 |
| |
| Reference Series | Buy This Issue Table of Contents For This Issue  E-mail
This To A Friend |
|
| |
| Book Of Tips | |
| May 2000• Vol.4 Issue 2 | |
Pre-Installed Software On New PCs |
Adobe Acrobat Reader 41 Minipages. In addition to using bookmarks to browse through documents, you also can use the Thumbnails feature. Available as a tab on the Navigation pane, thumbnails are minipictures of each page. With them, you can quickly jump to different pages or use the thumbnail’s page-view box to display different sections of the present page. (Just drag the box with the hand tool.)2 Grayed-out tools. You open a file with a Portable Document Format (.PDF) file extension (the format that Acrobat Reader uses) and find that you can’t use certain commands or tools. Why not? When you “author” a PDF document, you have the option of setting security restrictions that can password protect all or parts of a document. You need a password to use any tools or commands that the program dims. 3 Hyperlinks. One of the great features of a PDF document is that it can contain live Web links; clicking them will take you to relevant Web pages. From the Weblink Preferences dialog box, you can set many preferences for the way Acrobat Reader displays and reacts to Web links, such as what browser to use. Open it by selecting Preferences from the File menu and clicking Weblink. 4 Change directions. You’ve spent some time bouncing around a PDF document and now you want to find a page you were on earlier. One handy navigation feature is the Go To Previous View button on the toolbar. With this feature, you can retrace the path you took in the document (alternately, you could also use this by choosing Go Back from the Document menu). To go forward, use the Go To Next View button (or open the Document menu and click Go Forward). Microsoft Bookshelf 20005 Parental controls. Is Bookshelf 2000 a little too concise? With Bookshelf’s Parental Control option, you can set it up to filter out vulgar, obscene, or offensive material. To set up Parental Control, select Settings from the Options menu and click the Parental Control button. Choose a password of at least five characters (to turn the option off and on) and click OK.6 Quick article access. Do you want quick access to an article you are working on in Bookshelf? You can either save it as a favorite (click Favorites on the toolbar and then the Add Current Article button) or, better yet, as a shortcut on your Desktop. Right-click anywhere on the article and then select Create Shortcut from the pop-up menu.
8 Find a definition. You can get quick definitions for any word in a bookshelf article by placing your curser on top of the word and double-clicking it. This makes the Quick Define window pop up with a dictionary definition and audio pronunciation aid for the chosen word. 9 No CD Required. If you have enough hard drive space, you can use some of the more popular aspects of Bookshelf 2000 without having to insert the CD-ROM. The Bookshelf HD feature copies definitions and synonyms to your hard drive from the American Heritage Dictionary and other reference works. You can find this function by clicking Copy To Hard Drive in the Tools menu. Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Deluxe 200010 Turn off Tool Tips. Not all people love tool tips, the feature in many Windows programs that pulls up a little description window when your mouse hovers over some items. If you find this feature more annoying than illuminating, you can turn it off by opening the Settings menu, selecting Options, and then deselecting Display Tool Tips.11 Get linked. Like just about everything else in the world, Encarta has taken on a new dimension over the years, thanks to the Internet, and it’s much more than a mere gimmick. Encarta Online (select the Tools menu and then Encarta Online) allows you to get updates, explore reference links, and view additional content. One great feature here is the Schoolhouse section, where teachers can access hundreds of lesson plans and other information. 12 Mindmaze madness. It may not have Regis Philbin, but Encarta Deluxe 2000 does have Mindmaze. Answer questions (using Encarta as backup) to work your way through a castle maze. You get to select a difficulty level (1 to 4), and you earn points based on how long it takes you to answer questions. You can run Mindmaze by selecting Mindmaze from the Features menu or by pressing CTRL-Z. 13 Demonstrations and simulations. There’s nothing like a hands-on demonstration to facilitate learning, and Encarta incorporates many such demonstrations through what it calls InterActivities. To open this feature, go to the Features menu and select InterActivities. (You also can press CTRL-I.) These simulations, grouped by such topics as Physical Science, Humanities, and Anatomy, let users see how things such as animation and automobile engines work. Microsoft Expedia Streets & Trips 2000
15 City information. If you have Internet access, you can use Expedia’s Web Links feature to get information on hundreds of North American cities. To use this feature, find the location you’re looking for and click the Web Links button on the menu bar. Expedia will launch your designated browser and pull up a page listing relevant categories of links, weather, news, and other information. 16 Pushpin marks the spot. Expedia’s Pushpins feature (open by clicking the Tools menu and then Pushpin Tool) lets you mark locations, attach names and notes to them, and even manage sets of pushpins with the Pushpin Explorer (in the Tools menu). With pushpin sets, you can keep track of your favorite restaurants or all the bowling alleys in Boise. You can turn on and off sets by opening the View menu and selecting Show or Hide Pushpins. 17 Avoid road construction. Unless you have an infatuation with large trucks, scarified pavement, and flagmen, you’ll probably want to avoid road construction on trips. Expedia lets you easily log on to the Internet and download updated information on road construction sites and road closings. Open the Tools menu and select Update Construction Information. Symantec Norton AntiVirus 200018 Protect your data. As of this writing, Norton AntiVirus 2000 protects against more than 46,000 viruses, and with the Virus List feature, you can check out particulars on each one. It lists each virus by name and the type of file it infects (a program or a document), and you can click Info to get detailed characteristics and comments. You can access the Virus List from the Reports section.19 Screen your e-mail. New to Norton AntiVirus is the ability to screen and detect suspect attachments that gain access to your computer through your e-mail. To turn on this function, access Email Protection under the Options menu and enable the box. You also can select your e-mail client, how AntiVirus will react to suspect attachments, and other features here. 20 Virus updates. With new viruses being created every day, AntiVirus is only as good as its most recent update. Even though there are many sources for updates, such as the Symantec Web site (http://www.symantec.com/), the easiest way to update the program is with the LiveUpdate feature. You can do this manually by clicking the LiveUpdate icon, or you can schedule it to automatically happen by clicking the Scheduling menu and then New Event. 21 Scheduling tasks. The previous tip led you to the Norton AntiVirus Scheduling Wizard, which is a handy tool for scheduling virus definition updates and virus scans. You can do much more with this little program, however, including scheduling messages to display (as reminders) and running applications at specific times. 22 File inspection. Do you suspect a file contains a new virus? Use Quarantine to set aside the suspect file so it can’t interfere with your system. You can then use the Scan And Deliver Wizard (available under the Reports menu’s View And Manage Items In Quarantine command) to send the file out to the Symantec AntiVirus Research Center for testing. Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.023 Resizing photos. If you want to resize a photo in PhotoDeluxe, do it only once; resizing a photo several times may degrade the image quality. The best way to resize the photo is to save it and then experiment with several different sizes to get the best one, each time selecting the Revert To Last Saved command from the File menu to bring the photo back to its original, unaltered state.24 Seasonally festive. If you’re the type of person who likes to scatter hearts and jack-o-lanterns around your desktop according to the season, you’ll love PhotoDeluxe’s Seasonal Sharing. Using your own computer clock, PhotoDeluxe will occasionally ask you at startup if you want to install seasonal activities and wallpaper from the CD. Deselect any items you don’t want, and you’re set to design with the seasons in mind. 25 Share your stuff. Creating things is fun, but how do you show off your work? Adobe’s Activeshare.com Web site lets you do this and more. After becoming a free member, you get your own personal area to post photos to, interact with others, and even keep a calendar of events. You can get to the site by selecting the Share menu and then ActiveShare Website from the main PhotoDeluxe window or by pointing your browser to http://www.activeshare.com/ 26 More menu items. If the top menu bar seems rather sparse (it has only a few commands), you can expand it by clicking the Advanced Menus button on the left margin of the main work screen. All these commands also display as icons (in the space just under the menu bar) when you click the Get & Fix Photo, Cards & More, and Share buttons. Sierra Print Artist Grand Suite27 Open sesame. When Print Artist first opens, it defaults to a section where you can select from a wide range of templates. If you find yourself using Print Artist primarily for one type of project, you may want to change the program so it automatically opens to that project. You can do this by selecting Options from the Tools menu and clicking the Startup tab.
29 Work with layers. Layers give you fine control over one or more aspects of a project without altering others. You can drag objects between them, and you can lock off sections so they can’t be altered. To add a layer to a project, select the Object menu and then Layers, which splits off into several options. Select the Add Layer option. The layer tabs operate like an Excel spreadsheet workbooks feature, where tabs along the bottom of the window represent each layer. 30 Font it. You can change many aspects of fonts in a project with the Effects Gallery Font tab. Open a project, such as a calendar, and click the Effects icon on the menu bar. Select text sections to change the font, point size, style, and more. You also can use the Color and Special tabs to add color or unusual effects to text. Corel Print Office 200031 Application access. Corel Print Office 2000 is actually a combination of several Corel products, including Print Office 5, Photo House 5, WEB.DESIGNER 2, and CorelCENTRAL 9. If you use the personal information manager (PIM) part of the suite, CorelCENTRAL 9, all these applications are available as icons at the bottom of the Day Planner section.32 Use a different language. Corel Print Office contains many tools when it comes to dealing with text, and we’re not just talking English text; the language option lets you work with text in many languages, including Afrikaans and Zulu. To use a different language, select the Text menu and then Spell Checker. Choose Select Language from the Options drop-down menu. 33 Open a Web page. WEB.DESIGNER is a convenient way to turn items from Print Office and Photo House into Web pages, but you can also use it to open existing Web pages. To open a page that’s already on the Web, select the File menu and then Open From Web. Next, type in the Web site location. WEB.DESIGNER will then try to connect to the Internet to retrieve the page. 34 Set the alarm. In addition to using CorelCENTRAL 9’s Alarms function to warn about events and appointments, you also can use it as a timer. With this function, you can set the alarm to sound after 15 minutes of meditation, one hour of cake baking, or three days of Quake. To set a quick alarm, click the alarm clock icon in the Windows System Tray. Adept Street Wizard 7.035 Select a street. To make a street really stand out in Street Wizard, try highlighting it. Select the Highlight tool from the menu bar, and click the street you want. (Alternately, you also can right-click the street.) This will highlight all streets within the vicinity with the same name. You can edit highlight thickness and color in the Preferences menu by selecting Streets and then Set Details.36 Changing maps. When you first start Street Wizard, it loads a map of the entire United States by default. You can change this in the Change Startup Map To section of the General Preferences dialog box, which you open by clicking the Preferences menu and then General. First, select a section of the country by zooming in on it. Then, click the Current Map button on the General Preferences dialog box to load that map every time Street Wizard starts. 37 Zoom in on a map. You can zoom in on a section of the country in many ways. One is by clicking the two magnifying icons on the menu bar. The second is by clicking a section of the map and dragging to make a box the size of the area you want to zoom in on. 38 Longitude and latitude. Street Wizard makes it easy to find someone using longitude and latitude, a useful tool for those using Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers. On the menu bar, choose the Locate menu and then Longitude/Latitude to access this option (latitude and longitude are also displayed for the present mouse-point in a lower-right box of the main window). McAfee VirusScan 4.039 Scan and protect. VirusScan’s VShield component is designed to constantly scan and monitor your system to protect against malicious files, e-mail, and more. After installation, you should either use the VShield Configuration Wizard (right-click the VShield icon in the Windows system tray, select Properties, System Scan, then the Wizard button) or fine-tune the System Scan Properties yourself to make sure it covers everything you need it to.40 Send the bugs away. Like other antivirus programs, Virus Scan lets you forward suspected viruses to a special team, in this case the McAfee AntiVirus Emergency Response Team (AVERT). To send them files or documents, select the Tools menu and then Submit To McAfee from the VirusScan Central window. 41 Create an emergency disk. An important component of any antiviral strategy is to have an emergency disk on hand to boot your computer in the event of a system-crippling bug. At the very least, an emergency disk can clean the system enough to let you boot it and run the primary VirusScan. To make the disk, select Emergency Disk from the Tools button on VirusScan Central. 42 Block URLs. You can block access to URLs that you fear contain harmful code (ActiveX or Java) by pulling up the System Scan Properties dialog box, clicking the Internet Filter icon, and enabling the Internet URLs To Block checkbox. You can Add, Delete, or View Current Blocked URLs by clicking the Configure button. Symantec WinFax 10.043 User-friendly e-mail faxes. A new feature in WinFax 10.0 is the ability to send high-quality faxes to any e-mail address. By selecting the Send menu and then Send New Fax By Email, you can easily send faxes that arrive at a receiver’s e-mail address in a self-viewing format, so the receiver doesn’t need any special software or equipment to view it.44 Put it on the network. Do you want to use WinFax 10.0 on a network? With the Fax Sharing feature, networks can use WinFax by installing the Fax Sharing Client on each computer and the Fax Sharing Host on the central receiving computer. The Host lets clients on the network send faxes and log in to gather any incoming faxes. 45 Save your signature. WinFax 10.0 lets you easily store your signature for use on outgoing faxes. To store a signature, sign a blank piece of paper and scan or fax it to your computer. In the WinFax Viewer, disable Annotation from the View menu, select the signature area with the outline tool, select the Edit menu and then Create Stamp, and save it. After enabling Annotation, choose Stamp from the Insert menu, select your stamp, and click Use This Stamp As My Signature check box. 46 Object character recognition. WinFax also includes a basic version of TextBridge, which is object character recognition software that lets you easily turn faxes into text you can edit or otherwise work with. Select OCR from the Tools menu to use this feature. Nico Mak Computing Win Zip 7.047 Zippy unzips. You can quickly zip and unzip files without even opening WinZip. Just right-click the file you want to work with and select Add To Zip or Extract To from the pop-up window. To extract to a specific folder, right-click and drag the zipped file to the folder.48 Create self-extracting files . You can easily make self-extracting files by creating the zip file and choosing Make.Exe File from the Action menu. This will allow people who may not have WinZip installed on their machines to extract and work with zip files. 49 Use the Wizard. The WinZip Wizard, which you can open by clicking the Wizard command in the File menu, makes it easy to get up to speed on the program. The Wizard walks users through the process of unzipping and automatically installing software. By working with the Wizard’s Favorite Folders or search features, you can use the Wizard to keep track of every zip file on your computer. 50 Get a tip a day. To get many more tips on working with WinZip, make sure you enable the Tip Of The Day feature from the Help menu. The text box at the bottom lets you decide when the tip dialog box serves up its bits of wisdom, or you can opt to browse through tips to get a quick overview of some of the program’s features and tricks. Grolier Interactive Year 200051 Wild cards. When searching through Grolier, try using wild cards. Wild cards are characters you can use at the end of words to find all words with the same root. For example, use “*” at the end of “educat” to find the words “educator” and “educated.” You also can use a wild card in the middle of a word if you’re uncertain of the spelling. For example, use the “?” symbol in “tel?scope.”
53 Mark it. Marker Lists are great ways to collect lists of interesting Grolier items. Click the Mark button below an item to add it to the default marker list. Click the Markers tab to the left of the main window to view the default list, and if you want to make a new list or manage a group of lists, you can do this from the menu bar by selecting the Markers menu and then Set Marker List. 54 Customization. You can easily change Grolier’s theme by accessing Change Theme from the Edit menu. Thirteen themes, including Miami, Bijou, and Street, let you alter Grolier’s background and buttons. To select a theme, open its folder and double-click the .THM file. by Rich Gray
|
Copyright & Legal Information Privacy Policy
