North Dakota State University Extension Service - Burke County |
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Tips and Tricks For Your PC |
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| Opening Digital Photos Your computer probably has at least 3 to 5 different programs for viewing digital photos. Some are strictly viewers like your Internet Explorer browser, others may allow viewing in slide shows or various levels of editing. When you open your “My Pictures” folder and the subfolder if you have one, where the photo you want to look at is located, your will see either a thumbnail or the file name of the photo. Double clicking on it opens a program to let you view the file. What if it doesn’t open in the program you want? One way around this problem is to open the program first then go to “file” and “open”. Another easier way is to use your right mouse button to click on the file or thumbnail, then left click on “open with”. A small window will open, showing you the various programs that can open the photo. Then just click on the one you want. Webpage Linking Have you ever clicked on a link on a webpage and then realized it wasn’t the one you wanted? If you realize it before you release your mouse button, simply hold the button down while you move off of the link. If you’ve already released the mouse button, hit your “escape” key. This will stop the browser from continuing to load the new page. You may need to hit your “back” arrow to return to the previous page if the new page has started to load. Printing WebPages Have you ever tried to print a webpage and gotten 35 pages of printed material when all you really wanted was one page? Or part of a page? Place your mouse at the beginning of the material you want to print, hold the left mouse button down while you move the pointer to the end of what you want printed. This should highlight the selected material. From the menu bar select “file” then “print”. This should open your print properties box. Look closely at the options and you should find a box which says “selection”. Check the box, then click “print” or “OK”. On some versions of internet explorer you may have to click “apply” before clicking print. Another way to check what you will be printing is to use “file” and “print preview”. Photo Rescue Some time back I told you about a program called Photo Rescue which I had used to recover photos from a Smart Media card, which my Olympus digital camera refused to read. This weekend I had the opportunity to use the same program on a Secure Digital card used in an HP digital camera. The all the photos on the card had been accidentally deleted. The program worked perfectly and recovered 69 photos off of the 64 mb card. I tried it on another card where just a single photo had been deleted but was not successful at recovering that one. More photos had been taken after the photo was deleted, so the file had been overwritten. The key thing to remember if you accidentally delete photos off of a camera card or your camera suddenly won’t read a card is not to continue to attempt to use it or reformat it. Edit, Undo Do you ever use the “edit, undo” feature in your word processor or other programs? Instead of using the mouse to select “edit”, then “undo”, try pressing the “ctrl” and “z” keys at the same time. If you are typing in a word processor it’s much faster than reaching for the mouse. If the program you are using allows you to back up several steps this works great for multiple “undo’s”. Printing Tip Want to print faster and reduce ink usage? Set your printer to “draft” quality or reduce the dpi (dots per inch) quality setting. The particular method you use will depend on your printer. For photos and business letters you may want keep the quality high but for much of your normal printing you can dramatically reduce your printing cost by reducing the quality. In most cases you won’t even notice much of a change in the appearance and readability. Copying and Moving Files When I sort photos or other files on my hard drive I use Windows Explorer and drag the files to new locations by holding down the mouse button. I’ve had people ask me why the files are sometimes copied and sometimes moved when they do that and how to tell which is happening. The default or standard setting is for Windows to move a file when dragging to a different folder or location on the same drive and to copy it if going to a different drive like a floppy disk, a cdrw or dvd writer drive or to a second hard drive. If you want to do something different like making a backup copy on the same drive or moving a file to another drive to free up space try using the right mouse button for dragging. You will get a small pop-up window which allows you to specify copy, move, or create shortcut. New Browser Windows You have a web page open that you're checking out. You decide to check your e-mail. As you check out the new e-mail, you see a friend has sent you a link to a cool web page. So, you click the link and it loads in place of the page you were originally looking at. You catch yourself yelling, "Hey, stop! I was lookin' at that!" Sure, you can always hit your Back button to go back to your original page, but wouldn't it be nicer if the e-mail link would just open up in a new window? Good news- it can with just a couple of clicks of your mouse! 1. Open up Explorer and select the Tools menu, Internet Options. 2. Under the Advanced tab, look for the Browsing section. Now, look for a check box labeled "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts". Uncheck that box and you're all set. Next time you click on a link in your email it will open in a new browser window instead of replacing the page in the window you have open. What’s the “Windows” key for? Ever wonder what that “Windows” logo symbol on it is for? (It’s located between the “ctrl” and the “alt” keys). It’s a shortcut key. Pressing it will open your start menu like clicking on the “start” button. Pressing it in combination with other keys will provide different results. Here are a few for you to try. Hold the windows key down and press- M → Minimizes all windows Dan Folske |
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