Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Internet – Tabbed Browsing

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At last nights BPCA meeting, I was showing some of the different sites that I frequent. One of the members asked what the tabs were for. I was using Firefox at the time.

The question prompted me to give a short version of the reasons I prefer to using a browser with tabbing capabilities. As it turns out, a good number in attendance use Internet Explorer exclusively for their web browsing, which does not currently have tabbing capabilities. I have not checked things out for myself, but I have read that there are plug-ins available to enable tabbed browsing in IE and that the new IE 7 will have it.

Years back I experimented with the Opera browser, which I believe was the first to offer tabbed browsing, and liked the idea, so when Firefox came along I switched to it and have been using it for quite a while now.

Now to my reasons for preferring a tab capable browser.

I can have a large number of sites open all at the same time, and be able to keep track of where they are very easily. By contrast, without tabbed browsing all these sites would be open in different windows, making it very hard to separate them from other open programs.

When I am using a search engine, regardless of which one, I can open links to the results in separate tabs, which load in the background, letting me keep looking at the results for more pertinent information.

I do a lot of research with my browser and keeping sites open in separate tabs enables me to quickly retrieve information, without the necessity of continually using the back or forward buttons or the history to keep going back and forth between sites.

It is very easy to move from tab to tab, or even rearrange the order of the tabs, once you get used to it.

There are probably a lot more reasons users like tabs for browsing, those listed above are just my main reasons. If you have any thoughts regarding tab use or even just have a different reason for using them than what I have listed, please let me know.

Try tabbed browsing. If you do not like it, you can always go back to the non tabbed browsing that works for you.

Word Processing – Disable Auto Bulleted And Or Numbered Lists

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Word automatically formating bulleted and numbered lists, is very aggravating to me. I turn this function off for that reason.

The following instructions will show you how to turn this off. Of course, if you want to put up with this in the future, just reverse the process:

  • Select AutoCorrect Options from the Tools menu.
  • Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
  • Deselect Automatic bulleted lists.
  • Deselect Automatic numbered lists.
  • Click OK.

There are ways to get rid of the automatically bulleted or numbered lists, but I prefer to turn them off all together, rather than having to stop writing to fix the problem.

To turn this function off in OpenOffice the instructions are similar, but not entirely the same:

  • Select AutoCorrect from the drop down Tools menu.
  • Select the Options Tab.
  • Uncheck Apply numbering – symbol:
  • Click OK.

OpenOffice does not give you the option to have one or the other functioning, both bulleted and numbering is either on or off.

This will be one of the topics of tonight’s BPCA Word Processing SIG (Special Interest Group) session.

Google – Exact Phrase Searching

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You have moved to a new area and want to find a computer user group nearby. You go to Google.com and search for: computer user group,(results: about 366,000,000).

To search for the exact phrase in Google just enclose the same phrase in double quotation marks like this: “computer user group”, (results: about 123,000).

It should be a lot easier to narrow down when you use an exact phrase search. As you can see by the very broad example above, you would have to dig through over 300 million results of sites without the exact phrase, but only a little over 100 thousand with the exact phrase.

If I search within the 100 thousand for CT (Connecticut) it is narrowed down to 587, for MD (Maryland) 810, etc.

Coming up with a good search phrase and searching for that exact phrase, should keep you from getting frustrated.