Today’s XP Tip and Trick is a pretty cool trick for Multi-User computers. I want to show you with this XP Tweak to create a desktop shortcut for fast user switching. This will able you to quickly access a second or third account while having the other session’s active in the background.

It’s real easy; for creating a Desktop Shortcut for fast user switching you have to follow the next few steps.

• First you’ll need to right click somewhere on your desktop.
• And select new and create shortcut.
• Now you need to give the shortcut a new location and you can do that by copy and paste this location “c:\windows\system32\tsdiscon.exe”.

• Then click next
• And give thee shortcut a name.

• Now click Finish and you’re done.

Now you know how to create a Desktop Shortcut for fast user switching.

If you don’t know how to change the icon; here is a short description.

• Right click on the icon.
• Select properties
• And click on change icon.
• And choose a new icon.
• Click OK

By now you should have a nice looking Desktop shortcut for fast user switching.

Just a short side note: the print screens are in Dutch but you get the point, my English XP MC died on me and this was the only English XP that I had. The will be in English before you know it.

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I’m not making this a long sales pitch or try to convince you into buying this. I’m going to be straight to the point; this is what I have for you.

If you are a regular visitor of The World of Office you might know this, but in case you’re not; I wrote a +80 page book with Step by Step Tutorials and Tips and Tricks for getting the most out Vista. Plus I’ll show you were to download more than 20 FREE applications to super-charge your computers’ performance.

In 2009 alone I’ve sold thousandths of copies worldwide for the price of $37 and $27. This is a high quality Vista guide and the feedback and response I received from readers is fantastic. I’m really proud of this guide. Because of this success and the requests that the buyers came with I’m now in a completing phase of the book Take Control of Windows 7.

Since we are starting the promotion soon of Take Control of Windows 7, I decided the start the campaign on the blog where it all started; The World of Office.

We are selling the Take Control of Vista eBook

to the first 100 buyers for $7!!

But only for the first hundred because as soon as we release Take Control of Windows 7, all the Vista buyers will get a free copy of 7 too.

Click here to be forwarded to the temporary The World of Office page.

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This next Microsoft Office Trick and Tip is especially handy when you work at a “public” computer at the office. This probably isn’t necessary at home unless you’re working with multiple users at one computer. The problem is that when you leave your computer for one minute, willing people might check what your doing and the recent items is the first thing they’ll check. Here is a Windows Tutorial for leaving this field empty.

How to Hide the Recent Documents and Programs in Vista

• Right click the Start
• Select Properties from the menu

• Than go to the Start Menu tab if it isn’t open already.
• Now uncheck “Store and display a list of recently opened files” and “Store and display a list of recently opened programs”.
• Click apply and then OK and you’re done.

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The number of invites, we receive for writing software reviews is pretty amazing. Most products will change the world or they pretend to even solve the world hunger problem. They are all incredible… Not. Most of the request we receive will land in the bin immediately, especially if they write in the first paragraph that they are unmatched and the best in the field. This wasn’t the case a couple of weeks ago. I received a short, friendly email from a company called Novosoft, it was a nice lady asking me if I could check out her backup software.

I have to say that normally I would have been a bit hesitant; how many back up utilities are there? Hundredths? Thousandths? I don’t know but a lot. However, it happens that we were looking for a good backup solution for at least a couple of months. We were looking for an all-round solution. Of course the application needed to be able to make scheduled backups of the computers in our network but we also wanted to make backups of our servers and databases.

The site that she talked about was Handy Backup. Their site is straight to the point and instantly delivers what the visitor asks for which is a good backup solution for home or business use. Handy Backup comes in 3 different packages; standard, professional and a server edition for corporate networks. I was particular interested in the enterprise network edition, but I decided to give the standard edition a test run first.

I don’t know why they call it the standard edition because it comes with a ton of features. Obviously, it's possible to schedule backups of all your photo’s, music, documents and other folders but those aren’t the cool functions. The cool functions are file filtering and the free plugins that you can use. File filtering will assist you in automatically backing up your Powerpoint presentations or for example your Excel files. The plugins are amazing, I haven’t seen these options with any of the other “top of the bill” back up solutions. They have plugins for Firefox, Skype, Winamp, WMP, Dreamweaver, several messengers and a whole lot of others.

So I decided to give the free trail a test run. This is where you can Download Handy Backup for free. Installation with the wizard is very easy. Even the most inexperienced computer use can do this is. You can choose during setup which version of Handy Backup you want to install.

When you use Windows Firewall you’ll get a popup asking you want to allow Handy Backup access to your network. You need to select Unblock.

For this Handy Backup Review, I selected from a nice long list my Desktop, my Disks and Outlook. I also selected my email messages. For which I needed to enter my server details.

Then select a location in the next step. Followed by the type of back up; full or incremental and then you’ll be asked about the time and schedule.

I have never seen such a complete solution with such ease of use. And trust me when I say that I’ve seen and tested a whole lot of different application. I always thought of it lightly, making backups is important, losing my photo’s or document won't happen to me, I have a good system. Until a couple of years back when I lost a HD with all my movies and half of my music collection. Don’t make the same mistake as I did.

If you are interested in giving Handy Backup a free test run; this is where you can Download Handy Backup for free.

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Today I have another cool trick for you and it’s a Tip and Trick for Windows XP. Whether it’s real useful is debatable but its fun to know anyway. Today I want to show you how easy it is to create a icon on your desktop that closes down your system without any confirmations.

To create a XP shutdown button on your desktop you’ll need to follow the next simple steps.

·         Right click on an empty space on your desktop.

·         Select new and shortcut.

·         Now type in the window shutdown -s -t 0 (the last character is a zero.)

·         Click on next

·         And type a name for the shortcut

·         And click on finish.

Now you should have a XP shutdown button on your desktop.

·         If you now want to modify your XP shutdown button you’ll need to right click on it.

·         Select properties

·         And click on change icon.

·         You might see a warning message that shutdown.exe contains no icons

·         Click OK

·         And choose a new icon.

Now you have your own customized XP shutdown button on your desktop. If you want to have some fun with your colleagues; change it into a Word or Excel document icon;). Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this tip and trick and I’ll talk to you all tomorrow with a new Outlook Tutorial.

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Did you ever made a PowerPoint Presentation and set the timeframe for the slideshow without irritating yourself??

Using the “mouse click” option is by far the easiest. If you are a little bit more advanced in giving presentations than you’ll use a standard timeframe for the slideshows. I can still see myself sit behind my desk, wondering, wondering and wondering and than after 10 -15 minutes I was pretty frustrated because I couldn’t come-up with a good timeframe.

If you want to give a Professional PowerPoint Presentation; here’s a cool tip. Start practising your Presentations and use the Rehearse Timings option.

If you don’t want to rehearse your entire PowerPoint Presentation several times and you’ll only need to fine-tune it just a little more. Run it again and press O to skip the slide without adjusting the timeframe.

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Okay, it’s time for some cool Microsoft Word Tricks. Yesterday I showed you how to number you pages in MS Word. Well that wasn’t really special. Today I want to take it a step further. As I said yesterday; the standard setting of the page numbering in MS Word is that the numbering starts from the first page which is probably your cover.

If you are working on a multi-paged document then you most likely don’t want to number your cover and your index pages. There are two ways to stop this so you’ll be continuing the numbering on any page that you want.

We’ll continue from the moment that we created the numbering in your document.

The first Trick is to begin the numbering on the second page.

• Select your document.
• Go to the tab Page Layout.
• Click on the Page Setup Dialog Box launcher.

• Here you’ll need to select the Layout tab.
• And check mark Different first page.

• Click OK and you’re page will look like this.

The second possibility is to start numbering on the second page with 1.

• You’ll need to follow the steps for removing the page number from the first page.
• The go to the Insert tab
• And click on Page Number
• And click on Format Page Numbers.

And your document now looks like this.

I hope you’ll like these Word Tricks. Have a great weekend and ill talk to you all on Monday. See you!!

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It is time for the fourth and final Excel tutorial of this Excel week. The tutorials that we’ve covered this week are some pretty cool ones. The first was the tutorial with a formula for checking future dates followed by the Excel tutorial for using the TEXT and the TODAY functions and we discussed yesterday a tutorial for combining the TEXT and the NOW functions.

In today’s Excel tutorial I want to show you how you can combine 3 columns that hold different date values into one column.

It’s a pretty simple formula but its Friday so I don’t believe it’s a real problem. Entering all the data in the spreadsheet takes up most time.

• First you’ll need to create a spreadsheet that looks similar to this one.

• Select Cell D2:D8
• And type in the following formula =DATE(A2;B2;C2).

• Then Click CTRL+ENTER and you’re done, you’re spreadsheet should look like this.

And that’s it for another Excel Tutorial week. I really hope you’ve enjoyed this week and that you’ve learned something. Next week we’ll continue with our normal Tips and Tricks. Have a great weekend and I’ll talk to you all on Monday.

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This next Excel Tip and Trick is a follow-up of the article that I wrote last week about using the same formatting for multiple excel cells. I’m now using also using the Format Painter Tool. In the first article I explained how to copy the format to the second cell and how we can drag the formatting to the cell next to it.

This works great unless the cells don’t connect. I’m using the Format Painter Tool in this Excel Tip and Trick to apply to same formatting in non connecting cells.

For this example I used the same table that I used as the earlier article.

• If you want to use the same formatting on “random” cells you need to click on cell A1.
• And double click on the Format Painter Tool.
• Now you can click on the cells you want to apply this formatting on.

As you can understand this is quite random and I know it doesn’t make any sense but it’s only for the example;).

You can also apply the Format Painter for columns or rows.

Now I want the same formatting as row 1.

• Now click on the 1 on the right side of the spreadsheet.
• Click on Format Painter
• And click on 5

And you’re done.

I hope you all like this Excel Tip and Trick. I’ll see all you next time.

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