Links for Sunday August 26, 2001

Do you travel back and forth between work and home, checking messages on computers in both places? If so, you may want to leave messages on the server so that you can download them to both computers. Store messages on your email server by opening the Inbox, clicking Accounts from the Tools menu, selecting Properties, choosing the Advanced tab and putting a check mark in the Leave A Copy Of Messages On Server box. Now you can always find the latest mail, no matter where you are!

Killing A Window

Have you ever had one of those windows that misbehave? By “misbehave,” I mean you cannot get it to Maximize or Minimize. Sometimes Web programmers want to splash a screen onto your PC with no controls and will use this technique so that you can’t get their junk off your screen. For some bizarre reason they think this is a good thing. Anyway, you do have some control with the standard Windows window control options. Click anywhere in the misbehaving window and hit Alt + Spacebar. On the resulting menu, you can choose Close and kill the window.

Opening Files In Microsoft Internet Explorer

Suppose you’re working in Microsoft Internet Explorer and you’d like to take a look at a Notepad file. You don’t have to run Notepad and then find the file. All you have to do is choose File|Open. When the Open dialog box appears, type in the path and name of the file you want to open. If you don’t know exactly where the file is located, click Browse. When the dialog opens, click the arrow at the right side of the “Files of type” list box and choose (for this example) Text Files. Now locate your file and double-click its icon. Back in Open, click OK to open the file.

While you’re in the “Files of type” list box, you’ll see that you can open any number of file types including JPG, GIF, AU, etc.

Planting A Tree

If you’re going to use a PC or LAN to store your files and folders, it’s wise for you to design the structure you plan to use before beginning a project. It’s just too easy to lose track of your information when it ends up scattered all over the LAN or PC. Organize your file folders during the initial phase of a project by sitting down with a product such as Vizio and mapping out your design structure before you create that first folder. Otherwise, you’ll have folders upon folders and have no idea where your documents are stored.

Once you design a basic skeleton of your tree, create it on the PC/LAN in Explorer by clicking File, then New, then Folder when the secondary menu pops up. Once your tree is created, maintain it faithfully, and document how to traverse the tree; include a procedure on how to create new folders so that future additions will not “ruin” your tree.