The beginning of July and one of my New Year resolutions is still unbroken. At the beginning of the year I resolved to expand my office. While it may be a bit easier to get permitting and financing now to build a new office, it is still easier to take advantage of the existing space available. So I decided to expand my office to all of Charlotte County. Imagine a multiple hundred square mile office. All I need is an Internet connection to the World Wide Web, some good victuals and something to quench my thirst. So this week I decided to plop down in a corner of my new office that offered good food, and a beverage to match. Beef o Bradys in Punta Gorda, FL fit the requirements. They not only provide the provisions, but the wireless connection to the Internet as well.
Choosing a lunch item from the menu was the toughest part of the day. Lot’s of choices but think how difficult it would have been with out the menus. Walk into a restaurant and play twenty questions with the server. Do you have sandwiches? Do you have chicken sandwiches? What beverages do you serve? It might take all day to figure out what the restaurant served before we could even order. Think of the menu as a food tip.
Sometimes our computers can seem equally overwhelming when trying to figure out what button on the screen does what. Time and experience can make selection of the correct button fast and easy. When I am working on a PC a client will comment that I click buttons and open and close windows faster than they can figure out what each one was. That is experience. But for the novice there is a very simple tool built into the Windows operating system to help us navigate around. That same tool is an industry standard and is used by nearly every software company when they write new software such as a word processor or even a game. This tool is called a ToolTip.
The ToolTip is a common GUI (graphical user interface) element. It activates when hovering the mouse pointer over a button on a tool bar or over a link or picture on a web page. When activated, a small box appears displaying supplementary information regarding the item being hovered over. Let’s try it out. Hold the mouse pointer over the time in the system tray. See the box that pops up with the day, date and year? That is a tooltip. Open Internet Explorer move the mouse over one of the icons in the toolbar. After a moment or so, a little box appears telling us what that button does. For example: I move the cursor over the icon of the envelope and a box pops up that tells me that if I click on this button I will read mail. Now move the mouse over the START button and let it hover there for a moment. See the box that pops up and tells you “Click here to begin?” That is a ToolTip. Now open your favorite word processor program and move the mouse pointer over one of the many icons on the toolbars. After a moment a box pops up and tells you what it does. Check Spelling, Copy or Paste are just a few of the ToolTips that I can find in MS Word.
Another valuable tool that many people don’t utilize is the ability to open multiple windows and programs at the same time. Right now I have MS Word open as I write this column; I have Internet Explorer open as I research different topics. I have Windows Live Mail open so I can read and send mail and I also have Notepad open for a place to hold partial thoughts and sentences that I don’t like but am not ready to delete. But how can I see the windows that are open behind the one I am working in?
Look at the three boxes in the upper right-hand corner of the window's title bar. Click on the first square, marked with a line on the bottom, to minimize the window. The window then disappears from your screen, but its icon is visible on your taskbar. Now hold the mouse pointer over the icon on the taskbar and a ToolTip appears telling us what program the button represents. To open the window again, click on the taskbar icon. Remember that minimizing the window doesn’t close the program. The program is still running, using system resources and available for immediate use if we need it.
With apologies to Tiny Tim, let’s Tip Toe through the ToolTips.
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books
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