Tips & Tricks-January 2003

Hope you all had happy holidays and I wish you a prosperous new year. Christmas isn't over as I write this between baking cookies and wrapping presents so I am not quite in the mood for the New Year yet. Fortunately, I get several days off after Christmas through New Year's Day to play with any new toys Santa might bring. In the meantime, here are some new (I hope) tips.

Internet Explorer

Even though we are supposed to live and work in a paperless society, most of us still print web pages so we can file or carry the information around with us. As higher monitor resolutions cause web sites to be developed in an 800x600 or greater format, it becomes more difficult to hit the print icon and see your page print as it looked on screen. You have to remember to go to "File, Page Setup" and change the orientation from portrait to landscape or set your printer properties in order to print the entire width of a page. It's not a difficult solution, but easy to forget. You can help yourself a bit by using "Print Preview" from the file menu. View the page prior to printing to see if you need to change the orientation.

Using "Print Preview" also helps with another annoyance-web pages that print everything you need on the first page, then waste another sheet of paper with a menu or the company logo or similar items that you really don't need. You can use the arrow keys on the toolbar of the preview to move between the pages that will be printed to see if you get what you need, then just print the pages you want. You can also go to "Print Setup" from the toolbar.

Another way to avoid printing things you don't want is to use the cursor to select that portion of the page you want to print. For example, you go to the PCC web site, and you just want to print the SIG information in the middle of the page.

Use your cursor to select the text, just like you would with your word processor. Then go to "File, Print" and look at the dialog box.

Note that a radio button for "Selection" has appeared in the "Page Range" portion of the dialog box. (It's grayed out if you have not selected text.) When you print, only the selected text will print. This works on most, but not all sites. Usually, if it won't work, you can't select the text. Unfortunately "Print Preview" does not show what you have selected if you try to preview the page.

By the way, all of the tips and tricks articles are on the PCC web site at http://www.pcc.org/resources/tips_tricks.htm. Sometimes the articles include more tips than are printed in the newsletter because of space considerations. You can also use the search function that is built in to the web site at http://www.pcc.org/find_it/search.htm to search through all the pages on the site to find articles, columns, SIG pages, etc., that contain the terms that you enter in the dialog box.