Category Archives: Microsoft

Post specific to Microsoft / Windows O/S.

Screen Captures

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I have had a few people ask me what is the key that says Prt Scrn for? Well, in the olden days it used to be that you would press that key and whatever was on the screen would be printed.

Now it is used to capture a picture of the screen and sends it to the clipboard. There are two options for the capture:

  1. To capture everything on the screen, press the Prt Scrn key.
  2. To capture only the currently active window, press Alt and Prt Scrn keys at the same time.

You will have to save your capture to a graphics program to save it.

XP’s built in Paint or, if it is installed, Microsoft Photo Editor would be the cheapest means of accomplishing the save. You could also use any program capable of pasting your screen capture and saving it such as Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView, etc.

There are more capable screen capture programs available, both free and paid, with a lot more options.

For more information search Google for “screen capture software”.

I use Gadwin PrintScreen 2.6, the latest release, I believe it is 3.1, is available at gadwin.com and is a freeware product.

Displaying and Printing Microsoft Word Paragraph Styles

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While fooling around in Microsoft Word 2003 to work up something for the Broward Personal Computer Association, Inc. (BPCA) Word Processing Special Interest Group (SIG), I ran across how to display paragraph styles and how to print a listing of paragraph styles with their formatting.

Displaying

First lets deal with displaying the paragraph styles. Displaying the paragraph styles is only available in Normal view, as far as I can tell. I did try the other layouts. If anyone knows of a way to do the same in the other layouts, please let me know.

  • Open the Word Document you are interested in.

 

  • Select Normal, from the View menu.

 

 

  • Choose Options, from the Tools menu and select the View tab.

 

 

  • Locate the Style area width box (it should be near the bottom of the tab).

 

 

  • Set the width to 1.0″. (either click on the box arrow until you get to 1.0″, or type 1.0″ in the box directly).

 

Result Sample

 

  • If the width set, by following the above, is too large or too small when you are viewing the paragraph styles, it can be adjusted by clicking and dragging the line that separates the style name from the text of the document.

 

Printing

Sometimes it is useful to print out the paragraph styles and their formatting. I frequently do this when I am trying to set up a template for a project, so that I can consistently apply paragraph formatting throughout the document.

Typically, I use very few styles but, the styles I do use are used consistently.

You can print out a list of the styles used in a doument by selecting Styles in the Print What section of the Print Dialog Box:

Print What

In my opinion, the use of styles is very important. Styles promote consistency and make documents much easier to edit.

More on using Styles to follow in future postings.

Organizing Your PC Part 2

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As you know from Organizing Your PC Part 1, I like to have all the screen space possible available. To further do this I utilize the Quick Launch Toolbar, the Taskbar and the Desktop Toolbar. Using these makes everything I need readily available but, does not use up my screen real estate. These areas are shown in the image below:

I will just give you a brief description of these areas at this time, and will go more in depth about how I got them the way they are in subsequent posts in this series.

The Quick Launch Toolbar contains all the items I regularly use and need accessible. Not all the icons shown on the Quick Launch Toolbar are standard from Windows, some I have changed to reflect something of significance to me.

The Taskbar shows me the Windows I currently have open, both minimized and maximized. I don’t need that much space and will explain why later on.

The Desktop Toolbar contains all the items on that are on my desktop , which are hidden from view, as explained in Part 1 of the series. I have it shrunk down as far as it can go but, I can still access everything by clicking on the double right facing chevrons (>>).

More on each of these in the next installment of the series.

As an update on my hurricane shutters, they are now telling me that they should be installed June 9th. That should work out well.