[WindowsExplorer]
Configuring Windows Explorer on
MS-Windows XP (as far back as Windows 2000 or even Windows 98)
(Mar
26, 27, 2006): To watch the files that you have on your
Windows PC (Windows 95 or later, especially the latest, Windows XP),
open "Windows Explorer" (Right-click
on the Windows Start button and select "Explore") and size it to take
up most of the right half of your computer screen. In it, click on the
"View" menu and select "Details" to see file names, sizes, types, and
dates modified. To see more information about files, click on the
"Tools" menu and select "Folder Options". Click the "View" tab and
select "Show hidden files and folders". De-select "Hide extensions for
known file types" -- doing that latter can make things a lot less
confusing. Finally, click "Apply to All Folders".
Also, setting "Folders" for the left pane helps you see your
computer's directory structure. Click the "Folders" button in the
"Standard Buttons" toolbar. To get that toolbar, access the "View" menu
at the top, select "Toolbars" and make sure "Standard Buttons" is
checked. A couple of other good bars to turn on are "View" - Status
Bar, which gives information about the files being viewed and selected,
and "View" - Toolbars - Address Bar which shows the current directory
selected (watch that when you turn it on because you may have to drag
it over from the right to see it -- this can get very confusing if
misconfigured).
I open many files by dragging and dropping them from Explorer into
whatever program I want to use, and I use "Alt-tab" a lot to move
between windows instead of using the "desktop". I create folders on my
desktop to contain and sort my program icons, and switch between them
using "Alt-tab" or the task bar. In addition, the desktop is available
as the topmost "directory" in Explorer, and you can scroll up to that
if you have "Folders" selected.
When viewing HTML files in Netscape ver 7.2, you can click File (menu)
- Edit Page, and see all the "Anchors" (litttle yellow squares
containing pictures of anchors). These are used by appending the
"#" sign to the end of the URL and adding the anchor name. Of course
there's not much point in saving the page because you won't change it
on the web; you might only want to save the page for yourself (might
make a cleaner save, of just that page, as opposed to "File - Save As",
which saves images linked-to, as well). Close the page when desired or
keep it open for reference.
Printing Powerpoint slides or
viewgraphs
Using the printer properties seems to produce larger slides on the page
when printing multiple slides per page than does the program's "number
of slides per page" selection. However, you are typically then charged
for the number of pages you send to the printer, even if it puts them
all on one sheet of paper.
To work around this, if you have Adobe Acrobat PDF Creator, which the
computers in Engineering have, you can
even print PDF files to PDF Creator and select the number of pages per
sheet to print in "printer properties". This is useful when Powerpoint
slides have already been "printed" to PDF files at the rate of one
slide per page.
Next, double-sided printing can save you a lot of space in your binder.
You can take your new PDF file of multiple pages per sheet and print
the odd pages and the even pages separately. Before printing the even
pages, put the odd pages that were printed back in the printer. The
Lexmark printer in Engineering prints on the bottom sides of
the pages with the tops of the print image printed towards the user as
the user installs the paper in the tray (you can deduce this by making
a mark on a corner of the top blank page in the tray before printing).
Thus you can just drop the printed stack back in the tray (tops of
pages toward you) without having to reshuffle any pages. The even pages
will print pg 2 on the back of pg 1, pg 4 on the back of pg 3, etc.
This can save you a lot of money and a lot of space in your binder. The
only difficulty is that sometimes you get paper jams because the paper
is curled. Straighten it out a bit before putting it back in. If you
get a jam, you can usually pull the paper out gently without tearing
it, straighten it out (pull it across the edge of a desk) and put it
back in the tray (press the green "Go" button) and it usually prints
successfully.
Another thing is that sometimes the file save dialog takes a long time
to appear after you have done print to "PDF Create". Sometimes if you
make a temp file using Notepad and print that to "PDF Create", it
encourages the first file save dialog to appear. If you have to create
a PDF file out of a temp file, you can just delete the latter.