Date: June 18th, 2007

Author: Susan Harkins

This information is also available as a PDF download.

As I discussed in a previous entry, the My Places bar was introduced in Office 2000. It appears on the left side of the File Open and File Save As dialog box in all Office applications. My Places offers shortcuts to frequently used folders, but customizing it isn’t exactly an intuitive process.

Initially, the bar displays icons for the following Windows folders:

Most of us don’t use these default folders, or not all of them. Fortunately, you can add the folders you do use frequently. In the Open or Save As dialog box, select the folder you want to add from the Look In drop-down list. Then, choose Add To My Places from the Tools menu in the dialog box. To move or resize an icon in the bar, right-click on it and choose the appropriate command from the shortcut menu.

Office applications share one common My Places bar. Changes will show up in all the applications’ dialogs. Note that you can’t alter My Places in Office 2000, and Office XP’s user interface for updating My Places is more limited than 2003’s.

Removing the built-in icons

Removing custom icons from the My Places bar is simple. Right-click on the icon and choose Remove from the shortcut menu.

It isn’t as easy to remove the built-in icons, which is too bad: Deleting them would free up a lot of space for shortcuts you do use. To get rid of those icons, you have to edit the registry.

As always, before you begin editing the registry, be sure you back it up. where to buy viagra in uk Also, while you’re in the registry, don’t change anything unless instructed to in the following steps:

1. From the Windows Start menu, choose Run.

2. Enter regedit and click OK to launch the Registry Editor.

3. As shown in Figure A, expand the nodes to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places

Figure A

4. Update the version number 11.0 in the above key if appropriate. The StandardPlaces key contains the built-in icon values. UserDefinedPlaces contains custom icons. (Don’t worry if you don’t have a UserDefinedPlaces folder yet.)

5. Right-click on the Places key and choose Export. You’re creating a backup file of the current My Places bar. If anything goes wrong, you can simply double-click the file and the Registry will automatically restore the My Places keys, using the contents of the backup file. Give the file an appropriate name and save it where you can find it later. Click Save to create the backup file.

6. In the Places or the StandardPlaces key, double-click on the key you want to disable. Doing so updates the key values to the right. If the icon you double-clicked on has a Show value, double-click on it to display the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.

7. The Value Data value will probably be 2. Replace it with 0 (zero), as shown in Figure B, and click OK.

8. After disabling all the built-in icons that you don’t want to see, exit the Registry Editor.

Figure B

If the built-in icon values don’t include Show, add it as follows:

1. Click on the key that represents the built-in icon you want to disable.

2. Choose New from the Edit menu and select DWORD Value. The Registry will display a new value in the pane to the right. Name it Show and press Enter.

3. Repeat steps 6 and 7 above for each key, accordingly.

The results

When you display the Open or Save As dialog box, the built-in icons will be gone, as you can see in Figure C.

Figure C

Unstable My Places

The My Places user interface isn’t particularly stable, so you might experience problems after adding custom shortcuts or disabling the built-in icons. Usually, you can tell that things have gone awry when the Move Up and Move Down commands are grayed out. If this happens, reboot your system. Sometimes, this clears it up. If it doesn’t, and you want to shuffle your shortcuts, return to the registry and reset the Index values for each key, where 1 shifts an icon to the top, 2 positions an icon just below the first shortcut, and so on. Just remember that the custom shortcuts are in the UserDefinedPlaces key.

Date: April 23rd, 2008

Author: Greg Shultz

If you’re using MSN Messenger as your chat and videoconferencing tool, you may never use Windows Messenger anymore and have removed it from the startup group to keep it out of your way. However, you may have seen it pop up on occasion and had to struggle with closing it down. The reason that Windows Messenger makes these impromptu appearances is that Outlook, Outlook Express and even some Microsoft Web pages can still make it load automatically. Fortunately, where can i buy viagra online you can banish Windows Messenger from your desktop by making an alteration to the local group policy with the Group Policy Editor. Here’s how:

Note: This tip applies only to Windows XP Professional.

Date: May 19th, 2008

Author: Susan Harkins

Slides highlight or emphasize information that the presenter elaborates on during the actual presentation. After all, you can’t put everything on slides. When you want to provide additional information, but you don’t want to include it in the actual slide show, use notes. In Normal view, you can enter notes in the small section just below the slide where it says Click to add notes.

To view all notes, choose Notes Page from the View menu (or choose Notes Page in the Presentation Views group on the View menu in PowerPoint 2007). Use the scroll bar to view individual slides and notes. You can enter and copy text in this view as well.

Although you can use these notes as handouts for the audience, many presenters use them to script their presentation. During the presentation, the presenter can see the notes, but the audience can’t. During the development stage, you can use Notes as reminders of things to add, change, or research further.

To print notes, choose Print from the File menu, select Notes Pages from the Print What control, and click OK. Doing so prints slides and notes — one page for each slide. In PowerPoint 2007, click the Office button to find the Print command.

I’ve yet to find a good way to print just notes without using another application, such as Word. PowerPoint will print just the notes, but the feature is troublesome:

PowerPoint will print a page for each slide and that page will contain viagra women only the note text. It’s awkward at best because PowerPoint also prints a page for slides with no notes — in other words, you get a blank sheet of paper with a page number in the bottom right corner. In addition, you must apply the format to every slide. Removing the slide placeholder from the Notes Page Master doesn’t do the trick. However, you can delete the page number by displaying the Page Master and deleting the default footer placeholder. At least that way, you can reuse the paper.

If you don’t want a single page per slide, you can send notes to Word, but you’ll have to tweak the content once it’s there. From the File menu, choose Send To, select Microsoft Office Word, then choose one of the many options, and click OK. In PowerPoint 2007, click the Office button, choose Publish, and select Create Handouts In Microsoft Office Word.

In Word, you’ll have to delete the slide content (text and graphics) or links and then format the notes to suit your needs. Publishing the notes below the slides seems to reduce the amount of tweaking in Word.

Printing just the notes in a reasonable format seems like such a useful feature that, for the life of me, I don’t understand why PowerPoint can’t do it.

It’s worth mentioning that notes aren’t the same as comments. A comment appears in a yellow box inside a slide. Most often, other people reviewing your presentation communicate their ideas, additions, mistakes, and so on, via comments, and you eventually delete them. In contrast, notes remain with the presentation as reference.

Date: May 20th, 2008

Author: Mary Ann Richardson

Date: May 20th, 2008

Author: Mary Ann Richardson

You have a number of offices in various cities across the state. You need to send the latest employee information to each office. You have already grouped your Employees report by city. Now you want to be sure that when this report is printed, each city’s employees list is printed on a separate page. Follow these steps:

1. In the GroupHeader’s Property sheet, click the All tab.
2. Click the Force New Page property box drop-down arrow and select Before Section.

viagra without prescription online

Now each city’s employees list will begin printing on a new page.