Tech and life

I’ve been using MS Word for about 10 years and thought I knew most of its important features, but I didn’t know about the Spike!  I found out about this great feature recently in a blog post on Help Desk Geek. It allows you to quickly rearrange non-contiguous blocks of text or other items in your Word document. Basically, instead of using the simple cut and paste (Ctrl X, Ctrl-V) which I’m sure you’re all familiar with, you can use Word’s in-built Spike feature to ‘multiple cut’ items and then paste them all in order in a single operation.

Let me explain. The Spike allows you to add multiple selections (by cutting, not copying) to Word’s clipboard in the order you want, then to paste them all at once. So for example if you have an unordered list of say references which you want in alphabetical order, you just cut each selection in turn in the order you want using Ctrl-F3. They are added in that order to the Spike. No need to paste items individually, just keep adding your selections to the Spike. When you’ve finished cutting the items, you paste them all at once at your insertion point using Ctrl-Shift-F3.  Everything is pasted in one operation with all the selections in the order in which they were cut.

Try it out and see what you think. Definitely a time saver if you find yourself frequently rearranging selections in Word. And this feature works in all versions of Word from 97 to 2010. These are the main features of Spike but for a full how-to on using it, head over to the Help Desk Geek post. And let us know how you use the Spike in the comments.

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Image credit: quinn.anya

Anyone who has used Microsoft Word down the years will be familiar with the keyboard combination Ctrl-F to bring up a search box. Well, all that’s changed in Word 2010. Hitting Ctrl-F now brings up the Navigation pane on the left which is a little different, but I think an improvement – at least once you’ve tried it for a day or two.

So how is it an improvement? Well for me, one annoyance of search and replace in earlier versions of Word was the way the search box would jump around over the document when you clicked the Find Next button often obscuring the search results. Now in Word 2010, the search box is in the Navigation pane in the left panel. Search results are highlighted in the main window as you type your search word. If there are few enough occurrences, a snippet of text containing the words is displayed in the Navigation pane. Clicking on a particular snippet will take you to its location in the document and the words remain highlighted. The Navigation pane can be docked and undocked if you wish by clicking the down arrow to the right of the word Navigation. The pane can also be closed by clicking the cross next to the down arrow.

I was sceptical at first. Is this really an improvement? Well it’s not obscuring the search results any more but it doesn’t seem to be case-sensitive – searching for Table brings up Table and table and words like adjustable which end in table.

No problem. There’s a drop-down box which you can access by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the search box. Select Options here.

Now if you like, you can select Match case and Find whole words only to improve your search results – and if you like you can make this your default search option by clicking the Set As Default button. Incidentally, you can also select Advanced Find (the old style search box) from this drop-down menu.

Okay, so you’ve tried it and you still don’t like the new Navigation pane. Well, you can try remapping the Ctrl-F key combination to the old style search box, now called Advanced Find. I’m indebted to Jay Freedman for instructions on how to do this:

- Right-click the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar and choose Customize the Ribbon.

- Click the Keyboard shortcut Customize button in the dialog.

- Select the Home Tab category.

- Select the EditFind command.

- Click in the “Press new shortcut key” box and press Ctrl+F (note that the “Currently assigned to” label shows that you’re taking the shortcut away from the NavPaneSearch command, which is what you’d change to if you ever want to restore the default.)

- Click the Assign button and then click Close.

I’ve also discovered another quick way to access this Advanced Find box by adding its icon to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of your screen. Follow my instructions in an earlier post on the Quick Access Toolbar, but this time you want to go to All Commands and scroll down to Advanced Find (with the binoculars icon), highlight it, then click Add to add this to your Quick Access Toolbar. Now when you click the binoculars icon on the Quick Access Toolbar, as shown in the top screen shot above, the familiar old style search box should appear.

Finally, I should point out that clicking Ctrl-H to bring up the good old Find and Replace box hasn’t changed in Word 2010 – and you can also access Advanced Find by clicking the Find tab at the top of that box. Of course Replace still has that old annoyance of obscuring results just like the old style Find did.

So give searching with the new Word 2010 Navigation pane a good try out first before you revert to old habits… if you must – I think you’ll like it.

The new search feature (Ctrl-F) in Word 2010 is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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About a month ago, without any warning, my desktop Windows 7 system suddenly bluescreened reporting an ‘uncorrectable hardware error’. Everything had been working fine up to that point, I was just surfing the net and not stressing the system in any way. There was absolutely no prior indication that things were about to go pear shaped. I tried rebooting but soon after boot up was complete and I was on the internet again I got the same stop error code 124. I didn’t do a screen capture of the error message but here’s a very similar shot I found:

I suspected a motherboard problem. Although I had installed a new hard drive with Windows 7 recently, the other hardware components in my PC were about 5 years old including the Soltek SL-75DRV4 Socket A motherboard.

Unfortunately, I’m not a repair tech so I took it to a good mate who is. He diagnosed a problem with the voltage controller on the motherboard but because of the age of the motherboard, I needed a motherboard/processor/RAM replacement. But when he replaced the motherboard and tried to boot the hard drive with Windows 7 installed he got a blue screen hardware error. He couldn’t do a Windows repair to set up the hard drive with the replacement motherboard. He phoned Microsoft but they said a Windows 7 repair couldn’t be done – you have to reinstall Windows 7. A Windows repair for a new motherboard used to be no problem with Windows XP.

I had the Windows 7 retail disk and the product key but I didn’t want to have to reinstall Windows 7 on the hard drive as I had just got it configured and running as I wanted it. That seemed like a real backward step.

Eventually he managed to sort this problem without a Windows 7 reinstall. He plugged my hard drive in as a slave in another PC, booted up and deleted the motherboard drivers on the slave drive. When the hard drive was plugged back into my PC with the new motherboard, it found and installed the drivers it needed. I just had to go through Windows activation using the automated phone system and everything went fine. One month on now and so far no problems.

Just though I’d post this as a salutary tale. You never know when disaster will strike and it can be completely without warning. Data backups are obviously  important but in this case I was down for a couple of weeks while the problem was diagnosed, parts ordered and installed and the machine set up again.

If you use your PC or laptop as a vital part of a small business and it’s the only machine you have, you’d be well advised to have a backup machine ready to take over in the event of a hardware failure like this.

Setting up a Windows 7 hard drive without a Windows reinstall after a hardware failure is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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I have a PC with an older motherboard and I’m not able to set the BIOS to boot from a USB drive or USB stick, just from a CD or DVD. I may be able to do this if I update the BIOS but I don’t want to take any chances, so I was delighted to read a post last week by Trevor at How-To Geek offering a solution on how to boot from a USB drive using PLoP. I’ve tried it out and it works perfectly.

I followed the instructions in that post, downloaded plpbt-5.0.10.zip, extracted it to a folder, found plpbtnoemul.iso in that folder and burned that to a CD using ImgBurn. I plugged in my USB stick with Ubuntu and then booted up from the CD I’d just made. I was presented with a menu where I could select USB and sure enough I booted into Ubuntu on the USB drive. An internet connection was available after I entered my WAP password.

So if my system runs into problems, I now have the additional option of being able to boot up from my USB drive. This has the advantage of being easier to update with rescue utilities than a CD should I run into a PC disaster.

The original post on How-To Geek is really comprehensive and goes through all the steps involved in setting up the CD, and even a boot floppy disk for those older systems. If you can’t boot up from your USB drive, have a look at that post.

Booting from a USB drive when this can’t be set in the BIOS is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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If you’ve ever installed or reinstalled Windows, you’ll know how long it can take to track down and reinstall all your favourite apps afterwards. Well that’s all a thing of the past now with the advent of software installers which allow you to pick your favourite apps in one place online and install them all at once saving valuable time. You just check the apps you want, download the installer and away it goes working through your list.

I used Ninite to reinstall my apps after moving to Windows 7 but I’ve come across a couple of other installers recently and was interested to see which had the most apps available and just how many of those I’d actually want to install.

Ninite

They currently have 73 apps on their website of which I would install 28. No registration is required. Ninite Pro allows you to save and reuse your installer so you can set up multiple PCs but this is currently $20/month.

AllMyApps

They have the best choice by far with 117 apps just now and I would install 31 of these. You have to register for free to download a bundle and you can save your list for future installs. Great for PC technicians who are regularly setting up PCs.

Smart Installer Pack

This one is slightly different. You download the complete pack then check the apps you want to install. Currently, Smart Installer Pack has 51 apps and I would have installed 17 of these.

So for me, AllMyApps is currently the best choice with 31 apps I’d want to install and a great selection. It’s also a great choice for those who will be doing multiple installs. If you know of any other great software installers, drop a comment below.

Speed up a Windows install or reinstall with a software installer is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

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If you regularly find yourself copying and pasting text from websites or desktop applications then you should really have a look at PureText. When activated, this free utility quickly removes text formatting such as bold, italics, colour, underline, bullets and hyperlinks allowing you to just paste the text. For example, I commonly find myself having to paste portions of information I’ve found online into Word documents but I don’t want all the web formatting to be carried over. Similarly, I sometimes copy sections out of Word files into other applications and I often don’t need all the Word formatting. With PureText installed, once the information has been copied to the Windows clipboard in the usual fashion, I just click the PureText icon in the system tray and paste the text into the new document (or there’s an alternative hotkey combination to paste without the formatting – by default, it’s Windows key + V). Pure Text only removes rich formatting from text and won’t remove carriage returns or tabs.

There are free utilities for just about everything you need to do on your PC. In fact, you could end up downloading way more than you need – and forget they’re there on your PC. But if copying and pasting is something you do regularly then this is one utility you’ll end up using on a regular basis. It only takes up about 3MB of memory.

PureText

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If you’ve ever used a browser on a netbook, you’ll know that pretty much half of your screen can be taken up by menus, address bars, bookmark bars and tabs. Here’s a screenshot of the full netbook screen showing Firefox on my Acer Aspire One netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix – just 12 lines of posts in Google Reader – not too good.

Okay, I know all you keyboard ninjas know about this one, but for those out there who do everything by mouse, try pressing F11 when your browser is open. This is the same screenshot of the full netbook screen after pressing F11.

Great isn’t it. As you can see, the Firefox menus are gone from the top and the status bar from the bottom, and we now have 16 lines of posts. And the F11 full screen trick works in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer as well, and on a desktop PC of course. Hitting F11 again will toggle the menus on again, but here’s a nice feature. If you’ve maximized your screen real estate with F11 and then move your mouse up to the very top of the screen in Firefox and Internet Explorer, the address bar and tabs will auto-show allowing you to open new tabs or key a new URL in the address bar! Move the mouse back down and the menus auto-hide again.

Now if you want even more control over which menu bars and address bars show in Firefox, you could add the Hide GUI Bars extension as described on How to Geek.

Okay, so you knew about F11. Well did you know that in Firefox, hitting Ctrl-F brings up a search bar at the bottom for searching that browser window? Not only that but you can highlight the search results too and click through them. Also works for the other browsers I’ve mentioned. Here’s an example of a search for ‘Facebook’ in my Google Reader feeds.

Okay, so you knew that too and you’ve been short-changed by these simple tips. Well how about the ultimate list of Firefox keyboard shortcuts – head over to ShortcutWorld. There are pages for Chrome and Internet Explorer there too. More keyboard shortcuts than you’ll probably ever need!

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Another Google Reader topic today to follow on from my last post. This annoyance has been bugging me for a while and I’ve found a solution to it today.

More and more webmasters and bloggers are using FeedBurner to manage their RSS feeds. FeedBurner has introduced a feature which allows tracking of feed clicks in Google Analytics so as to track visitors from FeedBurner feeds. Problem is that when Google Analytics tracks FeedBurner visitors, it appends the feed item URL with Google Analytics tags, e.g. utm_source=feedburner, utm_medium=feed, etc. I’m sure you’ve all seen this. If you hover over the link to the feed URL in Google Reader before clicking it, it will start something like http://feedproxy.google.com…. Just as an example, here’s what appeared in the browser address bar after I clicked a link in Google Reader to a web page on Techie Buzz:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techiebuzz+%28Techie+buzz%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Pretty ugly. If you now bookmark that web page in Delicious or Diigo, all the tracking stuff is included in the link. I don’t know about you but I just want to bookmark the URL of the web page without all that tracking data. So from the above URL, I just want:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html

You could of course delete all that stuff off the end before you bookmark it, but there’s a simpler way to remove this tracking data in Firefox and Google Chrome. In Firefox, it involves installing a Greasemonkey script, while in Chrome you just install an extension.

Firefox: Greasemonkey script to remove FeedBurner tracking data

First you have to install Greasemonkey. If you haven’t already done this, visit my last post for more info. Then install the FeedBurner Tracking Query Stripper from here. Once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then, after a second or two, it will magically disappear.

Chrome: Unburner extension to remove Feedburner tracking data

If Google Chrome is your browser, then install the Unburner extension from here. Again, once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then it will be stripped out.

Now when you follow a link in Google Reader in Firefox or Chrome, all the tracking analytics will be stripped out and the web page will load as it should.

I spend well over an hour a day going through my 250 feed subscriptions in Google Reader. I always work in List View so I can skim through the post titles as quickly as possible. If the title of the post doesn’t look interesting to me, I move right along. Anything that would speed up working through the feeds would improve my productivity. What I really needed was a way to filter out stuff so that I didn’t have to read uninteresting posts and at the same time that highlighted stuff of real interest.

Coincidentally, I found the answer I needed when browsing through though the posts in Google Reader, and it’s a real gem. Thanks to Arpit Kumar at Techie Buzz for blogging this great tip about filtering within Google Reader. Don’t worry, it’s real easy to install and set up so please try it out.

Google Reader Filter

Installation in Firefox is a two-stage process. First you have to install Greasemonkey then the feed filter. But first what’s Greasemonkey? Well it’s just a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function. So first download and install the Greasemonkey Firefox extension from the Greasespot homepage. It will install just like any other Firefox addon, and you’ll probably have to restart your browser. Once it’s back open, you should see a Greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of the browser window. Now you can add Greasemonkey scripts. Hundreds have been written and are available here but today we’re going to install the Google Reader Filter script available here. Just click install on that page and then reload Google Reader.

You’ll see a new blue button called Filter settings at the top right of the Google Reader window as shown above. If you click on that you can add filter words to exclude or highlight posts in your list.

As you can see, if the post title has excluded words, the title will show as greyed out and if highlighted words are present, the title will be highlighted in green as shown above. If you check the box Hide excludes, you can drop the post completely if you like. Checking the box Prefer Highlights over excludes will highlight the post if it contains both highlighted and excluded words. Checking Hide duplicates does just what it says and any duplicate post titles in the list are excluded. The words in your filter list don’t appear to be case-sensitive. I did notice that if the word in the title is followed by a full point it won’t be excluded unless you add the word followed by a full point to the excluded list. If there’s a colon, dash or exclamation mark directly after the word in the title, it will be excluded or highlighted.

So now, in my case, I can filter out any feeds with the words iPad, Norton, etc., because I’m just not interested in these topics and my time can be more productively used reading other posts. At the same time, any topic I’m particularly interested in like Windows 7 will be highlighted and I can prioritise reading these posts if I want. Now, as I read post titles, when I spot further words I can add them to the filter.

I’ve set up the filter in Firefox on my Windows and Linux machines and they both work great. And yes I know, it’s yet another Firefox extension which is probably going to slow your browser even further. But if reading feeds in Google Reader is important for you then this is a must-have extension. And of course you can use Greasemonkey to run other scripts too. At the moment unfortunately, this filter doesn’t work in the Google Chrome browser.

All in all, a really simple way to filter your feeds within Google Reader and improve your productivity. I recommend you try it out and see what you think.

I’m frequently opening new blank browser tabs in Firefox to load a new website. Well there’s a nice way to get a reminder note in the new browser tab instead of a blank page. First download and install the Firefox add-on NewTabURL and once installed click the Options for that plugin in your browser side bar:

Select the option for URL and key in the URL http://stickyscreen.org. Then in Firefox go to that URL and enter your reminder message.

You don’t have to register with this site to use it. Your sticky reminder is unique to you. According to the website, nobody will see it except you (and whoever you let use your web browser). You can change the reminder as often as you like. The info is stored as a browser cookie. Now any time you open a new tab in Firefox, the StickyScreen website will load showing your reminder before you key your new URL. But if you delete your browser cookies using a PC maintenance program like say CCleaner you will lose the reminder info and will have to rekey it at the StickyScreen website.

Incidentally, as you can see in the Options, if you like, in your new tab you can set NewTabURL to automatically load a URL that’s in your clipboard.