(The podcast of this blog post will be available soon.)
OK, this tip has nothing to do with PowerPoint or Excel or anything else like that, but it just saved me a few hundred bucks, so I thought I'd share it. Here's the deal:
My iPod had been working fine until -- and this is the weird part -- I transferred an episode of the Twilight Zone onto it from my new Tivo (I wanted to put the file on my office computer to burn the episode onto DVD). It might be the show's most talked-about episode: "Eye of the Beholder", in which Maxine Stewart plays a lady undergoing radical treatment in a hospital, trying to look "normal". Her head is completely bandaged, everyone describes her as hideous, and you don't see anyone's face until her bandages come off...
Maybe Rod Serling's masterpiece was too much for the poor, old iPod (or maybe it was the 1.5 GB size of the video files!), because it became very ill. It would work only intermittently, display the infamous sad-face and exclamation mark icons, and one day it just stopped working altogether, uttering a final, sickening chirp. The drive would click, but not much else would happen. People all over the Web described the condition as the Click of Death, where you face the unpleasant choice of replacing the hard drive or chucking the whole iPod in the recycle bin and buying a new one.
Did I mention my PC wouldn't recognize the iPod either? When I tried to view the Disk Management window in the Computer Management console (press
+
R, type
compmgmt.msc /s then press
Enter), the screen would freeze.
If your 4G or 5G iPod (has the gray, non-moving click wheel) stops working, the
first thing you should do is reset it: hold the
Menu and
Select buttons for a few seconds until the Apple logo appears. If that doesn't get it working, reset it again, then immediately hold the
Rewind and
Fast Forward buttons to bring it into Drive mode. Then reset it again.
If that fails, use Diagnostic mode to run some hardware tests. Reset your iPod again, then hold the
Rewind and
Select buttons until the Diagnostic menu appears. Then navigate by pressing the
Rewind and
Fast Forward buttons and click the
Select button to choose the tests to run. You can test its memory, screen, hard drive, connections and lots more.
So are you ready for the
really crazy part? Here goes: I was running the hard drive scan, which should have taken several minutes, but was taking over 40 minutes. So I took a tip from
Macslash.org and knocked each of the 4 corners of the iPod on the desk, about as hard as I'd knock on someone's front door. And the bloody thing sprang to life! The menus came back and when I connected it to my computer's USB port, Windows recognized the hard drive and iTunes sprang up and showed everything on the unit as though nothing was ever amiss. I was even able to cut and paste the Twilight Zone episode onto my hard drive.
I have to assume there was a loose connection somewhere. I was considering opening the case, using the instructions on the
iPodlounge forum, but didn't have a guitar pick handy.
Some people on
Macslash said they've even wrapped their iPods in a washcloth and slammed them backside-down onto the desk to get them working. I'll save that act of desperation if the 4-corner knock trick doesn't work.
Numbering pages in Microsoft Word might seem simple, but you can control it in ways that aren't obvious. (The tips in this blog post will work in any version of Word from 97 to 2003.) There are a few things to understand, first:
First, the basics. It's easiest to insert page numbers in a header or footer:
Want to change the number format or the starting number?
There's no law that says page number have to go in the header or footer, either. Select View/Header and Footer, then select Insert/Page Numbers. Click OK. Click the page number to see its frame, then click and drag the frame's border anywhere onto the page. Word will still consider it a Header or Footer item, so it will still be gray on the screen, but it will print normally.
If you need to stop and start page numbers, use section breaks. Let's say the first four pages of your long document need page numbers in lowercase Romans, and you want to begin Page 1 on the fifth sheet of paper. Insert page numbers and format them as lowercase Romans as we already discussed. Select Insert/Break, then under Section break types, double-click Next Page. Use the steps above to reformat and restart the page numbers. You might want to deselect the Link to Previous button, which is turned on by default. This will make it less likely that your second section page numbers won't revert back by accident.
The coolest part of page numbering is the ability to do arithmetic. I used this technique not long ago, when I wrote an outline for one of our Tip Talks. (These are live training sessions where a Nerdy Books trainer comes to your company and teaches your employees how to use the software faster, more efficiently and have fun doing it. Check it out!) The document was a total of five sheets: a four-page outline and a survey on the fifth sheet for the participants to fill out. The page numbers in the headers of the first four pages read Page 1 of 4, Page 2 of 4, etc., and there were no page numbers on the survey page.
Most people would do this as two separate documents, then combine them. But the copy machine can staple the stacks of pages as they come out, so it was easier and faster to print all five sheets as one document. And who wants to be a human collating machine?
Here's how you can do it:
Another wacky, and undocumented, customization you can do is substitute words for page numbers. If you want page numbers to literally read Page One, Page Two and so on, do this:
One more thing: if the page numbers don't update automatically as you add and remove pages, you can update them yourself. Press F11 to go to the first field code, press F9 to update it, then press F11 to go to the next field code. Or simply press Ctrl + A to select all the text in the document, then press F9 to update them all at once. You'll now be outstanding in your fields.
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 10:24 AM 1 comments
I know I haven't blogged for a while, but now I hope to be back on something at least resembling a schedule.
One subject that often comes up is how Windows handles USB (Universal Serial Bus) devices and what you can do when USB devices don't work as you expect. First, let's talk about the two versions of USB that you'll probably encounter:
- USB 1.1: these were the first widely-available devices and usually ran at a speed of 1.5 mb/sec. They were meant to replace old-fashioned serial and parallel (printer) connections that ran at only a fraction of the speed and could connect only one device at a time. While this speed was OK for slow devices like mice and keyboards, it wasn't useful for transferring large amounts of data, like from digital video cameras. For faster speeds, you needed SCSI or FireWire (IEEE 1394) connections. Since these were used mostly on the Mac, you often needed an add-in card for your computer to use them, which is one of the inconveniences that USB was supposed to alleviate.
- USB 2.0: typically runs at the much higher speed of 480 mb/sec, which is faster than the original FireWire standard and much faster than SCSI. This is more appropriate for large data transfer, such as to external hard drives, and necessary to connect CD or DVD burners. However, some people still prefer FireWire for devices like video cameras, because FireWire is really a network that allows devices to be more interactive.
If you want to read a good technical and historical discussion of USB, you can find it at Wikipedia.So how do you know which USB you have? If your computer was made sometime in the last few years, chances are its USB ports are version 2.0, which are backwards-compatible with 1.1 devices. One way you can tell which version your computer has is to look at the Device Manager in Windows XP:
- Press
+ Break to open Device Manager (or click the Start button, then right-click My Computer and select Properties). - Click the Hardware tab, then click Device Manager.
- At the bottom of the list, click the plus sign next to Universal Serial Bus controllers.
- If your computer has is equipped with USB 1.1, you'll see a device or two called a Host Controller or Open Host Controller. If your computer is equipped with USB 2.0, you'll see a device or two called an Enhanced Host Controller or USB 2.0 Controller.
Any USB device you buy will have the regular USB trident logo and any high-speed USB device will have the red, white and blue high-speed logo (how appropriate for July 4 or Bastille Day).If you connect a high-speed USB device to a low-speed USB port on your computer, Windows will probably give you a message that the device can run faster if you connect it to a high-speed port. A USB 2.0 internal expansion card costs about $20 and a USB 2.0 notebook adapter (fits in the PC Card slot) costs about $40.
The most common problem people have is when they connect a USB flash drive (sometimes called a thumb drive) to a computer and the computer doesn't recognize it. First, let me say that these are great devices. Connect one to your computer and it works like a removable hard drive. I have a 1 gb flash drive on my keychain and use it all the time (you can get one for about $40; I just saw a 4 gb flash drive that fits in the palm of your hand for $80).
When you connect a USB device to a computer running Windows XP, the computer will detect it immediately. When that device is a USB drive, you'll probably see a message on the taskbar that Windows detected a new device, followed by a dialog box that asks if you want to open the drive to see its contents, play a movie and other choices. Windows will also assign a drive letter to the device. But sometimes you won't get this dialog box, and when you open My Computer manually (
Here's how you fix it:
- Select Start/Control Panel, then double-click Administrative Tools. (You may also have Administrative Tools directly on the Start menu.)
- Double-click Computer Management.
- On the left side of the Computer Management console, select Disk Management.
- On the right side, you should see a device listed as a removable drive, probably with the same letter as another drive you're already using.
- Right-click the white bar where it shows the letter, then select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
- Select the letter, then click the Change button.
- Pick a letter not already in use from the list, then click OK. Click OK on the warning message, then click OK again. (I assign U: to all USB flash drives, since I never use more than one flash drive at a time.)
- Close the Computer Management console. When you go back into My Computer, you should see the USB drive with the new letter.
Another common problem is running out of ports. When USB started being implemented, the idea was that you would daisy-chain the devices together. So computer manufacturers would put in only two ports (always in the back) and only one port on laptops. For a variety of reasons, the daisy-chain idea never caught on, and computers made today typically have four ports in the back and two in the front, for quick access.If you run out of ports, you can fix the problem -- as with so many others -- by applying cash. Buy an external USB hub for anywhere from $10 to $40, depending on size, number of ports and power. A hub will split a single USB port into several more. The better ones have their own power supply, so your devices don't have to rely on the computer for powering the USB connection. When there isn't enough power to go around for all the devices, they can go offline.
This brings me to the last problem I'll discuss today: USB devices going offline because of reasons unrelated to power shortage. This was fairly common when you had many devices connected using USB 1.1 in versions of Windows older than 2000, where the devices had to supply their own software to get USB to work. (Native USB drivers were first included with 2000, then made more robust in XP -- and Vista, presumably). If this happens, simply unplug all the USB devices, then plug them back in one-by-one. If any are daisy-chained together, connect the parent devices before connecting the child devices.
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 4:36 PM 0 comments
Most people I know outside the corporate world have experience with PDFs -- Adobe's Portable Document Format files -- as users or consumers of the technology. They can read PDFs, but aren't sure how to create them.
Fortunately, there isn't any big secret or mystery to PDFs. But before I tell you how to create your own on the cheap, let me explain why there's even a need for this file format.
Let's say you create a nice looking, highly formatted document, like a newsletter, announcement or flyer. You put graphics in certain places and use fonts that you bought or downloaded from somewhere. If you only want to print the document yourself and distribute it on paper, there's no problem. But what if you want to distribute it electronically, maybe by e-mail or putting it on the Web?
- If you created the document in Word, you can distribute the Word document, but what if the people viewing the document don't have your fonts? They'll see other fonts substituted, and your formatting work goes down the drain.
- If you created the document in PowerPoint or Publisher, or non-Microsoft applications, you not only risk the font substitution problem, but not everyone has PowerPoint installed and even fewer have Publisher installed. And who wants to read a document in Publisher, anyway? And yes, there are even a few computers that don't have Word installed on them.
That's where PDFs come in. A PDF is like a snapshot of your document. It includes fonts, layout, graphics and everything else you put in your document. Anyone can read PDFs using Adobe Reader (the software formerly known as Adobe Acrobat), available for free at Adobe's Web site. So what you intend people to see is exactly what they see -- no guessing required. This is also important for bringing documents electronically to a print shop for digital or offset printing, since the print shop might not have the application you used to create the document.The problem is that while Adobe Reader is free, it's just that: a reader designed to display PDFs, but not create or edit them. To create PDFs, you need separate software to do the conversion. Almost all PDF conversion software will work with your "regular" software when you print. That is, to convert a document to PDF, select File/Print (Ctrl + P), then choose the PDF converter as though it's a printer. Instead of printing, the converter will create a PDF.
Typically, people create PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. Once a regular document has been distilled (i.e. converted) to PDF, Acrobat lets you edit it in many ways, such as modifying font embedding, making minor text changes, inserting or editing hyperlinks, rearranging pages, cropping, renumbering pages, adding digital signatures and security, creating automated reading orders, inserting bookmarks and much more. You can't beat it for the number and flexibility of features.
If you have $300 to $400 to spare for the standard or professional version (or $1200 for the whole Adobe Creative Suite), then go for it. But if your budget is a little tighter, there are many third-party and shareware options available. Here are a few, all of which offer free trials:
For $30 or $50 (standard and pro version), you can buy the Adolix PDF Converter (www.adolix.com). It will do a decent job of converting documents to PDF and compressing them, too. It has basic post-conversion editing features, such as open/modify security, rearranging pages and merging documents.
Win2PDF (www.win2pdf.com) will convert documents for $35 or $69 (also for standard and pro versions), but its post-production editing is limited. You can set passwords and change document titles, but not much else.
While most PDF converters still require Adobe Reader to view or print PDFs, pdfFactory and pdfFactory Pro (www.pdffactory.com) let you preview and print directly from the application. The Pro version costs $100, but you'll also want the FinePrint utility for better editing. Spring for the extra ten bucks and get them as a $110 package.
On price alone, it's hard to beat pdf995 and pdfEdit995 (www.pdf995.com), from a company called Software995. Guess how much they charge for their products? As the product names imply, you'll need one program to do the conversion and another to edit. They don't have many options, but their output is good. If you only need quick-and-dirty conversion, it's hard to argue with twenty bucks.
Actually, there is one argument with twenty bucks: it's called "free"...but there's a big catch. If you need to create PDFs for the sole purpose of sending documents to your local Staples for their quick print service, download their EasyPrint software from www.staples.com/easyprint. It offers zero editing capability and requires Adobe Reader to view and print. The catch is that every page gets a Staples copyright notice running up the right side. When you send the document to Staples, they remove the watermark.
Much of this discussion may be moot before long. Microsoft plans on building PDF conversion into Office 2007, release date still unknown. As they say in sports, "just wait until next year!"
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 6:00 PM 5 comments
That's phishing as in strange, bogus e-mail messages. We've all seen them, we get some e-mail message from a bank we've never done business with, maybe from eBay or PayPal or some financial institution and with a dire warning, it says something to the effect of "Your account may have been compromised" or maybe "Someone tried unauthorized access" or maybe even "We seem to have lost your ID and password" and "Please, in the next 24 hours, you must log in and verify your information, and if you don't, your account may be suspended". And conveniently, there is a link for you to click so can and give them the information they want.
Phishing seems to be replacing spam as the e-mail scourge of the Internet. I'd like to tell you how to recognize these sorts of scams and up what to do or what not to do when you receive them. First of all, about 99.9% of messages like these are scams and you can safely delete them. Especially messages that look like they came from a bank where you've never even had an account. I often get these messages with return addresses pointing to banks with which I've never done business and having notices like "Please log in and in and confirm your accounts". These are obviously nonsense.
But what about a message that looks like it came from a bank where you have made deposits? These scammers' goal is identity theft, and they want still your identity so that they can steal your money or steal other people's money and make it look as though you're the one who's done it. Is it any coincidence at all that the banks that seems to be the most common that are sending these out or that or her being spoofed are the large banks? Such as Bank of America, Citibank, and so on, because they have the most depositors, the biggest target area.
But here are a few things that you should recognize when you get some of these. Number one: the Web address. You should know what the address is of any bank where you do business. If you buy and sell on eBay, if you use PayPal to send or receive money, you should know what the address is. For example, PayPal's legitimate address is www.paypal.com. If you see anything that says something like BillingPayPal.com or SignInPayPal.com or anything like that, you know that it's a scam. Also, you should look for the first part of the address, especially if it's a bank. The first part of the address shouldn't simply be http:// it should be https:// -- that S stands for security. That's not something that you can fake.
When you get a link to click in an e-mail like that, just do not click it. Any legitimate bank knows what it's doing and will not have any links in their e-mails for you to click. I will get once a month a notice for my bank that says my statement is available for viewing online, but they just tell me to go to their Web site -- that means that I can either type the address in manually in the browser's address bar or I could click it in my favorites list. Many banks will tell you that if you receive a message that looks like it's from them and it has a link, that means it's a spoof.
Now here's the scary part. Even if you manually type the address of some financial institution, it could still be fake! The way the spammers do it is they can plant a Trojan horse on your machine that actually redirects what Web address goes to what server. There is a system called DNS --Domain Name Service. It allows friendly names like www.eBay.com to connect to the actual server address, which is really just a string of numbers. But nobody wants to remember long strings of numbers, so DNS is there so you don't have to think about them. It's kind of like an automatic dialer on a telephone.
If a Trojan that changes the DNS addresses gets planted on your machine, when you type in what is a real address, you can be redirected to the server of one of these criminals. It's not even so much that you type it in, but they're expecting that you'll click on their link. For Windows users, there's a file on your system in your Windows folder called Hosts (no file extension). You might want to look at this file in your Windows folder and if you see it's been modified recently. It's a text file, so you can open it in Notepad (select Start/Run, or press
So when you go to the Web site of a financial institution, how do you know if it's real or not? One thing you should immediately look for in the lower right corner of your browser -- Firefox or Internet Explorer or any other -- is a little padlock icon, and it should be in the locked position. And this is something that cannot be faked. That icon should be on the status bar; if it's on the Web page itself, it's meaningless. Anybody with a basic knowledge of creating Web pages can put all sorts of padlocks and security-looking graphics on a site, but in the status bar of the browser, it's another story.
And here's one other problem with links in an e-mail. It's very easy to type the name of a financial institution and link it to something else for example, the text could say www.citicorp.com but when you click it, it goes to some scammer's Web site. (Here's an example of a bogus link that goes to our own site: www.WrongAddress.com.) So you always want to make sure of what you're looking at in the address bar of your browser. Also look at the end of the address bar of the browser. There'll be little padlock icon, just like on the status bar, and that's something that a scammer cannot forge.
Also look at the content of the message. If the message says something like "Dear depositor" or "Dear valued customer" rather than your name, that's probably a giveaway that it's not authentic.
Also look at the quality of the writing. A lot of these scams come from overseas, where the authors do not speak English as their native language. There are often spelling errors and grammatical errors. You might think, "Hey, I'm not the best speller in the world and I make grammar mistakes all the time." But banks that send e-mails to their customers don't send from just some guy or gal sitting at their desk, sending out messages to 10 million depositors from their personal Outlook account. Banks have people whose full-time jobs it is to read and write and edit these messages, and they will catch spelling and grammar mistakes before the e-mails go out. What amazes me is that the scammers don't even think to press F7 to do a spell check -- if English is not their native language, why would they not use a spell checker? I saw one the other day that looked almost real. It was supposedly from my bank, but they had the word "useful" spelled with two ll's, so I knew it wasn't real.
Also consider what they're saying and how they're saying it. If it's a breathless message with a false sense of urgency, you know they're trying to get you to click that link and type in your information before you have a chance to hit the Delete key. A real bank will not give you that sort of breathless warning, like you might get from some of these bogus virus warning messages.
Some of the scammers have found that they can use a publicly available databases like Yahoo or Google, where they actually can find your address, and I've gotten some that refer to me by name, and even have my home address. At first I wondered how these guys know who I am by address, and then I realized they all it takes is a simple Web search. So even if it doesn't say "Dear customer" or "Dear depositor", even for those referred to by name or by address, it still is very possibly a scam.
Some thieves will tell you that there's been some change on your account and they want to verify it. It is possible that you recently changed your password or maybe you did buy or sell something on eBay or you did something else online. Maybe you used your credit card number, and it just so happens that you get an e-mail about that particular bank or credit card and you want to see if the thing is legitimate. Maybe you don't even consider that it's a scam, because you've done something recently. Beside the fact that you still should not click a link like that in an e-mail, when you're on the site, look at what information they are asking for.
A regular bank will simply ask for user ID and password, but some of these will ask all sorts of information -- not only ID and password, but your mother's maiden name, your Social Security number or your bank routing number. Any page that asks you for information like that, you know is not legitimate. Especially if you get a page that asks for all this type of information at once you know is not real.
Keep in mind that when you get one of these messages that says, "Sorry, but we lost your information..." banks do not lose your information. You and I may have lost information here and there, but we're just regular people doing other things. Banks have full-time professional security people whose job it is to make sure that customer information is not lost, and if anything is accidentally deleted, they have backups, and backups of backups at secure data centers and sitting under a mountain somewhere (maybe here). So your bank will never tell you "Sorry we lost your ID and password". That simply isn't going to happen.
Because phishing attacks are becoming so common and increasing so much, some technical help is on the way. Internet Explorer 7.0, which is due out soon, will have some anti-phishing features, such as a little, green light on pages that are safe. Firefox, made by the Mozilla foundation, will also have some security features in future versions. Microsoft Outlook, Safari and Entourage on the Mac, will also have some features that will help. For example, links in e-mail messages are disabled by default, though this is a little silly, because that defeats a large purpose of the Internet. Though the average person doesn't e-mail links to credit card sites and banks. But even when these features are available and active, they are there to help you -- don't rely on them as crutches.
So beware and be vigilant and understand what it is that you're receiving by e-mail, and to assume that just because an e-mail looks like it comes from a trusted source or financial organization, doesn't mean that it really is. It's very easy to spoof the From field or the Reply To field in an e-mail message. Anybody with the most simple knowledge of e-mail software like Outlook could make that spoof. So have fun, be safe and we'll see ya' next time.
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 12:11 PM 0 comments
If you use any graphics in PowerPoint, you need to know how to position and align them -- to each other, to the page or to text. Other than bad spelling, nothing screams Amateur more than graphics that look crooked or scattered or positioned unevenly.
Here are some handy features that will make it easier to deal with graphics, so you don't have to eyeball them.
- Use the grid. The grid is a set of vertical and horizontal lines that's normally invisible. Objects will snap to the grid, as though the grid has some gravity. That's why, when you drag an object, it doesn't move smoothly across the screen.
on the Standard toolbar or press Shift + F9. If you want to ignore the grid temporarily, press Alt as you drag. As long as you hold the Alt key, you can drag objects smoothly...but there's less chance that they will line up.
- Use the guidelines. If you want some objects to sit along a line, horizontally or vertically, don't eyeball it; display a line on the screen. When you press Alt + F9, a horizontal and vertical guideline will appear and objects will snap to them, unless you're holding the Alt key. Drag the guidelines anywhere you want. Of course, pressing Alt + F9 makes the guidelines disappear.
- Set grid and guides options. Press Ctrl + G to display the Grid and Guides dialog box. There, you can turn snapping on and off (if you're tired of holding Alt) and turn the grid and guides on and off.
- Move objects very small amounts with precision. To move an object horizontally or vertically exactly 1/10 of an inch, press one of the four arrow keys on the keyboard. To move an object 1/100 of an inch, press Ctrl + an arrow key. You can't be that accurate with the mouse!
- Drag objects straight vertically or straight horizontally. Just Shift + drag the object. If you start dragging horizontally using the Shift key, you can't also drag vertically, and vice-versa. So go ahead, have that extra cup of Java! PowerPoint won't mind if your hands are a little shaky.
Here's a bonus tip: if you want to duplicate an object while dragging it, press Ctrl while dragging. And if you press Shift + Ctrl while dragging, you'll duplicate the object exactly horizontally or exactly vertically.To show or hide the grid, either click the Show/Hide Grid button
Are a single vertical and single horizontal guideline not enough? Just Ctrl + drag any guideline to duplicate it. To remove a guideline, just drag it off the edge of the page. But you'll have to remove them one-at-a-time; there is no command that deletes all guidelines. (Pressing Alt + F9 only hides them, it doesn't remove them.)
When you drag a guideline, do you notice the little numbers attached to the mouse pointer? They're showing you how many inches away from the middle of the slide you're dragging. If you'd rather that the number start from zero, to make it easier to measure how far you're dragging it, press Shift while you drag. For example, if you want to add a guideline half an inch below an object, hold Shift as you drag a horizontal guideline downwards. When the number on the mouse pointer displays 0.50, let go. As with dragging objects, the guidelines can snap to the grid or not, depending on whether you're pressing Alt.
When you turn the grid on, it only shows the lines at each horizontal and vertical inch. The grid has many more lines than that, but there isn't a way to make the rest of them appear. But in this dialog box, you can at least set their spacing. Click OK when you're done.
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 9:16 PM 0 comments
Two features of Excel you have to know if you want to use the software effectively are ways of using AutoFill (there are more than one) and absolute references.
You can watch the Flash version here, which is bigger and easier to see than the smaller, iPod version.
POSTED BY Bob Flisser, co-author, www.nerdybooks.com AT 8:10 PM 0 comments