Anindya Nandi's Blog

Windows Media Player 11 Keyboard Shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Windows Media Player 11 Keyboard Shortcuts

Hey all you Windows Media Player users out there – looking for some keyboard shortcuts? Well, load up WMP 11, open a video and follow along, because here’s a bevvy of them to try out!

Switch to full mode – CTRL+1
Switch to skin mode – CTRL+2
Switch to the first view in a media category – CTRL+7
Switch to the second view in a media category – CTRL+8
Switch to the third view in a media category – CTRL+9
Play the previous item – CTRL+B
Move the focus to the search box in the library – CTRL+E
Play the next item – CTRL+F
Turn shuffle on or off – CTRL+H
Eject CD or DVD (won’t work on PCs with two or more CD or DVD disc drives installed) – CTRL+J
Show or hide the Menu Bar (full mode only) – CTRL+M
Create a playlist – CTRL+N
Open a file – CTRL+O
Play or pause a file – CTRL+P
Stop playback – CTRL+S
Rewind video – CTRL+Shift+B
Turn subtitles on or off – CTRL+Shift+C
Fast-forward – CTRL+Shift+F
Play faster than normal speed – CTRL+Shift+G
Play at normal speed – CTRL+Shift+N
Play slower than normal speed – CTRL+Shift+S
Repeat the playlist – CTRL+T
Specify either a URL or path of a file – CTRL+U
Close or stop playing a file – CTRL+W

Command prompt to reveal Hidden Files

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:41:00 +0000

Command prompt to reveal Hidden Files

Some viruses leave behind nasty side effects, even when your antivirus program has cleaned the actual virus from your computer. If your desktop icons are missing and your C: drive appears blank, don’t panic — your files haven’t gone permanently AWOL. Common viruses, such as the Windows 7 Recovery virus, will hide your files in an attempt to coerce you into paying for the virus’s removal. When you view your desktop or click on your C: drive, it may appear that all of your files have been deleted, but they haven’t — the virus has simply hidden them. You can restore them easily using a simple command prompt trick that works in Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Click the Start button in the lower left corner of your task bar. Type cmd in the search box at the bottom of the menu and press Enter. If you’re using Windows XP, click Run and type cmd into the Run box.

Type attrib -s -h -r c:/*.* /s /d and press Enter to execute the command. The command prompt window should look like this after you’ve typed the command:

Allow the command to finish executing (it may take a few minutes). When it’s done, close the command prompt window and check your desktop — your files, hidden by the virus, have been restored. You can use the same trick to restore files the virus may have hidden on other drives, including removable storage such as flash drives and external hard drives; just change the drive letter in the command above to the drive letter of the storage device with the hidden files.

How to Zip

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:59:00 +0000

How to Zip

Say you have many files that all need to be e-mailed, but you don’t want to add them one by one and you don’t think all of them will be within the recipient’s e-mail size limits.

What do you do then ? Why zip ‘em up, of course!

So....here is how to do it in a flick of a second .........

Browse to the folder where the files you want to zip are at. Now highlight the files by either drawing a box around them or by holding the Ctrl key and selecting each of them. Once you have all of the ones you want to zip up highlighted, Right-Click one of them, go down to “Send to” and choose “Compressed (zipped) folder”.

Like magic, your highlighted files will appear in one convenient package. If you don’t like the name Windows gives your zipped folder, just rename it!

If you don’t want to use the built-in Windows zip utility, there are also third-party programs like WinZip and WinRar, that have more features, like the ability to set the compression size and file extension.

Start Internet Explorer 9 in Private Mode

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:13:00 +0000

Start Internet Explorer 9 in Private Mode

For all you Internet Explorer 9 users out there, how would you like to learn a quick trick so that every time you start IE, it runs in Private mode right from the start ?

What we’re going to do is create a desktop shortcut for IE and set a switch to make it start in InPrivate mode. So, right-click on your desktop, select New and choose Shortcut.

Now, if you’re using a 32 bit version of Windows, copy this text and put it in the path box:

“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -private

For those out there running 64 bit windows, you have to change it a bit. Use this line:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -private

Notice that in both cases we put -private after the quoted path.

When you’re done, hit Next, give your shortcut a name and you’re good to go.

Note: if you get an error while inputting this path, you might have a different version of windows and should try the other path.

Auto-Complete commands in Win 7 Command Prompt

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 16:50:00 +0000

Auto-Complete commands in Win 7 Command Prompt

Did you know that there’s a way to auto complete a path or file name in the Windows 7 Command Prompt?

Here’s how!

Open a Command Prompt by clicking Start, then typing cmd in the Search Box. Right Click the Command Prompt icon in the results that appear and select Run as Administrator.

In the Command Prompt window, type in the change directory command, like this:

Now hit the Tab key.

*Poof* -the path is completed!

If you keep pressing the Tab key, the Command Prompt will put forth the next applicable file or folder that’s consistent with what you’ve typed so far.

Note: This may not work if you don't open the prompt as Administrator

What are Pen Flicks in a Touch screen Laptop

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:35:00 +0000

What are Pen Flicks in a Touch screen Laptop

I think the reason people love touch screens is because of how natural the hand gestures feel. For example, to scroll down a document, it feels better to just swipe down instead of pressing a little arrow key. If you’re looking to bring some of these intuitive gestures to your Windows computer, then might I humbly recommend that you enable Pen flicks.

To utilize pen flicks, your computer must be touch screen, or your laptop’s trackpad must support gestures. If you have a graphics tablet, then that will also allow pen flicks as well.

Begin by pressing the Start button, and selecting Control Panel.

Select the Classic view, and double click Pen and Input Devices.

Now choose the Flicks tab, and check the box labeled Use flicks to perform common actions quickly and easily.

Now you have two options: the navigation flicks, or the navigational flicks with editing. I personally prefer the latter, as it allows me to copy and paste with ease. Choose the option that best suits you, and of course, you can always change this setting.

If you select Customize, you can hand select what action a flick in a certain direction will perform. If you’d like to add a custom keyboard shortcut, just select the add option. For example. I made it so that a downward flick will close the program using the keyboard shortcut Alt+F4.

Finally, one last setting I’d like to bring to your attention is the flick sensitivity. If you find that you have to repeat a gesture several times before Windows recognizes it, then you should make the sensitivity more relaxed. However, if you find gestures are occurring by accident, than you should move the slider to the precise setting.

I hope this setting makes your computer feel a little bit more natural. Enjoy!

Network problems and Command Prompt

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:08:00 +0000

Network problems and Command Prompt

You don’t have to be an IT expert to troubleshoot pesky network and Internet connection problems. All you need is the Command Prompt utility. Any computer users familiar with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 recognize it. Well, that utility hasn’t gone away; it’s still around, just hidden in the background.

Here’s how to access it, and how to troubleshoot basic network problems from your computer.

Press the Windows key on your keyboard. Type the text cmd in the search box – in XP this is called “Run” – and press Enter.

Basic rule of troubleshooting: always start with the closest possible source. You need to check your own computer for network connectivity first. Type ping 127.0.0.1 and press Enter. Your Command Prompt window should look like this if your computer’s network card has no problems:

You’ve just sent four requests for dummy data to your computer’s “loopback” IP address and it (hopefully) replied to each one. An IP address is a unique tag for your computer that tells the server where to send data; the loopback address is used for testing your computer’s network card. If there were intermittent problems or if your card were completely non-functional, the ping would have experienced some loss.

The next step up the chain is your default gateway, which is in most cases the network router. Any data entering or exiting the network has to pass through the router. To diagnose the router, you need to ping its IP address. Type ipconfig at the command prompt and look for the entry next to “Default Gateway.”

Now, ping your router the same way you pinged the loopback address: type ping . In this example, you’re pinging the default gateway at 10.0.0.1. If the connection between your computer and the router is strong and stable, all four of your data packets should get a response. If not, your router has connectivity problems. As a note, wireless connections are prone to drop signal, so keep that in mind when working with a wireless router.

Let’s say you’ve tested your computer and router and that everything checks out, but you still can’t connect to a webpage. So, perform the ping test on it. Let’s use Yahoo! for an example:

Yahoo! works. Just to be sure, do another ping test, this time to Google:

Google’s homepage checks out. If you were able to ping two remote sites successfully, you don’t have a problem with your network or Internet connection.

What is 32 Bit and 64 Bit - Explained

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:46:00 +0000

What is 32 Bit and 64 Bit - Explained

In one context, 32-bit and 64-bit refers to how a CPU (computer processor) handles information. These terms also indicate the number of bits that comprise a single data element (for example, a pixel in an image). In that case, when dealing with resource hogging data like images, audio, or video, there is a distinct advantage to a 64-bit system. However, when writing emails or text documents, the benefits of 64-bit may be less apparent.

What is a bit?

A bit (short for binary digit) is the smallest unit of digital information, represented by either 0 or 1. Arranging a series of bits in sequence creates a binary math language that the processing chips can understand. As a result, CPUs are identified by their ability to process these sequences (32-bit or 64-bit). Eight consecutive bits in such a sequence equals a byte (short for binary term). Large numbers of bytes are then combined to create kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, etc.

Not confusing enough?

The terms, 32-bit and 64-bit indicate the width of the registers, which are storage areas within the computer. The registers can contain either the address location in the computer memory where data is stored, or the data itself. All computer data is processed using information represented in these registers.

Each instruction (the most basic computer command) can process the number of bits indicated in the registers. So, a 64-bit machine processes a 64-bit width register with each instruction. Likewise, a 32-bit machine processes a 32-bit width register per instruction. While it would seem that a 64-bit processor would naturally be faster, the number of instructions executed per cycle (the fundamental unit of time measurement in a device) indicates actual processing speed, so that may not always be the case.

It’s the combination of hardware and software elements which make up the computer architecture that determines processing speed. This will be discussed in part two of this series, where we’ll take a more in-depth look at processors, memory, and how hardware and software interact to improve (or–if not correctly balanced–reduce) overall performance.

Speed

Processing speed, referred to as clock speed, is generally measured in megahertz (MHz) which amounts to one million cycles per second, or gigahertz (GHz) equaling one billion cycles per second.

A computer’s architecture is a significant contributor to that processing speed, so CPUs (computer processors) with the same clock speed may not perform functions at the same rate. While a fixed number of clock cycles is required for each command (instruction), a faster clock will execute more instructions per second, and the machine will perform those instructions more quickly.

However, clock cycles (or clock ticks), like so many other terms in this bewildering lexicon jungle, is a term with multiple meanings. On one hand, a clock cycle is as described above, the relative speed of a processor, but it also refers to the internal system clock, which always runs at 66 MHz (66 million clock ticks per second). So, more powerful CPUs can execute instructions more rapidly than their less sophisticated counterparts, while still displaying the same number of units per cycle.

Memory

While the clock speed of the CPU is the primary indicator of processing capability, RAM (Random-Access Memory) also plays a significant role in performance. When a CPU requests information from the hard drive, it’s put into RAM, where it can be accessed with greater efficiency. But, if the memory (RAM) isn’t sufficient, the information may have to be returned to the hard drive before the next request can be answered, thereby slowing overall performance.

Hardware and Software

Hardware and drivers (the software that controls the hardware) must match the device’s system type, and this should be a primary consideration when upgrading a 32-bit system.

What all this means is that, with each operation, 64-bit processors can handle bundles of information that are twice the size of those processed by 32-bit systems, and the speed at which these bundles are delivered is determined by the overall balance of system resources (RAM, processors, etc.). In researching this article, I was directed to an analogy of a two lane highway that had been converted to a four lane highway to relieve bottlenecks. But, while that’s a good comparison, the benefit is more than just a method of efficiently moving traffic. 64-bit is not just an increased amount of data per bundle, it’s also higher quality data, as images, audio, and video files comprised of 64-bit elements are richer, with more depth and texture, than those made up of 32-bit elements.

The next and final part of this article, How to Determine if a System is 64-Bit Capable, will explain how to tell whether a system is 32-bit or 64-bit, and whether upgrades are possible (or practical).

I hope this has been as enlightening to read as it was to write.

Speed Up Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:10:00 +0000

Speed Up Google Chrome

Well Google lunched new version of Google chrome which is much faster and stable, You also loving it and it’s becoming your favorite browser as you simply loves it’s clean interface and speed of browsing. Here are some good tips which can improve your experience further and you will love this fantastic browser more than ever.

Just follow these tips and see how Chrome improves in performance -

Disables usage statistics of Google Chrome

This option is used to help in Development of Google chrome, It send your usage data to Google so that based on that they can further improve Chrome. But if you are worried about system performance you should disable it . To disable this go to tools menu > Options > Advanced and uncheck the check box which says Send usage data to Google….

Disable DNS Preload in Google Chrome

This will prevent Google chrome to keep DNS info in their cache. Most of time it is unnecessary if you have a good connection of at least 256kbps or more. It is recommended only for slow dial up connection or Mobile users who actually spend a lot f time in DNS query during browsing. to disable this select tools menu of Google Chrome and select “Options.” In the next window, go to the “Advanced” tab and uncheck the “Use DNS preload ….”

Disable anti-phishing filter

If you are advanced web user and you know how a phishing site look like or you know how to prevent from them you can disable this option. But if you are not at all comfortable working without phishing filters or don;t want to take risk you should keep it as it is . Disabling this not only saves your CPU time but also save your Internet bandwidth. This option can also be disabled from Tools Menu > Options > Advanced.

Removes navigational data regularly

All of the browsers cache the Navigation data and other info for faster access to web pages you frequently visit. But if your cache size is big or it contains very old pages which you hardly visit once or twice in a month it will start performing negative for you, as web pages will load faster but they Browsers perform worse when navigation data is saved. So it is important to remove navigational data frequently. To delete this in Chrome, go to Tools menu and choose the option “Remove navigation data” and choose “Delete data for this period” and not the option “All”. So it will remove old data and will keep recent data do this once in a week at least.

Disable Useless function which we don’t use normally –

To options that are mentioned below you need to edit the properties of Chrome shortcut which you are using to start the browser. To Change it, right click on the Chrome icon and choose “Properties.” this will open a windows with the “Shortcut” tab, in this tab there is a box called “Destination”. You have to change things in this box itself.

E.g. To disable Java box,

if you are using Windows Vista it should go like this — : “C:Users\AppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe -disable-java”
and if you are using Windows XP: “C:Documents and Settings%username% Local SettingsApplication DataGoogleChrome.exe”

The options which we are adding after the full path of chrome can be used one after the other leaving a space between. You don’t need to write the entire path every time you are using a new options. Here are the option which can be used -

Disable-dev-tools – This will disable Developers tool which is not used by a normal user for sure.

Disable-logging – This will disable looging of browser activity, This log files are useful only in case of Crash or Other error which prevent you from using browsers. if you are experiencing any such problem and need to know the reason you can enable this option. but in general you don’t need these log files. By disabling this you will certainly save CPU RAM and Hard disk space.

Disable-metrics-system – This option will disable gathering of Usage Statistics data. This is used by Google and we don’t need it any how so you can safely disable this option.

Disable-metrics-reporting – If you disabled Metrics system there is no point in keeping Metrics reporting On, as there won’t be any data to send across. Disable it for sure.

Disable-java – Java on the web is rarely used these days and it greatly slow downs your browsers performance. If you not running any online application which uses Java or Java Applets you can safely disable this feature. This will prevent you from playing number of Online Java Games though. (like Yahoo Games)

Disable-java script – This will disable all kinds of JavaScript from being run on the web pages you visit. This is not recommended at all as most of the sites these days are using some kind of JavaScript, to display pages. By Disabling JavaScript you will not be able to see these site properly and they will behave improprly. This is why disabling JavaScript is not recommended.

Disable-plugins – This will disable all plugins including Flash player and other media player. After applying this modification you won’t be able to see a lot of media sites properly including YouTube. If you understand impact of disabling this go ahead and do it otherwise don;t use this option.

Disable-images – This will disable all images on all Webpages you browse, if you are using low bandwidth conection like GPRS or Dial Up it will be very useful for you as it will save a lot of bandwidth for you. This will make your browser an text only browser. So be sure you need it that way before making these changes.

How to hide usernames in Windows 7

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:05:00 +0000

How to hide usernames in Windows 7

The login screen of Windows Vista and Windows 7 makes it very easy to see the user name of the last person that logged in. This may be fine on personal computers, but on shared computers, this could be a security threat. A potential intruder would only have to find out the password, which is very possible with the right software. To solve this problem, we have to change a value in the registry. Don’t worry; it is easier than it sounds. But before we change anything, it is best to make a backup of the registry.

Note: If you’re uncomfortable editing the Windows Registry do not attempt this tip.

1. Press [Windows Key] + R to bring up Run.

2. Type “regedit” (without quotes) into the text box and hit enter.

3. In the Registry Editor, click on File -> Export…

4. Enter “backup” (without quotes) as name and save the file to the desktop.

Now we can start editing the registry…

1. Press [Windows Key] + R to bring up Run.

2. Type “notepad” (without quotes) into the text box and hit enter.

3. Insert the following text into the document that opens up:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“dontdisplaylastusername”=dword:1

4. Press Ctrl + S to save the document. As a name, type “loginscreen.reg” and save it on the desktop. (IMPORTANT: enter the name with quotes)

5. Go to your desktop and double click on “loginscreen.reg”. When you are asked if you want to allow the program to make changes, click “Yes”.

6. You can now delete the loginscreen.reg file and enjoy your secure PC!

To change your login screen back to the default setting, repeat the above steps with one small change. The line:

“dontdisplaylastusername”=dword:1

needs to be changed to:

“dontdisplaylastusername”=dword:0

Note: In case you didn’t know, the registry is the part of the computer that stores all its settings. Do not allow programs or files to make changes to the registry unless you know they are trustworthy. It is usually a good idea to make a backup of the registry before editing it. By doing that, you can restore the registry afterwards if anything goes wrong. You can restore the registry by simply double clicking on the exported file.

Facebook Login Notifications

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 16:38:00 +0000

Facebook Login Notifications

Hey, Facebook users – after a very long time I have again come to my place. My Blog. Was a bit busy settling my second career and with Facebook. But I am back now. Did you know that you can set up India's favourite social networking site to send you an e-mail or even a text message if anyone tries to access your account from a new device?

It’s great for that extra layer of security – and I highly recommend it!

Here’s how:

While logged in to Facebook, click the arrow next to your name, then Account Settings.

Once at the Account Settings control panel click the security category off to the left, then click Edit.

Now simply choose how you’d like to receive a notification when/if your account is accessed from a new/different computer. Click Save Changes when you’re finished!

Word 2007 - Draft View

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 11 May 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Word 2007 - Draft View

If you’re using either Word 2007 or 2010 and preferred working in the Normal view, then you’re probably wondering what happened to it.

I’m sure you’ve investigated the View tab of the Ribbon and this is what you found:

While on the surface it seems that they’ve done away with the Normal view, the truth is that they just renamed it. Try the Draft view.

Feeling better?

Yeah, I though you might.

Of course the happiness will be short-lived when you save a file in the Draft view and then find that later it opens in the Print Layout view again.

After you’ve changed the view of each document you open to Draft for a few days, you’ll be tired of it and wonder why they created the Draft view if Word wasn’t going to keep the setting when it’s opened again at a later time.

Well we can stop wondering about the whys and still not give up on having things presented to our liking…

Microsoft has included in the program options a place to tell Word whether or not you prefer to allow documents to open in the Draft view.

If you like that view then you’ll want to allow it, and here’s how you can make Word do just that.

Begin in the Office Button / File tab and choose Options.

In the Options dialog box choose the Advanced category on the left

On the right scroll all the way down to the General section.

Locate and select the “Allow opening a document in Draft view” option.

Click OK.

When you next open a file that you saved in Draft view it will still be in Draft view.

Web Browser Navigation

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:43:00 +0000

Shift+Space Web Browser Navigation

Sounds like a cool new form of space travel, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) it’s just a trick to make navigating pages in your web browser a little easier.

So, instead of using the Page Up and Page Down keys all the way on the other side of your keyboard, do this:

Press your Space Bar to go a page down.

Press Shift+Space to go a page up.

Quick navigation, without traveling all over the place! Give it a try!

Get Connected with me

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:26:00 +0000

Get Connected with me

Here are few links to get connected with me

My FaceBook Page : http://adf.ly/1TX5p

My Blog : http://adf.ly/1TX1w

My WOrdpress Blog (Softknowledge) : http://adf.ly/1TX45

Mallabhum ( My Business): http://adf.ly/1TX3E

Adf.ly : http://adf.ly/?id=457859

Firefox 4.0 Safe Mode

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 04 May 2011 04:24:00 +0000

Firefox 4.0 Safe Mode

One of my favorite things about Mozilla Firefox is the plethora of add-ins you can download to expand its functionality. Ad blockers, screen capturing widgets and weather monitors are all at your fingertips, but all of that added function can sometimes cause some problems. If you think an add-on is causing Firefox 4 to act all wacky, try this:

Click the Firefox button and choose Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled… .

Note: Make sure you’re clicking the little arrow next to Help, and not the button itself.

When the dialog box appears asking you if you want to disable add-ons pops up, click OK.

Now, before Firefox restarts another window will appear that gives you a list of options to fiddle with. Be extremely careful, because some of the options can have permanent effects (like deleting your bookmarks, as I painfully found out!). If you know what you’re doing, or have isolated the problem already, feel free to experiment, but for everyone else, click Continue in Safe Mode.

Firefox should then open up, uninhibited by any potential add-on problems, thus allowing you to carry on with your business until the add-on causing problems is fixed or removed.

Successor of Windows 7 - Windows 8

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sun, 01 May 2011 05:24:00 +0000

Successor of Windows 7 - Windows 8

Windows 8 Milestone 1 is now available to download on torrents. Please note that this is not the Official version, its just a leak.

Developing of Windows 8 has jumped into a phase of Milestone 3. And Automatically led to even wave of new leaked screenshots of the system, which appear in the network and reveal newer features of the Windows 7 successor. In addition to the Aero Lite interface that was reveled before and now the website MSWin.me has published the pictures of the controls, which will go to lighter Aero theme of Windows 8.

Much more interesting feature that is included is the news about a module that is responsible for changing the language of the system. With this feature you are allowed to change language in Windows. Sources reveal the significant changes in the module. First Changing the language will be much simpler, and Microsoft company will enable this function at a fast location. Microsoft’s new window is expected in the next year. And the first beta version of Windows 8 is expected to be launched by end of this year.

Download Details (Search It from any torrent site and download)

File Name: 6.1.7850.0.winmain_win8m1.100922-1508_x86fre_client-enterprise_en-us.iso
Size: 2.45 GB (2,637,101,056 bytes)
SHA-1: DCA69DF6074BCA8B5DBA5C8D6D030D53CB6D82C
MD5: EA2DCFADA6BBA517A0A0649D15E1EB3D
CRC32: 32EB1881

Some Win Key Shortcuts for Windows 7 Users

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:34:00 +0000

Some Win Key Shortcuts for Windows 7 Users

Here are 11 beautiful shortcuts for Windows 7 users. Lets take a look: -

Win + Up Arrow – Maximize

Win + Down Arrow – Minimize

Win + Left Arrow – Snap to Left

Win + Right Arrow – Snap to Right (see a pattern here?)

Win + Home – Restore or minimize all other windows

Win + T – Press once to focus the first taskbar entry; press again to cycle through taskbar entries

Win + Space Bar (hold) – Peek at the desktop

Win + G – Bring gadgets forward to the top

Win + any number key (1-9) – Open a program on the taskbar. (The number corresponds to the pinned program’s location.)

Win + + (plug sign) – Zoom in

Win + - (minus sign) – Zoom Out

Microsoft Word 2007 - Review Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 12:15:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Review Tab

In Microsoft Word 2007, the Review Tab is useful in a lot of ways. You can have the Spelling and Grammar feature, the Research option, Thesaurus and Translation functionality to help you improve your documents. Here is what the Review Tab looks like.

Under the Proofing group, you can use find the Spelling and Grammar feature. You can easily check the spellings, punctuation errors and grammar using this tool. Here is the screen shot.

The first thing we are going to try is to check the spelling and grammar of a document. Go ahead and select the insertion point and click on spelling and grammar on the Proofing group on the Review Tab. This will start the Spelling and Grammar dialog box as shown below. Notice that it found an incorrectly spelled word, procedur. You can either click on Change if you would like to accept the suggestion made by Microsoft Word. Otherwise you can ignore it if you think the word is OK as it is.

Next we are going to try is the Research command on the word authentication as shown in the figure below. Select the word authentication and click on Research icon, this will launch the Dictionary feature as shown in the right side of the screen shot. It was able to find the word with the correct pronunciation and also the meaning for you to review. Very cool indeed!

Another related feature is the Thesaurus in Microsoft Word 2007. This amazing feature helps you find synonyms and also antonyms of any specific word. In our example it found a list of synonyms for authentication as shown on the right side in the figure below. I'm going to select certification and select insert. This helps if you are like me and use the same words over and over again.

In the next figure I have highlighted the Word Count feature. This lets you find the number of characters, paragraphs and lines in the document. This is a pretty useful feature if you are working on a term research paper where you have to stay within a certain number of words or pages.

If you are collaborating on a document with other team members or on a project report, the Comments feature in the Review tab in Microsoft Word 2007 can be a true lifesaver. In the following screen shot, I have added a comment that is shown in red. Notice that it used my initials and a number right before the actual comment. As the other team members and comments, the application will use different colors. This helps to keep all the comments organized from different authors.

Moving onto the next group section which is the Track changes group. We can easily manage additions, deletion, any comments and formatting changes in an efficient manner using this feature. You can find the Track Changes command under Tracking group in the Review Tab in Microsoft Word 2007.

Let us look at an example of this feature using a Course Syllabus sample. After the initial review, the changes are highlighted as shown below. The additions are in red and underlined, the deletions are in red and using a strike through. Furthermore notice that there is a vertical bar next to all the changes.

If you prefer seeing all the changes in Balloons, you can do this by selecting Show only Comments and Formatting in Balloons command. This will clean the document up and move the comments and changes to the right side in the markup area. The next two screen shots display the functionality of this feature.

If you would like to see all the changes in one place, you can use the Reviewing Pane command. In the image below, I have selected the Reviewing pane under the Tracking Group. Notice all the revisions are summarized on the left side of the document and broken down into insertions, deletions, etc. by the author and into different sections, very cool!

After all the changes have been reviewed and checked, we are ready to accept all the revisions. We can do just that by selecting Accept all Changes in Document under the Accept command in the Changes group under the Review tab in Microsoft Word 2007. This will go ahead and update the document then finalize all the revisions and changes.

As you can see the Review tab in Microsoft Word 2007 has a lot to offer us. OK at times, it is necessary to review different versions off the same document especially if there are several people working on it at the same time. In Microsoft Word 2007, this is just a breeze. You can also use the Compare feature to combine multiple versions of the same document.

Let us go ahead and see how this can be achieved. I'm going to compare two Course Syllabi that I have been working on for a class that I am teaching. I select the Compare command which launches a dialog box as shown below. I select the original document in the left side and the revised document on the right side and hit OK.

This will launch the wizard that will compare the two versions. Not only will it show all the differences between the two versions, but also display a summary on the left side as shown below and the screen shot.

The last thing I would like to show you is how to protect a document from editing. This option will restrict others from making certain types of editing or formatting changes to the document. You can select the Protect Document option under the Protect group. Here is the command shown on the ribbon in Microsoft Word 2007.

This will launch the Restrict Formatting and Editing dialog box as shown below. I will select the editing restrictions option that is number two and then click on us start forcing protection.

In the start enforcing production, I will select password, enter my password and click OK. There you go, now your document is protected by this password.

Next time someone tries to open this document and make changes, they will be prompted by this friendly on perfect document dialog box, pretty cool. A screen shot is as follows.

FaceBook Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:34:00 +0000

FaceBook Fun

Facebook has all sorts of fun buried in its code, but this trick is one of my favorites. Today we're going to learn how to turn things upside down!

Here's how:

First, scroll all the way to the bottom of your Facebook page - you should see the copyright info, and whatever language your page is currently in. Click the language link.

In the resulting window you can choose whatever language you want your page to be in, but if you click the little arrow next to English...

...you get extra options to switch your language to Pirate English or even Upside Down English!

Click one to see your Facebook page in a whole new way - just remember to follow these same steps to change back when the fun is over!

Microsoft Word 2007 - Mailing Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 04:05:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Mailing Tab

Using the Mail Merge feature in Microsoft Word 2007, you can write a customized letter or flier to all your customers in one shot. Each letter has the same kind of information, yet the customer content is unique typically provided by a data source. The data source could be in many formats including text file, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, SQL server 2008, Oracle, etc. Today we will look at the procedure of using mail merge in Microsoft Word 2007 with data from Microsoft Excel 2007. So let us go ahead and get started.

First of all browse to the Mailings Tab which can be found next to the Review Tab. When you click on it, you will see something similar to the screen shot below. In my case I have written a generic form letter that I will be sending to all of our customers. I've added my address information, the annual sale specifics and a few closing remarks. What I need to do is add unique customer information and a greeting line to the body of each letter.

Before I get started I also need the customer data from Microsoft Excel 2007. Right below is a screen shot of the data that I will be using for my mail merge example. Let us take a look at some of the mail merge fields; first name, last name, address information, etc. Also notice that the data resides in Sheet 1 of the Excel workbook.

Switch back to Microsoft Word. Go to the Start Mail Merge group under the Mailings Tab to start the mail merge process. Select Start Mail Merge command and then choose Step by Step Mail Merge Wizard. I would highly recommend using this option if you are new to mail merge. Here's what it looks like in my case.

This will launch the Mail Merge wizard which is a six step process. In the first step, you have to select what type of document will you be working with. I'm going to use the Letters option and then click Next. You can see the wizard on the right side of the document as shown below in the red rectangle.

In the next step you have to select which letter you will use for the mail merge. I'm just going to use my current letter that I started with and then click Next. There's a screen shot of what I'm talking about shown below.

In step three I have to select a data source for my customer list. For our demo, I am going to use a list from Microsoft Excel as was mentioned earlier. So I will choose Use an existing list and then click on Browse.

This will launch a new dialog box where I will find my customer data file in Documents folder. I will click on Customer Data.xlsx and then hit Open. This is shown in the figure below.

My customer data resides in Sheet 1$ so I will select that one and click OK. Also I will check First row of data check box. The dialog box shown below displays this information.

The mail merge wizard will parse the data, and bring up a list of all the possible mail merge recipients. In this list you can choose the customers that you would like to send the letter to. You can also sort and filter the data depending on your situation. I'm going to be using the default settings and just click OK.

When I did this, it took me back to my previous screen with one exception . Notice under the Use an existing list, you can see that it found Sheet1$ in Customer Data.xlsx. I will click on Next:Write your letter to move to the next step in the wizard.

In step four, I will be adding the address information and also a Greeting line block to my letter. Let us see how to do just that. In the screen shot below, I have highlighted in red were the address and greeting information needs to go. I'm going to select my insertion point in my letter (blue arrow) and then click on the Address block on the right side of my document.

This will bring up the Insert Address Block dialog box as shown below. In the Preview pane, I see that the actual street address is missing, not good. I need to fix this so I will click on Match fields command button.

This will take me to the Match fields dialog box where I can choose fields from the drop down for the place holders. I will select Street for Address 1 and then click OK. Here's a screen shot to display what I am talking about.

Notice that this inserted street address in the Preview pane. I can preview the information to make sure it looks good. Then I will click on OK.

In the screen shot below you will see that the wizard added an Address block in our document shown in a red rectangle. Next we need to add a greeting line, so I will choose Greeting line in the wizard on the right side and rerun my steps. This is highlighted by red rectangles in the figure below.

This will bring up the Greeting line dialog box. For the format I just need to use the first name, so I'll click on match feels again.

This will bring up the Insert Greeting line dialog box as shown below. I will go ahead and select the first name in the drop down and then click OK. You get the idea on how to customize the field selection and formatting within the mail merge wizard.

This time it added the greeting line to my letter. We still need to do one more thing before we can move onto the next step. We need to remove the Add address information and Add greeting line information that was part of the initial draft. So please go ahead and remove them. These are shown using a strikethrough below. Go ahead and click on Next to move on to Preview Letters.

Yahoo! we can actually see customer information and the greeting line in the next screen shot. This is exactly what we needed to achieve however font and showing up in red.

We must correct this before we can move on to the next step. I can just use the mini toolbar fix this problem. Here's what it looks like and then I clicked on Next: Complete the merge.

At this point we are done with our mail merge letter. You can either Print them or you can Edit individual letter. I will click on Edit individual letters to see what they look like.

This fires yet another dialog box with the heading on Merge to New Document. I will choose All for Merge records and hit OK as shown below.

I think we are all set at this point. If you look on the bottom left corner, you will notice that it is displaying Page 1 of the 100 letters that I need to send to my customers.

If you like this you can save this as a separate word document. This is shown in this screen shot below. I'm going to call this document customer mailings letters. Remember, you can always get back to these letters and print them at a later time if you like.

If you like you can Save this as a separate Word Document. This is shown in this screen shot below.

I'm going to call this document Customer Mailings Letters. Having a saved document is beneficial as you can always get back to these letters and print them at a later time if you like.

At this point we are done with our mail merge exercise. I did want to show you a few more features in the Mailings Tab so let us take a look at some of these quickly. Sometimes it is necessary to look at the fields (place holders) that you are using for mail merge in your document. You can highlight them by using Highlight Merge Fields command under the Write and Insert Fields Group. This is shown below in the screen shot.

What if you wanted to insert the last name in the greetings line? You can easily do this by selecting the Insert Merge Field command from the Write and Insert fields group. Here is what it looks like in action.

If you wanted to preview a certain customer, you can do this by using the Preview Results group. Let us say that we wanted to look at the tenth customer, we can easily use the navigation buttons to browse to that customer. This is shown in the figure below.

Microsoft Word 2007 - Reference Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 06:22:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Reference Tab

The References Tab on Microsoft Word 2007's new ribbon offers a quick way to enter your document sources, citations and choose a style like APA, MLA etc. On the References tab you will find things like Table of Contents, Footnotes, Citations & Bibliography, Table of Figures, Captions, Indexes and Table of Authorities.

Let us take a look at what the References Tab has to offer. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like.

In Microsoft Word 2007, creating a Table of Contents is really easy. One thing you need to make sure is that you type your document using one of the heading styles for the items that need to be included in the Table of Contents.

Let me show you this by example. For my project management plan report, I have created nine different sections with Headings. However I have not had the chance to create the Table of Contents just yet. I will do that next. Click on the Table of Contents command in Table of Contents group under the References tab, then click on the drop down button. It will give you built-in menu of options to choose from. From that list, choose automatic table 2.

After I went through the above mentioned steps, Microsoft Word 2007 generated a nice Table of Contents as shown below. Now when you need to browse to a specific section, all you need to do is Ctrl + click the section in Table of Contents and it will take you there directly.

Footnotes and endnotes are an easy way to direct the reader of your document to supplemental information generally located at the end of a page. You can insert the Footnotes and endnotes using the Footnotes group in the References Tab. This is illustrated below.

Let's say I want to add a footnote in my schedule information on Daw project plan report, something along the lines of an estimated completion date. I select my insertion point and right after section B and then click Insert Footnote. Word will add a 1 and then move the cursor to the end of the page. I then insert my necessary text and that's it, we just inserted a footnote to our page.

The screen shot will explain this, the small red rectangle is my insertion point and the large red rectangle has the actual footnote text.

When your document contains someone else's work, this typically needs to be cited for reference. Adding such references enables the readers to identify the source information. Using Microsoft word 2007, you can easily insert citations and references in your paper. Let us review the steps involved in this process next.

The first thing you need to do is select a standard style for formatting your references. You can do this by selecting the style command on the Citations and Bibliography group in Word 2007. When you click on the drop down, you will get a list of available styles.

We will choose APA for our citations as shown by the screen shot below.

We will be adding citations to the Risk Management Plan area. Notice in the screen shot above, I have added the quoted text in bold. I have also added the citation location indicated by red. Go ahead and select Insert Citation command and then choose add new source.

Here is what it looks like.

Microsoft word 2007 will launch the Create Source dialog box as shown below. This is where you will need to enter all the information regarding your citation. As you can see, I have entered the pertinent information including offer, title, publisher etc. Finally I hit OK to close the dialog box.

This will add an inline citation right next to the quote and also add the reference to the bibliography in our report. Notice in the screen capture below, we now see the author's name in addition to the year of the published book.

Next when I try to insert another citation and select the insert citation command, notice that the first citation is already included in the list. I can use this one again for a separate quote as highlighted in bold shown below.

I can also review all my sources by clicking on the Manage Sources command and go in the Citations and Bibliography group. You can organize the list of sources, sort them by different filters and modify them if you like.

Here is a screen shot of the Source Manager.

The last thing I need to do at this point is to add the bibliography at the end of my document. Let me show you how to do that. You can browse to the end of the document and select the insertion point. Next you need to select bibliography command as shown below. You will need to select one of the built-in choices from the drop down. Here we are selecting Bibliography.

This will go ahead and add a nice bibliography section to your document according to the style you picked. We have shown the bibliography section from our report in the figure below. Notice that it took care of formatting and the order in which the different items should appear, very cool indeed!

If your report has a lot of pictures or figures in it, it may be beneficial to have a Table of Figures in it. You can do this by simply inserting a caption which really is a pointer to the underlying object. My Project plan has at least two figures that I would like to be part of a Table of Figures. So how do I do that?

I select my first figure and then click on Insert caption command in the Captions group in the References Tab in Microsoft word 2007. Here is a screen shot of what I'm talking about.

When I did the above steps, I got the Caption dialog box. I went ahead and entered some more textual information for figure one. In this case I am calling it a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) which is a project management term.

This is shown below.

I repeat the above steps for the next two figures in my project plan report, a Communications Plan and a Gantt chart. After I am done, I click on Insert Table of Figures command on Captions group.

This launches the Table of Figures dialog box as shown below. I am going to leave the default settings and click Ok.

This generated a professional looking Table of Figures section in my project planned report. From within the table of figures, I can simply choose the figure and then do Ctrl + Click to follow the link to the target object.

I have included a screen capture for your review.

You can also create an index using the Reference Tab. The index includes list of topics in your document along with the pages that they are on. You have to write the name and cross reference for your index. We have included a screen capture to show you how to insert an index.

Finally you can make a list of all the cases, statutes and authorities in your document. You can do this by inserting a table of authorities. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like.

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noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

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Microsoft Word 2007 - Page Layout Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 09:56:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Page Layout Tab

The Page Layout Tab lets you control the look and feel of your document in Microsoft Word 2007. You can apply a global design to your document by using one of the available themes and color schemes. You can also change the document orientation, page size, margins, indentation, line spacing and paragraph settings.

When you click on the Page Layout tab, this is similar to what you would see.

The first thing we are going to discuss is working with Themes. Themes are pre-defined and let you change the entire design using a combination of colors, font styles and formatting effects. Themes in Microsoft Word 2007 won't apply to the text if you don't have a style in place.

First you will need to use the Home tab to pick one of the Styles options. You can also click Change Styles and select a Style Set for the whole document. Since themes are set to work with the styles used in a document, you need to choose a style for all your headings, sub headings, and so forth.

Using this feature I was able to change my entire document to "Metro" theme. As I hovered over it, I was able to see a "Live Preview" on the right side. Note that the changes were only applied to the Header section and section headings. This is shown in the screen shot below:

The Theme did not affect my document text as it did not have a style applied to it. When I selected the heading, "Description of Organization" and browsed to the Home Tab, I did see that Heading 1 style had been applied to it.

This is shown as follows.

I don't know about you, but I am not a big fan of the bright green color for my headings. I can easily switch this by using the Built-In font colors under the Themes group. After you select this command, you will get a drop down list of several choices. I am going to select the Office color scheme which will switch the heading to blue. This is a fine color choice.

This step is shown in the screen capture below.

The last change I am going to make is to apply one of the Theme Fonts. This will leave the color scheme in place and just change the fonts. I will switch from Metro (blue rectangle) to Concourse (red rectangle) as shown in the next figure.

Next we will move on to the Page Setup group under the Page Layout Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. Using this tab, we can modify the structure layout of our document with details like margins, page size, orientation, line numbers etc.

I would like to modify the Definition Assignment document to use the Narrow margins instead of the Normal one. This will use more real estate on the page and trim 0.5 inch around all the borders. Here are the necessary steps shown by red rectangles.

When I did this, my document was updated using the Narrow margins. Here is the output from the action. I like the changes I have made so far so I will go ahead and Save the document. Like they say, "Save early, save often!"

Next what if you were trying to print address labels and needed to select a different paper size? No problem. From the Page setup group under the Page Layout tab, select Size and then Envelope #10. Caution: remember to feed the proper paper size in the Printer as well for this to work correctly in Microsoft Word 2007.

Here is a screen shot of what this should look like on your computer.

I really like this next feature. Currently I have a report that I am working on, but what if I was actually working on a newsletter or flier? In that case maybe I would want to split the text into two or more columns. Using the columns option in Page Setup group, you can do just that. Select Columns command and then choose Two.

After you have made the above selection, Microsoft Word 2007 will split the text in the report to two columns. It takes care of the formatting, margins, spacing and everything else automatically!!

The image below shows an output from this command of splitting a document into two columns.

Another common task is to use hyphens in your document. This conserves space and gives the document a more professional look. You can enable this automatically by using Hyphenation command under the Page Layout Tab.

A screen shot is as follows. Notice I have also shown you how to insert continuous line numbers here. This command is right above the Hyphenation button. This functionality could be useful if you are working on a legal document.

The hyphenation will split long words into two lines as shown below in the right colored rectangles

Let's move on to the next group, which is the Page Background. Here you can select Watermarks, Page Colors and Borders. For confidential or privacy type documents, you may want to use a Watermark. You can achieve this by selecting Watermark and picking one of the menu choices as shown below. Microsoft Word 2007 makes this a breeze by providing you Built-In options to do this task.

What if you wanted to add a little color to my document? You can select Page Color option under the Page Background group. How about bright Green, a little too bright I think!

The Page Layout Tab lets you also control indentation in your document. Indentation determines the distance of the paragraph from either the left or the right margin. I found a quotation in my document and this is a perfect candidate for indentation.

I am going to use 0.5 inch indent from the left and right side. Here is a screen shot of this action in red arrows.

The last option I want to discuss is the Spacing before and after paragraphs. We will use the same text as the previous example. The quote seems to be a little too close to the regular document text. I would like to add 18 pt (point) spacing to the top and bottom of this quote. I can easily do this by using the Spacing option under the Paragraph group in Microsoft Word 2007.

Shown below in red arrows is the affect of making this change.

Microsoft Word 2007 - Insert Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:13:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Insert Tab

The Insert Tab is right next to the Home Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. This tab has a lot of useful features that will let you insert things like pictures, clip art images, shapes, SmartArt graphics, charts and a host of other items. Let us review a few of these features in this exciting new tab.

Before we do that here is a screen shot of the insert tab shown below.

Today we will be working with several different documents to show you the functionality in the Insert Tab. A common task in Microsoft Word is to add a Page Break. For this practice we will use the definition assignment document as illustrated below.

We would like to add a page break right before the Research Analysis section. In order to do this in Microsoft Word 2007, you can select the Insert Tab and then select the Pages group and then choose Page Break. Here is a screen shot of this action.

After performing the above mentioned action we were able to insert a page break right before the Research Analysis section. This is highlighted by the red rectangle in the following figure.

Next we are going to look at a Meeting Agenda for more practice with the Insert Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. We have some basic information about the meeting like date, time and presenter in the beginning of our document.

We need to add at least two more things, the schedule and the company logo as highlighted in yellow.

One quick way to add a meeting schedule in Microsoft word 2007 is to use a table. Let us see how we can achieve this task next. Select the Table command from the Insert Tab which will launch the Insert Table functionality in Microsoft Word 2007. It will let you pick the number of columns and rows of the desired table in your document. As you drag your mouse over the highlighted area, you can select the rows and columns that you would like.

Here I have chosen a 2x5 table for my meeting agenda. Also notice that as you drag the mouse you will get a live preview of your table in your document, very cool! This is shown below in the screen shot.

Before we go ahead and enter the data, I want to talk about Contextual tabs. These are special tabs that appear only when certain objects are being used such as a table or a picture. The idea is to keep them hidden until the object is active, leading to a more efficient work flow and less cluttered area.

The Table object has two such contextual tabs: design and layout. The design lets you control things like table styles, borders and shading. This tab is illustrated below in the screen capture.

The next contextual tab related to Tables is the layout tab. This tab will actually let you modify the structure of the table including rows and columns plus alignment and cell size. This is shown below with all the available options.

Once the table is created, you can start entering the data as you wish. In my case I went ahead and entered the training schedule times and information shown as follows.

I also unchecked the header row and the first column check boxes on the Ribbon shown in red squares. I also clicked on the More command to choose a different gallery style for my table.

WOW!! look at all these predefined, ready made table styles available in Microsoft Word 2007. These styles use a combination of color schemes, font properties and graphical effects. As I hover my mouse over the styles, I get a preview of what my table will look like if I select that option.

I like the Burgundy color so I'm going to choose "Colorful Shading - Accent 2". Here is a screen shot.

My first column is taking way too much space so I would like to move the border a little to the left. I can do this by selecting the first column border and moving it left.

This is shown by the red arrow in the screen shot below. Notice the dotted line will be the new location for the column border.

The final touch that I want to give to my table is borders on all sides and in between cells. I'm going to select the Borders command in table styles group under the Table Tools Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. This will show a drop down menu where I will choose all borders.

This is illustrated below in the screen shot.

The meeting schedule is now complete. Let us take a look at the end product shown below. Very Nice and professional looking!

Let's switch gears and insert a company logo into our document. I would like to use a free Clip Art image for this step. I am working on a sales meeting so I would like to add a picture of cash or money in my document. I can use the Clip Art feature of Microsoft Office 2007 that will let me insert free images and graphics in this document.

I clicked on Clip Art command on the Illustrations group to start the process. Here's what it looks like in my document.

The Clip Art dialog box launches on the right side of my document. I will type business in the Search for text box and hit Go. Looks like it found a currency symbol, I like it for now. I will go ahead and choose this one for my company logo.

This is shown below the screen capture.

After you enter the image, Microsoft Word 2007 will launch the Picture Contextual Tools tab shown as follows.

This tab will let you enhance the image further if you like. You can do things like change styles, borders, colors, sizes and other picture effects. I would like to make the company logo a little bit bigger before I mess with any other effects.

I can do modify the image size by grabbing the sizing handles on the bottom right corner of the image, as shown by the blue arrow. Using the mouse, I can drag the picture to increase the size.

A screen shot of the Picture Tools tab and the updated image is as follows.

What else can I do to make the image stand out more? Adding a border to my company logo may enhance the effect. So I will click on the Picture Styles group under the Picture Tools tab. I will select the drop down arrow to launch gallery of styles. I will choose the black Simple Frame for my Logo.

I've included a screen shot of this.

I'm ready to print my meeting agenda now as I have added the necessary elements into my document. It is always a good idea to do Print Preview before printing any document. So when I did that, I got the following preview. I think this looks awesome!!

The last thing I wanted to show you is Inserting Header section for my Definition Assignment project. I will switch to the other document for this exercise.

Headers and footers are important items to add to your documents to give them a professional look and feel. A header could have information on the document title, author name, version number etc. while a footer is useful as it contains things like Page Numbers and Dates.

In order to create a Header section, click on the Insert Tab and select Header in the Header and Footer group. This will launch the built-in Header gallery as shown below.

I will pick the Austere style which will give me a nice color scheme with Date and Title layout for my header. After I made the selection, Microsoft Word 2007 inserted the header block and I was prompted to enter the Date and Title information. It was nice to get a date time picker for the date. I selected today's date, entered the title of my document and voila!

I have included a screen capture here also:

Notice that I was given a Header & Footer Tools tab above where I could have further tweaked the settings.

I am actually happy with my existing layout so I am done at this point. Now this header will be visible on the top of all the pages in my definition assignment report.

When I did a Print Preview, I was able to see the document and it looks like the one below.

Microsoft Word 2007 - Home Tab

noreply@blogger.com (Anindya) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:54:00 +0000

Microsoft Word 2007 - Home Tab

The Home Tab is by far the most important Tab in Microsoft Word 2007. The Home Tab contains all the commands that are used most often. These include formatting commands like changing text size, font style, font color, list types, and clipboard functionality like Cut, Copy and Paste. Furthermore, the home tab in Word 2007 includes features like text alignment, line spacing, gallery styles and theme settings. Finally, the Home Tab includes the ability to find and replace text.

For this lesson I will be using a sample resume for practice. Here is a print screen of the Home Tab in Microsoft Word 2007.

The groups on the Home Tab are as follows:

Clipboard
Font
Paragraph
Styles
Editing
Let us take a look at these groups one at a time. The first one is the Clipboard. This group includes popular commands like Cut, Copy and Paste. Using the Cut command, you can remove a piece of text from one location and insert it into a new location within the same document. You can also use the Copy command instead of the Cut command, however this will leave the original text in place. Next you can browse to the new location where you would like to insert the cut text. Using the Paste command you can then insert the text at this new spot.

For our example, I am going to move the section on Education all the way down in sample resume. You can first select the text using the keyboard or mouse. Next you can click on Cut button to add this to the clipboard. Here is a screen shot of what I am talking about.

Next I scroll all the way down in sample resume. I find a new line and click on the mouse to enable the insertion point. Then, I click on the Paste command under the Clipboard group to insert the section on Education.

Here is a screen capture of this action:

You will notice that the Education text block has now been inserted into the new area which happens to be on a new page. You can see that we are currently on the second page whereas we were on page one before we did the Cut and Paste operation.

When you need to modify a part of the text in your Microsoft Word document, you can use the Font group under Home Tab. You can choose from options like font size, font type, bold, italicize, underline etc. In addition you can highlight a portion of your document and experiment with different font colors under the Font group in Microsoft Word 2007. Here is a display of the formatting options relating to Font.

Let's say we would like to change TECHNICAL SUMMARY heading in sample resume to bold. You can highlight the specific text and then click on the Bold command as shown in the red square below.

Here is the end result in Bold instead of Normal font setting shown previously.

Notice that the font group also has a dialog box launcher on the bottom-right corner in the Ribbon screen shot below. This gives you even more options related to font and character spacing. These may look familiar to you as they were available in Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier versions. The next few figures display these options.

I'm going to switch back to the Format Painter option that I skipped over from the clipboard group. This is a handy little feature that will let you copy formatting from one place to another using the mouse. This is what you need to do. First you need to select your text, apply the necessary formatting and then double click on the format painter command. Now you can highlight any text in your document that needs to have the same formatting. Sweet! In the case of sample resume, I want to copy formatting from Technical Summary to all the Headings like Software Skillset, Professional Experience, etc. Here is a screen shot of the needed steps in order.

As long as the Format Painter option is enabled, you can simply copy that formatting anywhere in the document. I just applied the formatting from Technical Summary to Software Skillset as shown below.

I also feel that I need to emphasize the Technical Summary portion of my document. I'm going to highlight the specific area and then change the font style to something more eye catching. After I select my text, I can click on font style drop down, and try one of the many available fonts from the list. You will notice as you hover over these font styles, Microsoft word 2007 will give you a live preview of what the text will look like after the selection has been made. I really like the Live Preview feature in Microsoft word 2007, very cool. I think I like the Franklin Gothic Demit font style, so I will choose that one. This is shown as follows.

The Headings look good in sample resume, however actual software skills look rather blah. How about a little font color change to spice things up? I can do just that by using the color palette options under the font group. Purple looks good so I will select this choice for skills section. sample resume looks acceptable now so I will go ahead and save this document.

Sometimes you may have made a lot of changes, maybe more than you wanted to, I do that sometimes. At that juncture you may wish to clear all the formatting from your document. You are in luck as Microsoft Word 2007 has just this option for you. It is the Clear Formatting command under the Font group. The keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl + Spacebar.

Here is what it looks like and the screen capture below.

After I used this option, I was able to get back to original plain resume. It's good to remember the Clear Formatting option when you need to get back to the way things were originally.

Moving on to the Paragraph Group, here you are able to start a bulleted list, numbered list, multilevel list, increase or decrease indentation, change the text alignment, increase or decrease line spacing... Furthermore you can add features like borders and shading. Here is a screen shot of this listed below.

The Paragraph Group in Microsoft Word 2007 has a lot of different options just like the font group. Let us jump right into it and start looking at these features one at a time. After I switched sample resume to the old boring format, I am ready to redesign it again. I will be using bullets to highlight the Technical Summary section. In order to do this, I will select the section and then click on Bullets command on the paragraph group.

Here is an example using this feature.

As I scroll down sample resume, I would like to align all the employers along the right margin. You can do this by selecting the appropriate text and choosing the align text right command.

I have a screen capture of this right below in red rectangle. Notice that now the employer info. has shifted to the right margin, perfect!

Within job highlights, all the items are jumbled up, that is definitely not good. I would like to possibly use a numbered list to organize the highlights of prior job positions. Let's try this in our next practice area. You can highlight the necessary part in your document, click on the numbered drop down menu of commands as shown below.

In case I used the one in the red square. After I selected this option, it applied the formatting rather nicely to sample resume, shown in the long red rectangle.

As a final touch to position highlights at the consulting company in Bloomington Minnesota, I would like to add some more line spacing here. Currently it is using a single spacing which needs to be changed to 1.5 instead. I will highlight the text, click on the line spacing command and then choose 1.5. This will apply the correct line spacing as follows.

The last feature I want to look at in the paragraph group is the ability to add indentation in a document. A good candidate for this in sample resume is the Education section. I will highlight that entire area and then click on increase indent command (red square). When I did that, it moved the text to the right about half an inch.

This is illustrated by the red arrows shown below. Ok, I am done with this resume for now so I will go ahead and save it.

The next group, Styles is going to make the biggest impact in your document layout and design. Microsoft Word 2007 has done an excellent job of creating pre-defined quick text styles that you can easily put to work.

A style is a set of formatting settings, such as font type, size, color, paragraph alignment, spacing and graphic settings. When you use these ready made styles to format your document, you can quickly and easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.

Here is a screen capture of the different styles with a preview of what they look like on top.

Notice in the document above we are using Normal style. Right next to it you will see some other gallery styles, including Heading 5, Strong, Subtitle etc. In order to work with the styles, you can simply highlight the text and choose one of the many pre-defined styles.

Let's practice with one of these styles now. We are going to select contact information in the resume, and choose one of the styles. This is what you need to do to make this happen. First select the text that you would like to change (step 1), then click on quick styles (step 2) and finally choose one of the available styles. Using these steps I was able to change contact information to Intense Quote, very nice indeed.

Here's what it looks like on my computer screen.

Another excellent function of this group is the Live Preview mode in Microsoft Word 2007. When you highlight certain text and choose a quick style, Microsoft will apply a temporary formatting to it that will let you review the style before you decide to accept, sort of like "Test drive before you buy". You can even change the style in your document to a global level by choosing Style Set command under the styles group.

Here is a screen shot of this with the necessary steps in order of action.

Using the same Quick Styles I'm going to apply the Heading 2 to Software Skillset and Professional Experience also. These are visible by the red rectangle in the screen capture below.

Sample resume is looking quite good now as opposed to the plain one that I started with. However I still need to add a little more pizazz to this document. What can we do to achieve this? How about using one of the ready made style sets available from the styles group? When you select one of these style sets, you will notice that not only do the styles on the ribbon change but all styles in your document are updated as well.

Before using the style sets you need to define elements like headings, titles, quotes, and subtitles in your document. We already did that in the previous step so we are good to go. For sample resume I will click on change styles, choose style set, and then select "Word 2007" style. Wow! Notice the dramatic change in my document as captured by the screen shot below!

I think I have finally found what I was looking for. Sample resume looks awesome with selected color scheme, font choices and smooth graphical formatting. Let us go ahead and save this document now.

Here is a preview of the final product, just a little improvement over the original one, don't you think?

The final option I wanted to talk about is the Editing group. This will help us in finding text, replacing text and selecting document elements. Let's say you wanted to find a certain text or expression in your document, no problem. I can use the Find command to do just that. You can even change the text easily by using the replace command. In my case I want to replace the word DBA to database administrator in sample resume.

I need to select the text first, click on Editing option and then choose Replace. This is shown below in the screen shot.

This will invoke the Find and Replace dialog box as shown below. The original word is in Find what textbox, the new word is in the Replace with textbox. As I click Replace, it will switch DBA to database administrator.

I have highlighted the first word that it found as shown below. This looks good so let's go ahead and click on Replace All command button.