Tips and Tricks-February 2006

It is seldom that I have to admit that I made a mistake (hah!), but I do now. I want to retract most of the negative things I said about the MSN Screensaver. After installing for an article, I left it installed. I discovered that it works a little differently from most screensavers in that you have to actually click a mouse button to get back to your desktop, moving the mouse is not enough. This feature makes it a little more practical to use. Now when I come back to my computer, I have a weather report, the RSS feeds and photos from one of our last vacations to look at before I need to get back to work. It’s not as dumb as I thought it was!

Next some tips for Office users, inspired by an article in TechNet Magazine, a Microsoft publication aimed at IT Professionals.

Everyone has had the experience of forgetting to save a file before closing a program (even when the prompt asking you if you want to save pops up) or having a power outage after you just spent the last two hours working on your memoirs. Is there anything you can do? The answer is probably, but it takes some preparation and some time.

Users of Word and Excel can configure the software to do a couple of things that may save your document. Go to the “Tools” menu on the main toolbar. Select “Options” from the menu. Click on the “Save” tab.

There are three selections that may help. First is “Always create backup copy.” If that box is checked, Office will automatically create a backup file, “Backup of your filename.wbk” It’s not clear where the file is saved, but if you do a search for files with the wbk in the name, you should find the file.

The next option is “Save AutoRecover info every:” followed by a time setting. While you are working on the file, a file will be saved every 10 minutes, in this case. The files are saved with the extension “.asd” and you can tell Word where to put the files by clicking on the “File Locations” tab in the Options dialog. On my system the files were put in the application data files under Microsoft in the Documents and Settings folder, C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP. Your path may be different or you can specify a different path—you are not stuck with the default path. You can do the same thing in Excel using the “Tools, Options” menu. I did not see a way to set your own default path. On more than one occasion, I have been able (actually Word automatically reverted to the Autorecover file) to retrieve the file. You may lose a few minutes of your work, but that’s better than losing all of it.

Finally, if you are saving your files to drive on the network or to an external storage device, you can specify that a local copy of the file be saved as well.

While we are looking at the Options dialog, there is one more thing to note. You can make your life easier by specifying a default location for files. You are not stuck with having to save them in My Documents. Select the tab “File Locations” to view and modify the paths.

Explore the options set and see if there are other settings that will help you work better and more efficiently.

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