Tips & Tricks-June 2002

I discovered a few interesting new tips from Emazing this month related to editing. The first is yet another way to copy and paste.

Select a phrase to copy in the document you want to copy by left-clicking the mouse and dragging over the field so that the data is highlighted. Hold the ctrl key and press the Insert key on your keyboard, usually in the keys between the letters and the numeric keypad. Next position the cursor where you want to copy the data, either in the same document or in a new document. Hold the shift key and press the insert button. This will work on web pages as you're browsing as well. It's good for items that you can't edit, but you want to copy anyway.

You can easily edit web addresses in Internet Explorer 6.x using this tip from Emazing.

Position your cursor in the address bar. You can jump from left to right in the address, from dot to dot by holding down the ctrl key as you click the right or left arrow.

For example: The address is www.microsoft .com/officexp/index.shtml and you want to go back to correct the address for Microsoft without having to change anything else. Your cursor is at the far right of the address. Hold down the ctrl key and click the left arrow to go back in each segment of the address, "shtml", "index", "officexp", and so forth. By the way, this works in other documents as well.

When typing web addresses, you don't need "www" or the "com." Just type the domain name and press ctrl and enter. Internet Explorer fills in the rest. This works best with .com addresses. It finds the .com extensions. If you are not sure of the domain type, press Enter to have IE search for the site.

The next tip is in response to a lot of questions raised by members about losing the ability to open certain files with a certain program by double-clicking the file. For example, you can open a Word document with the extension ".doc" by double-clicking on the document file. Microsoft Word opens with the document in the active Window. This process saves you from having to open the application, then find and open the file you want to edit.

One day you can open the file and the next, the file opens in another program, usually after some new piece of software has been installed.

The reason the application opens when you double-click on the file is that there is a "file association." The file association can be modified by you or by other programs.

To see what file extensions are associated with a particular program, open a folder using My Computer or Explorer. Click on View, Folder Opetions, File Types. The window will display various file extensions and the current association (application) program.

To edit the association, find the file type you want to edit, such as .gif. Click on edit twice and enter the path to the program that you want to use to open such files. In the case of gif files, you might want to use PaintShop Pro, so you would enter the path to the executable file for the program. (Windows 98).

In Window Me, 2000 or XP, you go to Tools, Folder Options to find the File Types tab. Then the button is "Change" instead of "Edit." You can add new associations or delete associations.

The most common file types affected by installation of new software appear to be files related to either multimedia or graphics. So if a file will no longer open in the application you expect it to, check the file association.