Workers' Edge

New Office 2007 add-on makes commands easier to find

Dennis O'Reilly — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Microsoft claims that Office 2007's ribbon interface saves time by putting the features people use most often closer at hand. For those of us who spent years learning where those functions were in previous versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the changes aren't the productivity boosters Microsoft envisioned....

Identify mystery apps installed on your PC

Dennis O'Reilly — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I'm always looking for a little bit more performance from my PCs, so I regularly use Piriform's free CCleaner utility to clear out the clutter on my systems' hard drives. (Note that CCleaner is donationware, so if you find yourself using it regularly, drop a few ducats in ...

Blip tip: Hide formatting marks in Word

Dennis O'Reilly — Sat, 10 May 2008 02:30:00 GMT

A family member contacted me this morning about a problem a friend of his was having in Microsoft Word. It seems there were little dots in every blank space, paragraph marks at each "carriage return," and other formatting symbols that she didn't want to see.

To hide formatting in ...

Your one-stop shop for free online PC scans

Dennis O'Reilly — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Too often we choose a security program based on the reputation of the vendor. That's why I was happy to learn that the results of recent tests of antivirus software conducted by AV-Test.org found several with near-perfect virus-detection rates, including Avira's free AntiVir Personal.

The tests didn'...

Roll your own Firefox scripts with Chickenfoot

Dennis O'Reilly — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that ...

Save time by customizing Windows' taskbar

Dennis O'Reilly — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Your computer's dashboard is that small row of icons located along the bottom of the screen--at least that's where it's located on most PCs. Windows' taskbar shows you at a glance which applications are open and which programs are running in the background (represented by the icons ...

The fastest way to open a word processor

Dennis O'Reilly — Fri, 02 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Faster is almost always better, at least when it comes to computers. So what's the fastest way to open a word processor?

You can create a keyboard shortcut to open Notepad, WordPad, Word, or any other word processor on your PC by right-clicking the program's shortcut on the ...

Keep Vista's User Account Control on guard duty

Dennis O'Reilly — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Well, Microsoft has finally come clean about the real motivation behind Vista's User Account Control feature. As Tom Espiner's reports from the recent RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft UAC Program Manager David Cross admits that UAC was designed to annoy users.

Espiner quotes Cross telling the security-conference ...

Delay the messages you send from Microsoft Outlook

Dennis O'Reilly — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:01:00 GMT

Since I started using Gmail as my primary e-mail program a couple of years ago, I haven't missed much about Microsoft Outlook. However, there's one useful Outlook feature that Gmail lacks: the ability to delay sending all of your outgoing messages, or to set individual messages to be ...

Free templates give your Office files a fresh look

Dennis O'Reilly — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:01:00 GMT

At a report-planning meeting last week I volunteered to add a timeline to a Word document that would ultimately become a PDF file. I could've used Word or Excel to create a horizontal timeline with about a dozen events, each denoted by a text box big enough to accommodate ...