Tip #116 - Spell-Checking in Your Browser

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #116 - Spell-Checking in Your Browser

When you're filling in information using your browser, there is a spell check option that's available to help you. I noticed that when posting on Facebook or creating an email in my Gmail account, a red squiggly underline would appear below words that were not in the dictionary. This gave me a great sense of comfort

because I am not the best speller in the world. I got comfortable giving the word my best shot and the program would let me know if I was right or wrong. And then one day my lovely red squiggles stopped appearing. I knew that I hadn't suddenly learned how to spell so I figured out that somehow my spell checking tool got turned off...but where was the tool and how do I get it back on!

My initial thought was that the spell check option was in Gmail or Facebook but I couldn't find any documentation to support that. Then I remembered I had been having trouble with my Chrome browser and maybe that was the source of my problem...and it was. If you're not seeing the red squiggles when you're entering text in a multi-line text box...on any website...find the directions for your browser below and make sure your spell check is turned on. This is helpful not only for your email but it will help on websites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor or Yelp when you're writing reviews.

One more thing, when you see a squiggly red line, move your mouse on it and click with your right mouse button (Ctrl click in the Apple environment). A menu of choices will pop up including some suggestions for the correct spelling of the word. You might also consider using "Add to dictionary" for words that are spelled correctly but are not in the dictionary. If you do that you never see the squiggly line under that word again.

Here's the directions for four of the top browsers:

Google Chrome

Mozilla Firefox

Internet Explorer

Safari

I thought I would share an interesting observation with you about my blog. Twice as many people visit my blog using Chrome browser than the Internet Explorer, which is the second most used browser for visitors. It shows that I have very smart visitors.

Please share this tip with your spelling challenged friends, you'll be glad you did.

Happy Computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

Tip #115 - Changing Your Orientation (in Word)

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #115 - Changing Your Orientation (in Word)

Suppose you need to have some charts in your document and they need to be on landscape pages but the rest of your document is in portrait orientation. What are your options? I was working on a document in Microsoft Word like this recently and I wanted to insert a landscape page in the middle of a Word document, between two portrait pages. Of course some creative folks would just put the graphic in sideways since it prints out the same, but because more documents are being read on-line rather than being printed (right??) I wanted to make it easy to read. I didn't want to have to imagine the readers tilting their head to the left/right to view the chart.

Pages in Word document with different orientations.

Back "in the day" we would create two documents when we needed pages with different orientations, one for all of the portrait pages and the other for the landscape. It was challenging keeping the page numbers sorted out in these two documents but we didn't see any other alternative.  I don't remember exactly which version of Microsoft Word introduced the feature that allows for multiple page orientations but I believe it was either in 98 or 2000. The secret to making it work is Section Breaks!

For those of you who use the very popular press the Return/Enter key until you're on a new page method of pagination, it might come as a surprise that not only can you insert page breaks but you can insert section breaks in a word document. There are many reasons for section breaks but we'll only talk about their need when changing the page orientation.

To change the orientation of a page:

• Click in the document where you would like to insert the landscape page.
• From the Page Layout tab, Page Setup group click the Breaks option.
• From the Breaks list choose Section Breaks - Next Page.
• Without moving your cursor choose Orientation - Landscape from the same area of the ribbon (Page Layout tab, Page Setup group).
• The page that your cursor is on will now become a landscape page...and all of the pages following it (the current section) will also become landscape.
• When you want to return to portrait orientation, insert another Section Break - Next Page and choose Orientation - Portrait.

You'll have to use the same steps to return to a portrait orientation if you don't want the rest of your document in landscape.

While you're looking at the types of Breaks available in Word. People mostly using either Page breaks or Section Breaks - Next Page. Note: You can insert a page break from your Keyboard using the Ctrl (Command) + Enter/Return keys. 

Promise me you'll insert page breaks rather than pressing the Enter/Return key until a new page appears. 

Happy Computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #114 - Replacing Text in Word & Publisher - Including Special Characters

A variation on Finding text in Word is Replacing text. Most people will think about using this tool in their last proposal to change all of the occurrences of “ABC Moving” with “Acme Moving & Storage”. While that is a helpful use of Replace, I use it to clean up documents that I copy from the internet or that clients send me. They are often filled with manual line breaks, extra spaces and unneeded paragraph marks.

To use the Replace feature click the Replace option on the Home tab, Editing group. In the dialog box click the More button on the left side and then click the Special menu to view the options. If I wanted to replace all of the manual line breaks with a space I would find “Manual Line Break” in the list and click on it. Word inserts the code for that (^l) in the Find What box. Now click in the Replace with box and tap the spacebar once. You won’t see anything in the Replace with box but the character has been inserted. Now click the Replace All button and all of the manual line breaks have been replaced with a space. Once you use this a few times you don’t have to click on the More button and Special, you can just type the code ^l (l for line break) and click on Replace All.

Another code that I use frequently is ^p for Paragraph Return. I am often sent documents  that I need to import into newsletters or brochures. The client has typed the document using two returns after each paragraph. This has to be stripped out for my purposes.  In the Find what box I will type ^p^p and in the Replace with box I type one ^p. This is telling the program to find every occurrence of the Return/Enter key being struck twice and change it to one return, thereby removing the extra returns between the paragraphs.

Another example of this is when people get carried away using the Tab key in an effort to make nicely spaced columns. They will create lists by typing something like the first name at the left margin and then press the Tab key two or three times and type the last name. They will again tab two or three more times before typing the phone number or other piece of information. These extra tabs need to be removed before this information can be put in a table or used in another format. In the Find what box I will type the Tab code of ^t^t and in the Replace with box I again use ^t. In this case I don’t want to remove all of the tabs, just those areas of the document where there are multiple characters together. After I click on the Replace all option I will often click on Replace all again. I am reading the search report looking for zero replacements made. Then I know that the document is free of these offending double (triple?) tabs. 

Happy Computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

Tip #112 - Printing Specific Pages

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #112 - Printing - just the pages you want!

So printing may sound like an easy activity. You're looking at the document, you go to the File menu or use your keyboard command (Ctrl p on the PC or Command p on the Apple) and up comes the print dialog box. You click the print button and walk to the printer. Why would I feel the need to write anymore about the topic. Well I was just helping my husband print a variety of pages from a PDF he downloaded and I was able to print five of the eight pages all at the same time. 

Before I printed the document I scrolled through it and realized that he only needed to print some of the pages, the rest were advertisements or instructions that he didn't need. I made note of the pages to print and then brought up the print command. Rather than going with the default "All" pages, you need to click in the "Pages" box. If you want a range, type the first page number followed by a dash and then the last page number. For non consecutive pages, type a page number followed by a comma and then the next page number. As you can see in the screen shot, I wanted to print pages 1, 3 and then 5 through 7. This sure beats printing each page or group of pages separately!

So how easy is that? If you look carefully you will find in all documents the ability to enter specific pages rather than printing the whole document.

Happy Computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

Tip #110 - Special Characters on Apple

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #110 - Special Characters on Apple

My Apple friends have been feeling neglected by my posts. Hopefully they will be happy to find out how to insert special characters (such as accented letters, copyright symbols, foreign language punctuation, etc) into their documents. Here is a printable list so that you can have it handy when you need to insert any of these characters.

You might find that if you just print this page the sheet will print too small. If that's the case you should right-click (Ctrl click) and choose "Save As" to save the picture to your hard drive and then print from there. If you have trouble doing this please send me an email (diane@dianemckeever.com) and I will send a full size version of this chart to you.

If you have an iPad or iPhone you don't need this list. Hold down your finger on any vowel and a list of accented characters will pop up! Brilliant!

Happy Computing

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com . 

Tip #109 - Gmail Changes

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #109 - Gmail Changes

One of the things I love about the Google folks is that they are always trying to think up ways that they feel can improve your computer experience.  You may not agree that all of their "improvements/changes" are better but generally you have a choice of whether or not

you want to implement these changes. 

Google announced this week (June 2015) that you now have an Unsend option...but you have to move quickly,  it's only available for about 30 seconds...and it doesn't say "unsend" it says "undo". Well, I guess this is better than nothing. You'll see it at the top center of your screen, just above the inbox messages. Clicking on Undo will retrieve the message from wherever messages to and open it for editing...or deleting. While you're in your inbox you might want to check out the settings mentioned below. They might make your Gmail life a little easier to deal with.

I was looking at my Gmail settings, something I recommend you do occasionally. When I clicked on the gear icon in the upper right of the Gmail screen I noticed "Configure Inbox" was a choice. I didn't remember seeing that before so I clicked on it.

The resulting dialog box was very interesting. It was offering me the opportunity to have tabs appear along the top of my Gmail inbox. I checked off a few of the choices and then clicked on the Save button. Lo and behold my inbox had tabs along the top and emails in each of the newly created tabs. Google initially determines which emails belongs in which tab. It seems to be based partly on who sent the email and partly on the content of the email. 

Primary	Messages from friends and family, as well as any other messages that don’t appear in other tabs.
Promotions	Your deals, offers, and other promotional emails.
Social	Messages from social networks, media-sharing sites, online dating services, gaming platforms, and other social websites.
Updates	Notifications such as confirmations, receipts, bills, and statements.
Forums	Messages from online groups, discussion boards, and mailing lists.

If a message appears in the wrong tab, you simply drag the email up to the correct tab. After you move a message to a different tab, a message above your inbox will ask if you want to undo that action or choose to always put messages from that sender in the tab you chose.

Conversation View

While you are looking at your Gmail settings, you might want to consider turning the conversations feature off. The conversations feature is on by default and it groups all of the emails that relate to the same conversation into a stack automatically for you, with the newest message at the top. A conversation will break off into a new thread if the subject is changed or there are more than 100 messages. Until you get used to it, and some people never seem to get used to it, you can feel that you are losing messages. It can get confusing if you have sent an email to a group and there has been a lot of back and forth messages. 

If you would like to turn the conversation view off, click on the gear icon in the upper right side of the Gmail screen and choose Settings. Scroll on down and click the circle to the left of "Conversation view off".  Whew, I can see many of you relaxing a little bit right now. 

As long as you're in the settings area, scroll on down and review some of the other choices. For those of you who like using keyboard shortcuts, there is a feature to turn them on/off. Clicking on the blue "Learn more" option will reveal a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts you can use in Gmail. There might be other things you can turn on/off to make your life easier. 

Labs

When you want to see what may or may not become a standard feature of Gmail, you should click on the Labs tab in the Settings window. As their heading describes this section, it's "some crazy experimental stuff." You might learn to love something only to see it disappear or you could be an early adapter who can say, "yeah, I know about that...been using it for months."

Happy Computing


Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the author of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com .  Consider going to Amazon and buying her book! You'll be glad you did.

Tip #106 - Facebook Graph Search Feature

100 (or more) Computer Tips in 100 (or more) Days

Tip #106 - Facebook Graph Search Feature

Mark Zuckerberg (Credit: AP/Jeff Chiu)

Facebook Graph Search is a feature of Facebook that rolled out earlier this week (July 8, 2013). It uses information that you have added to your to your Facebook profile to create easy searches. It uses the "Search for people, places and things" box to allow you to search for friends who "Live in Connecticut and like to cycle" or "Friends who like to eat sushi". 

After each search you are presented with a page full of profile pictures, many of whom are people you have never seen before because Graph Search looks through your "friends of friends" network, which is vastly larger than just your friends network. After you've done a few searches you might be surprised about which of your friends fall into different categories.  Beware this search tool becomes a little addictive after a while.

Keep in mind that it's not just profile information but pictures, music, movies, games, etc. that Facebook has put into a giant database to make the information searchable. Of course one of the first questions I'm sure you have is, "Can I control any of this?" and the answer is a big maybe. There are some privacy settings you need to check on, including limiting visibility to old posts. 

Past Posts

To limit the visibility of your old posts with one click you can go into your privacy settings (use the cog icon in the upper right side of the Facebook page) and click on "Limit Past Posts". Here you should be able to make everything that was once public limited to only your friends. 

Present Posts

Go through your Profile (click Edit Profile just under your profile picture in the upper left side of the screen) and check the audience selectors in the various sections. You can limit what information is public and included in strangers' Graph Searches. Pay particular attention to the interests sections (movies, music, books, games, etc.) since this is where much of the searchable information comes from. Setting all of these to Friends, Friends Except Acquaintances or Only Me would be good choices.

Future Posts

Each time you post on Facebook you have an opportunity to choose the audience. Remember that the default setting for this is Public so you should have changed this by now. If you haven't, go back to the Privacy Settings area and make this change to friends as the default. You can also create lists that can be selected so that a specific post is only visible to a limited group of people you specify. Directions for this can be found in Tip #44. Friend Lists in Facebook. 

I know change is difficult for most of us and Graph Search seems like we've made one giant step forward (backward!) in the Big Brother society but if you make the changes that need to be made as to what is included in other people's searches for your information, you might feel a little better.

Happy computing!

Diane

Don't forget to click the Subscribe to 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days via email link on the right side of the screen so you get email alerts when Diane adds a new post.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Diane McKeever, the writer of 100 Computer Tips in 100 Days, by subscribing to her Facebook posts or visiting her web page, www.dianemckeever.com .