[Cheiron]

We each day wrestle with our puters and we get some habbits of dealing with it. Currently I'm attending a puter course and actually found some interesting stuff that is good to know, and that I bet many of you don't know about. Here goes.

1) If you have multiple windows (programs) open, instead of messing in the processline or dragging windows around, hold down ALT key and then hit the TAB key.... a little window will pop up and you can cycle through open programs to choose what you want... when you release ALT key that window will be the forefront one. Neat and fast, huh?

2) Do you know the situation where you paste in some text in a document... and then have to correct an error before it?... so you place cursor, hit backspace button... but the damn puter deletes stuff in front of it... it's called "rightside delete". Very annoying thing that has driven me nuts many times. Now, the way to instantly get rid of that nuisance is to.... hit the "Insert" key. First time I have ever known a use for that key !

3) If you use the finder with navigation pane of folders to left and the content window of selected folder at right... if you use drag and drop to move a file to another folder in navigation window... if it is on same drive, it will move it there, not make a copy. If you hold down control key while you do it, it will copy it, and you will notice a little + sign appearing at cursor. Now... if you do this from another drive, say an external one... the thing works in opposite way... if you just drag a file to a folder on another drive, it will copy it, if you hold down ctrl key, it will move it. Watch for the plus sign... that always means copy.

4) Well.. most people will know this... but throwing it in for good measure: to copy a highlighted file, folder or text part, ctrl+ C... to paste in ctrl+ V .... to cut ctrl+ X... and here is maybe a more neat one: if in a folder and you want all files there... hit ctrl + A, it will select all files in folder. If you want to select various files in a list and they are not in order... hold down ctrl and click on the files you want. If you want all files in a consecutive part of a list, hightlight first file, hold down shift and click last file...
Btw... alt + F4 will close currently active program no matter how many windows it has open.

5) Searching for files. here are two tricks: if you want to search for a specific file type ... say a .doc or a .mdb file.... type in *.doc (e.g for Word documents)
If you want to search for a beginning letter of a filename (say starting with letter b) type in b*.

These things work at least on XP and Vista
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)

[Cheiron]

A few Excel tricks:

1) say you want to make a budget for each month of year, instead of typing in all the months in the first row, type in "january" in B1 cell, then with cell highlighted move cursor to bottom right corner of that cell...(the cursor will turn into a little +)... and drag along the row, while you hold down left mousebutton to end of 12 columns (M1 cell), so that you have selected all 12... bingo, it autofills all the cells with names of months.
Sorta same thing goes with say you have a row that has "House rent" as topic... type in the rent in the January column... do the same as above... and it fills in rest of months with the same given amount of money each month.
Of course you can do same with formulas ... say you at bottom of each column want a formula that tell total expences that month, e.g.: =SUM(B2:B10) ... that you put in B11 to add up your january expences... you drag along same as above and it fills in the formulas for each month calculating the total expences.
It is due to the nature of "relative cell reference". If you want an "absolute cell reference" included in formula for whatever you make...well you use the dollar sign.. e.g.... B15 would be $B$15 in formula

2) Now, say you have a payment that is due each 3rd month... first entry is, say february (cell reference is C2 e.g.)... write in the amount in february, then highlight B2, C2, D2 together. Again move cursor to right bottom corner of highlighted 3 cells, AND hold down ctrl key while you drag along row to december... BINGO... it will install payment only each third month.

I got many more tricks with this concerning functions and diagrams, but it gets a bit complicated for me to explain, since my version is in danish language version... but one maybe works

3) In a spreadsheet "project folder" you can have many sheets. Say you run an expences sheet for a couple of households, so you have a sheet for each household with their total, but you want total expences for the building and all households...
To make (maybe in a new sheet) a grand total expences cell... you type like this:

if total in sheet one is cell D5.... sheet two is D6... sheet 3 is C15, formula is:

=Sheet1!D5+Sheet2!D6+Sheet3!C15

it's called cross referencing

I hope some find it useful and didn't know this
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)

[Cheiron]

Well.... I dunno if people out there know this and it is just me being dumb, but well.....I didn't know.

I sat fumbling at puter after just getting up, half asleep still.... and by mistake dragged a picture I have put as a file on desktop onto my browserwindow..... and BOING.... it showed the picture !

Same goes of course if you drag a picture file from usual folders (and of course it doesn't move the picture file from it's location)... so, an easy way to get a quick watch of a picture

(this is in XP and using IE)

(PS: I haven't checked with all graphics formats yet... like gif, png etc)
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)

[Flexie]

Thankyou for the information we are always in need of computer tricks. They do come in handy.

- Flexie -