Tips & Tricks-April 2003

Given that April Fool's Day is just around the corner, I would be suspicious of anything that appears in this column this month. But here's what I've got anyway.

Word XP

Do you create flyers and similar documents for emailing? Do you like to use pictures and clip art? Do the files you create in Word get to be humongous? I don't' know about you, but I am not too happy when I get large files by email. Most ISPs and even free services limit the amount of email you can have in your inbox so you can go over quota. At work, when we go over quota, new mail does not come into the Inbox until we have deleted enough mail to get below the allowed quota. Recently one of my co-workers accidentally sent two files that totaled 3 megabytes to the mailboxes of all the staff in an entire division. She sent people over quota everywhere.

In trying to find out how big the images in her file were, I accidentally discovered a menu item in the new version of Word that allows you to compress a file that contains clip art and probably photos. First, select a graphic in the file. Then right click it and select Format Picture. In the dialog box, there is a button on the lower right-Compress. Click on it and a dialog box will open with a number of selections.

Pick the appropriate choices, the click "OK." The file will magically compress itself to a more manageable size. The one megabyte file described above (four pieces of clip art and text on a full page) was compressed to 68KB. Not only was the file size reduced, but the quality of the images did not appear to change when the document was printed. There can be some loss of quality, but for most documents, this is a very cool way to reduce the file size.

Internet Explorer

This one comes to you from a newsletter I received from WinXP News. It's been revised for PCC. It's a neat trick that uses your Internet Explorer to make it easy to send an email to a frequently used address without having to open your email client first. You can add an email address to the Favorites list. Open IE, click on the Favorites menu and then on Add to Favorites. Type the name of the recipient and click OK. Next click on the Favorites menu and right-click on the name of the recipient in the list. Select Properties from the menu.

In the properties dialog box, enter "mailto:" and the email address you want to send to. Also note that you can add an icon. That leads to the next tip. Any .bmp file can be used as an icon. If you have a photo of the recipient, save it as a .bmp file using a photo editing program, then select it as the icon file. Windows will automatically size it as an icon.

Take this one step further and put the link on your desktop (this is good for emailing Moms quickly). From Internet Explorer, click on the Favorites menu, right click on the link you created and select Send to, then Desktop from the menu and a shortcut on your desktop will appear.

Windows

The last tip from WinXP News is a good one to use when you need help from someone after generating an error message on your computer. You can copy the contents of the message box that pops up. Be sure the box is selected, then press Ctrl-C to copy the box to the clipboard. Then you can email information about the problem or preserve the message in a document by inserting the contents into the email or document using Ctrl-V or Paste from the edit menu. I have not tested this one so I will be interested in getting feedback from you if you remember to try it when you get an error message. It doesn't appear to work with other types of dialog boxes so let me know what your experience is.

That's all for this month--I'll try to find some Easter Eggs for you for next month.