MANATEE PC USERs' GROUP of Manatee County Florida
Pictured left to right: Peg Place: assistant, Carol Davis: Instructor, Helen Skomra, Grace McCloy,
Dee Hansen: assistant.
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Blacklist, whitelist, and just plain shut out spam with this freebie.
Some spam filters assume that you want to see almost any message, and some assume you want to see almost none. ChoiceMail Free combines blacklist and whitelist technology to make sure that your POP e-mail program refuses e-mail from the addresses you block and lets the e-mail you ask to see through without a hitch. Use the built-in permission rules to block likely spam, and add your own touches to customize the blockade.
You can also activate unknown-sender registration, which sends e-mail back to senders whose addresses ChoiceMail doesn't recognize, asking them to identify themselves. Usually only people who really know you and (and like you enough to deal with this small irritation) will respond to such messages. Safe message previewing lets you look at those messages you're not sure about--but without letting potentially infected spam loose on your system.
choicemail is as free as its name indicates, but online support costs $20 per year. The more full-featured ChoiceMail One--which blocks spam to AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo--includes the cost of a one-year support subscription. A 14-day trial can be downloaded from the vendor's site.
MS Office SB 2007 is designed for either a small business or a professional computer user who needs to perform many different tasks or projects. Many computer users have a word processing program, but most have no need for spreadsheet, brochure, work planning or presentation programs. If you do use some or all of the other programs, in the Small Business Suite you will find they work smoothly together - the data from one program can be used in the other programs. The programs in MS Office SB 2007 essentially perform the same functions as they did before, so this review is about the changes to the use of the programs, not their functions.
Microsoft has made drastic changes to the User Interface, especially the menus in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Publisher and Outlook have not had their menus changed, but additional features have been added. It takes a long while to get used to these menu changes. This will make the programs less productive for a time, but like everything in life, change happens and you have to keep up with them. It probably isn’t practical, but it would have been nice if Microsoft had allowed the menus to be switched between the old ones and the new ones like they’ve done in past upgrades. That way you could use either menu set and slowly get used to the new ones. They have provided a technique called Dialog Launcher that shows you some of the old windows. While it may add confusion to some, it may help others. Microsoft points out that when Word, for example, was version 1.0 it had only about 100 commands, but now Word has over 1500 commands and that's why they felt a new menu system was required. They describe the new user interface as task-based, providing the available commands and options based on your current task. They also have tried to make the menus constant between the different programs to make the learning easier.
The familiar File in the menu bar has been changed to an icon of the Microsoft Office logo. This not only displays the old File options or commands, but also the new ones. If options have choices, they are shown in another panel to the right. An example is Save As; when you clicked Save As in the old menu it brought up another window and you had to click a drop-down sub menu to see the choices where to save a document. Now those choices are displayed immediately when you select Save As.
The new user interface is spread across the entire screen. There is a combination of Command Tabs, Command Sets and Contextual Commands. Microsoft has tried to make the Command Tabs follow each stage of the process as you work. The Command Sets then relate to the selected Command Tab. Contextual Commands are collected in the Command Set, and are the actual commands you use. In the bottom right of most Command Sets is an arrow that, when clicked, displays the more familiar window. This feature is the Dialog Launcher function mentioned above. The ribbon of menus can be minimized. Click on the arrow at the right of the icons in the uppermost menu and select “Minimize the Ribbon”.
If you like using shortcut keys, all the old shortcuts are usable. If you’d like to see all the shortcut keys available for any Command Tab, press the Alt key. When the shortcut keys are displayed, press the Number or Letter shown in the square next to the name and that choice will be selected. Unless you get used to using the combination of the Alt key and the Shortcut key, you probably would find it just as fast to use the mouse and click on the function's icon.
There is a Quick Access bar at the top of the menus. This bar can be customized by clicking on the arrow at the right of the icons. Check or Uncheck the commands you use frequently. If you click More Commands on the menu, you will be able to select literally Any command available in the program. I think this feature will be used a lot. There are so many commands you Don’t use in a program, it is nice to have the most frequently used ones easily available. Then if you minimize the ribbon, you have an uncluttered screen but still have access to all the commands.
It will take some time to get used to. I think that if you customize the user interface to suit the way you operate, you will be very comfortable using the programs in Microsoft's Office Small Business 2007.
Bill Sommer
Pictured left to right: Peg Place: assistant, Ursula Wing, Carol Davis: Instructor,
Rosemary Carollo, Mary Franklin, Dee Hansen: assistant.
Interested?
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On March 7th, our club members attended the Florida Association PC Users Groups conference in Zephyrhills, Fl. In front are Bob and Doug, in back are Jo Anne, Mary Ann, Barbara, Dolly, Lyla, and Donna.
They brought home the award below for our web site.
The Manatee PC User Group meets the first Thursday following the first Wednesday of every month at The Freedom Village Landings.
For more information contact:Fill out your membership application and print it for mailing. click here to try it online.
If you would like to dispose of your empty ink cartridges, and help MPCUG at the same time, bring your cartridges to the classroom, or the general meeting. We will have a box available to collect them. The money will go towards purchasing door prizes for the general meeting. We are now accepting all OEM cartridges.
The news letter is available on-line.
Club members have to register their email address so they can login
and download news letters. To login and download a news letter click
HERE.
You can register or change
your email address at any time. The next months' news letter
will be posted on or about the 26th of the month. Also available are a
number of previous news letters.
View File Extensions In Vista
File extensions are the three- or four-character codes, such as .DOC, .TXT, and .JPG that follow a file name and indicate what type of file it is. To make extensions visible, open Control Panel, double-click Folder Options, and select the View tab. Remove the Hide Extensions For Known File Types checkbox and click Apply. (XP is similar)
Thanks to Smart Computing
Make "No" mean "No" In WinXP
One of our pet peeves about Windows’ file management is that it contains a Yes To All button but
not a No To All button. The Yes To All button lets you automatically overwrite all file duplicates when
you are copying files from one location to the next.
A No To All button would be nice so you could
automatically prevent any duplicates from being overwritten.
If you are copying an entire group of files from one folder to another and many of them are duplicates
you do not want to overwrite, the process can be a real pain.
Fortunately you can work around this
limitation. When you copy files from one place to another and Windows prompts you to overwrite the
first file, hold down the SHIFT key and click No. From that point on, No To All will be enabled for that
particular copy session and no duplicates will be overwritten.
Thanks to Smart Computing
IT's ALL GEEK to ME
Visit the Science Channel WEB site to find out what!
Are you signed up for automatic annual renewal of your
virus or firewall software, and did not know it?
Click on the link above to read what WindowsSecrets.com has to say.
This page was updated on
September 5, 2008