Tips That Survived the Test of Time
Get more from Microsoft Office and Windows, and all kinds of hardware.Steve Bass
Steve Bass writes the "Hassle-Free PC" column in PC World's print edition and is the author of PC Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things About Your Personal Computer, available from O'Reilly. Watch this spot for details on his "Updated and Revised" edition due out in late March. Sign up to have Steve Bass's Tips and Tweaks newsletter e-mailed to you each week. Steve Bass is probably busy trying out new tools and utilities, but he may be checking his e-mail.
Give me a good tip, something I can use (and remember to use), and I'll get into a long-term relationship with it. And that's this week's newsletter topic: tips I've come to know and love, as well as a few top-notch how-to articles.
Long-Term and Beloved Tips
I'll admit that not every tip I find, or even write about, is a good fit for me; but those that are, they just make my day here at Bass World Headquarters a little easier.
I'll give you a "for instance." In my line of work I have to crank out lots of subheads, the short bolded line you usually see when a topic changes. (They're a killer to write; editors want a play on words, or a pun, and I'm as lame as, uh, well, I'm not great with metaphors, either.) I write the subheads quickly, all in lower case. Then I highlight the words and use one of Microsoft Word's shortcuts (Shift-F3) until the words are in title case, Which Looks Like This. That's a keeper tip, one that I use a dozen times a day when I'm writing a column.
Here's another tip for Word: I'll often look at a doc and realize there are a bunch of paragraphs that need to be reformatted. To change the formatting quickly, I use an underutilized tool: the Format Painter. Try it yourself by selecting a few words in the paragraph with the formatting you like, then clicking the Format Painter button, which looks like a little paintbrush. Now highlight the new text you want to be formatted the same. The cursor changes to a small paintbrush and the formatting is applied to whatever words you've selected. Cool, no?
There's more. Once you finish highlighting the new area, Format Painter thinks you're done. But if you need to apply formatting to multiple areas, use Format Painter's hidden trick: Double-click the Format Painter button. Amazingly, you can format as many items as you want, then press Escape to turn off Format Painter.
Dig This: Should you eat fried chicken with your hands while in England? Leave rice in the bowl while in China? Answer these, and other pithy questions, in the "Don'tGrossOutTheWorld" Flash game.
More Tips You Can Really Use
The most popular features in PC World are the ones covering tips, tweaks, and hidden tricks. It seems like we've done plenty in the last few months, and I want to make sure you see them all. Here are three of my favorites.
Michael Desmond, the guy who said he's "ashamed to admit that he spends more time with his word processor than he does with his children," has about 20 tips covering all the parts of Microsoft Office. "Stuck in the Office?" is stuck on Office 2003, but my experience is that many of the tips work in previous versions as well. Two tips I like are "Frequently Used Files" and "Banish Reading Pain." This article is a few months old, but don't worry: All of the tips are still good to go.
If you haven't switched to Linux yet, then you'll enjoy Lincoln Spector's "Windows Rejuvenated!" Lincoln's an old hand at this and knows his stuff. He starts with what we all know: Windows, no matter what the version, gets laden down with junk in the assorted startup locations, long-forgotten programs still evident in Add/Remove programs, and debris in the Registry. Read his article through and see what you can do to clean things up in Windows XP, 98, and Me.
Nipping at Lincoln's heels is Scott Spanbauer, also a PC World old-timer, with his "Keep It Simple." It's a compendium of 50 tips, including a terrific section--"15 Icons You Can Dump"--on paring down your system tray (which Microsoft recast as the Notifications area).
Our tips aren't limited to software. Jim Aspinwall, a hardware maven, put together "Secret Tweaks," which has a really great deck: "20 unexpected ways to unleash the true potential of the technology products you already own." Boy, did that draw me in. Jim covers lots of areas, including overclocking, the black art of pushing your CPU to the max; video overclocking; silencing, and cooling down, your CPU and system; and hacking a Canon digital camera to force an upgrade.
Dig This: If you have a teenager, you might think you know their language. Nope, at least not according to Microsoft, of all companies. Check out this eye-opening (at least for me) article, "A Parent's Primer to Computer Slang."