to send a holiday greeting in your own voice or your child's, the tools already exist in Windows. Go to Start, Accessories, Entertainment, Sound Recorder. There is a very simple interface to create a recording. Of course, you will need to have a sound card and a microphone, but virtually all systems have a sound card capable of recording and microphones are very inexpensive. Plug it into the appropriate connector on your sound card (it's usually identified by a symbol that vaguely resembles a microphone if you squint hard). You can adjust the quality of the sound file by selecting File, Properties. On the Details tab, find Format Conversion, select Recording formats, and then click on Convert Now. You will be given several options that affect the size of the file. As you check the types, note on the right hand side that the number of bytes per second will be displayed. CD quality, for example, takes 172 bytes per second of sound. If the recipient uses a cable connection, you can send larger files and if not, you should select radio or telephone quality to get a smaller file. Then send the file as an attachment to your email. (The telephone is probably easier, but this is more fun.)

The above tips were inspired by tips from Michael Vincent of Emazing from their Windows Tip of the Day email newsletters.

One last tip. If you are looking for seasonal images or music files, go to the Microsoft site and find the Design Gallery. The best reason for using this site is the search capabilities. You can search for clip art, photos, sound files and videos by several criteria. The files are downloaded in a format that is used in Microsoft Office's Clip Art Gallery and have to be accessed from there. Sometimes this makes it cumbersome if you want to use the file in a different program, but you can get around this, at least for clip art. When you find a promising image, click on the thumbnail image to see a larger view. Then right click on the larger image and in Internet Explorer, you can do a "Save As" and get the file as a .bmp file. You can download it and use it as is or convert it to another format depending on what you plan to do with it. Also notice that there are links to other similar files by a number of different criteria.