March 2000
News Letter
A message from the President:
For our February meeting, there were 25 members and 1 guest to hear and see TIM KLING talk and demonstrate OFFICE 2000. He had done some preliminary work on a Web Page for our group and Rodney Malkoff is following up on it. By the time you read this, we may already have one. Tim did an outstanding job on his presentation and answered several pointed questions. He was kind enough to bring his own computer and monitor but Lab 104 was in use, that night, so we were forced to move to Room 132. What a shame, it worked out perfectly.
If you missed the February meeting, why? Do you already know all you need to know about Office 2000 or are you accustomed to discarding a few eggs out of each dozen you buy? If an egg is cracked, broken or otherwise bad then it makes sense to throw it away but we don’t have any broken, cracked or bad meetings, so why miss any? Just like the eggs, they are paid for so why not use them?
I’m hoping we finally have someone interested in being the Vice-President in charge of finding speakers.
Take a look at you mailing label. The first line is the expiration date of your membership, if it is highlighted, your dues are due or overdue. The annual dues are $10 which works out to 83 1/3 cents per meeting. If you miss one that raises your dues to 90.9 cents per meeting, miss two and it goes up to a dollar. Guess what happens if you miss half the meetings. You’re right, it goes up to $1.67 per meeting. That doesn’t mean the meetings are better if you miss some, it just means you pay more. Get your money’s worth, come to all the meetings for which you have paid.
Someone please help me remember to send around the E-Mail pad so that I can include everyone’s E-Mail addresses when I finally complete the list. This list will be for no one else’s use, just within the group.
Several months ago we bought 10 $10 gift certificates to use as door prizes, hoping to increase attendance. We must have given out only nine of them because I found one and don’t remember winning one. Come to the next meeting and see how we utilize that final gift certificate.
JACK BODEM of Reboot Computers will be our speaker for the March 9, 2000 meeting. We will probably be in Lab 104, but check the signs in the Lobby for directions to our meeting room.
I’m hoping to see all of you at the March meeting. We’ll have forms available for anyone wishing to donate items to the IVY TECH Benefit Auction on April 29th.
Group President,
Larry L. Thompson
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LOCATE ALL HIDDEN FILES AND FOLDERS
Ever wished you could search out hidden files and directories within a particular folder? If you have Internet Explorer 4.x installed (or you've upgraded to Windows 98), you can sort the contents of any folder by attributes.
First, opt to display file attributes (in Details View). In any Explorer window, select View, Folder Options. On the View tab, select Show File Attributes In Details View and Show All Files, then
click OK.
Now open any Explorer window and navigate your way to the folder in
which you'd like to search for hidden files and folders. Select View, Details, then click the heading of the Attributes column. Click the same heading again, and the contents of that folder will appear sorted by attributes (in reverse order), with files first, then folders.
An H in the Attributes column--alone or mixed with other letters--means that file or folder is hidden.
Ed Danley
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WORD: CHANGE HIGHLIGHTER COLOR
Version 4.x, 95
If you use highlighting a lot, you probably like to change Word's highlight colors when you highlight more than one topic. But first, for those of you unfamiliar with highlighting, let's do a little
refresher.
Highlighting letters, words, sentences, or entire passages in Word is easy. You simply click the Highlight button in the Word toolbar. It's the button with an icon showing a marking pen over a small
square.
When you click the button, the cursor changes to a marker pen icon and you highlight text by dragging the cursor over it. To turn off highlighting, click the button again.
Now let's say you have a document in which you'd like to use two highlight colors--one for each main topic, perhaps. First, do the highlighting using the Word default (yellow). After you've
highlighted all you need for now, click on the down arrow at the right side of the
Highlight button and choose a new color from the drop-down menu.
Now mark the items that should be highlighted with the new color.
Note: This is a separate button and doesn't affect the state of the Highlight button.
There are four colors available for highlighting. As soon as you
make a choice, the drop-down menu will disappear, and Word will apply
your selection color.
Ed Danley
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STRETCH AWAY FATIGUE
Click-and-drag. Double-click. Control-shift-click. If these terms make you cringe or give you nightmares about sitting at your computer terminal for 8 hours a day., you’re not alone. The typical office worker spends the majority of their day in front of a computer. The repercussions include developing a host of ailments from carpal tunnel syndrome to pinched nerves. On the
plus side, studies have shown that a few well-timed stretches can help eliminate the kinks, prevent future health-care costs and give you more energy after works.
In 1966 alone, more than 60 percent of the 439,000 reported injuries in the private business sector were associated with trauma brought on by repetitive motions. Does this sound familiar? If it does, there are a few actions you can take to help alleviate the pain and overreact indurate.
The first is the use of an ergonomically correct workstation. This includes making sure your desk height, keyboard height and style and even the style of your mouse conform to the way you work. To compliment the ergonomically correct workstation, you need to take stretching breaks throughout the day. Experts say that taking frequent stretching breaks, even if only for a minute or two, can reduce stress, ease muscle stiffness and increase circulation.
The following are a few stretching exercises that we find helpful and we hope you will also.
Stand and stretch backwards. Stand up, put your hands behind you on your lower back and slowly arch backwards. Hold for a few seconds and then relax.
Shoulder shrug. Slowly lift your shoulders towards your ears until you feel a slight tension in your neck and shoulders. Hold for three to five seconds and then relax your shoulders. Repeat two or three times.
Shoulder stretch. Lace your fingers behind your head while keeping your elbows straight out to your sides. Keep your body straight and then pull your shoulder blades toward each other, creating a slight feeling of tension across your upper back and shoulder blades. Hold for eight to 10 seconds and then relax. Repeat several times.
Forward arm stretch. Interlace your fingers and straighten your arms in front of you, palms facing away. Hold for 10 to 20 seconds. Repeat at least once.
We hope you find these stretching exercises helpful. When performed on a regular basis, they can help prevent some of the many ailments that afflict the everyday computer user.
Richard Coop
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CREATING A NEW PAGE FROM SCRATCH--PART 1 OF 5
For those readers new to creating a Web page with Netscape Composer, the next few tips offer a basic guide to the major aspects of page creation. We will be going over setting colors and backgrounds, adding
and formatting text, adding pictures, adding and modifying hyperlinks, and publishing the page to a Web server. To begin, open Composer and begin with a new blank page: Select File, New, Blank Page (or press
Ctrl-Shift-N).
Generally, the first thing to do when you're creating a new page is to edit its title and color scheme. Click Format, Page Colors And Properties. Under the General tab, you should give your page a title and include your name as the author. Write a brief description if you like and click Apply. You can also think up a list of keywords that
pertain to your page. This is how most search engines (Yahoo, Altavista, and so on) cross-reference your Web page.
Select the Colors And Backgrounds tab to change the color scheme of your new page. You can specify different colors for text, links, visited links, active links, and page background. Be careful not to select a text color that is too bright or too dark to show up against your background. You can also specify an image as your background--click Choose File and locate the image you wish to use. Composer tiles it in the background of your page. Click OK to apply the changes. Save your document and give it a logical name, such as newpage1.html.
Jerry Henry
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CREATING A NEW PAGE FROM SCRATCH--PART 2 OF 5
Now that we've set the colors and general page information for our new Web page, we're ready to add some real content in the form of text. Type the text you wish to appear on your page and use the formatting
tools to change how it looks. You can change the font, size, style, and color from the Format menu. Toolbar buttons also offer boldface, italic, and underline options, as well as paragraph indentation and
automatic list creation.
To have Composer format a bulleted list for you, type the list items, putting each item on one line, and select the entire list using your
mouse. Click Format, List, Bulleted (or Numbered). You can specify additional settings for the list by right-clicking it and selecting Paragraph/List Properties.
Composer also offers a few character tools to spice up your content. Select a sentence with the mouse and click Tools, Character Tools. You can change a line of text into a rainbow of color, change all lowercase letters to caps, or insert a special character such as a 1/4 symbol or an accent. Practice with the options available for text
formatting. You can always undo any changes by clicking Edit, Undo (or
by pressing Ctrl-Z). Be sure to save your work.
Jerry Henry
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CREATING A NEW PAGE FROM SCRATCH--PART 3 OF 5
With a basic page and some text in place, we're ready to add pictures to our wonderful new Web page. Place the cursor where you want your picture to go and click Insert, Image (or click the Image button on your toolbar). In the Image Properties window, enter the location of the image you wish to use. For convenience's sake, Composer copies the image to the working folder, but you can specify that it leave the image in the original location.
If you want text to wrap around the image in a certain way, choose the wrap style from the Text Alignment buttons; if you want the image to have a border or other space around it, specify the amount in the Space Around Image settings. To make the image a hyperlink, select the Link tab and specify the target location in the Link To box. Click OK to apply your changes. Be sure to save, then preview your work in Navigator by clicking the Preview button (the gold Netscape icon on your toolbar).
Jerry Henry
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CREATING A NEW PAGE FROM SCRATCH--PART 4 OF 5
A Web page just isn't a Web page without hyperlinks. That's what makes it the World Wide Web--it has millions of interconnecting bits of HTML code for surfing eyes to see. You may want to add some hyperlinks to the new page to send potential visitors to sites of interest.
Create a list of sites to which you wish to link, and format them so each item appears on one line. Have Composer make the links into a bulleted list by clicking Format, List, Bulleted. Now highlight the first item and click Insert, Link (or press the Link button on your toolbar). In the Link To box, specify the page to which you wish to point; include the full URL, including http://. Click OK to apply the changes.
You should do this for each site in turn until every item on your list is a fully functioning link. You can add a hyperlink to just about any object: text, pictures, even a single letter. You can also divide your Web site into main topics and have separate pages for each topic with links connecting the pages (page1, page 2, and so on). One warning,
though: Make sure all your links work. It's embarrassing to have nonfunctional links on your Web page.
Jerry Henry
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CREATING A NEW PAGE FROM SCRATCH--PART 5 OF 5
We now have a rudimentary but fully functioning Web page. The last thing you need to do is publish or upload it to a Web server. Unless you prefer to use your own FTP client to connect you to the Web server
and transfer your HTML and pictures, use Composer to publish all your Web documents in one fell swoop.
Usually, your ISP provides a specified amount of Web space on its server. Check with the Web master of your ISP and find out the details of uploading your new page so the public can view it. You'll need to
know the server name, your log-in name and password, and any other information specific to your ISP.
To begin publishing, open your new page in Composer and make one final check to see that it's ready to go. Now click File, Publish. In the Publish window, specify your ISP's Web server information (the location to which you want to publish); include either ftp:// or http://, depending on what the Webmaster tells you. Composer lists all
files to include in your new page. You can select or deselect additional files. Click OK. Composer connects to the Web server and
uploads all the files in your new page-it's now available to a world of Web surfers!
Jerry Henry
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Larry Thompson, 457-5622
Treasurer Richard Coop Sr., 459-8731
Member Services Rodney Malkoff, 453-1159
Newsletter Editor Jerry Henry 453-4144
Newsletter Distribution Marcy Young
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This Month’s User Bucks
Ed Danley $1
Jerry Henry $1
Richard Coop $1
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Newsletter editor Jerry Henry
jhenry@netusa1.net 453-4144
Keep those articles coming in Word
Perfect, plain text, or Word
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