Hey, I can read that!

Progress marches on. Many of us are purchasing new computers and new software to go with it. We like to keep on the leading edge rather than the bleeding edge. One software package that many users are adding to the arsenal of tools available to them is Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365 with its Word, Excel and other components. These programs are useful, full of features and make our daily chores easier. We can send out that newsletter, weekly bulletin, letters and even holiday cards.

But across the land we hear from the recipients of our missives, “I can’t open the attachment.” Investigation reveals that there are many users still chugging away on Office 2000, XP or 2003. Starting with Office 2007 Microsoft changed the default file format for documents from .doc to .docx, spreadsheets from .xls to .xlsx and PowerPoint files from .pps to .ppsx which are not compatible with the older versions and hence cannot be opened. Do not despair; there are some options available to remedy this dilemma.

One alternative is to notify the sender that we cannot open the file in its current format and would they resave the document in an older format. Using a Word document as our example (the process is the same for Excel and PowerPoint) start Word 2007 or 2010, open the document to be converted from ".docx" to an earlier format. Click the "Office" button in the upper left corner of the screen. Move the pointer to "Save As" and a side menu will pop out. Select the option for "Word 97-2003." This will save the file in .doc format.

They can also have Word 2007 or 2010 save by default to ".doc" instead of ".docx." This is accomplished by opening Word, clicking on the "Office" button in the top left corner. Next click the "Word Options" button. Select "Save" from the options bar on the left, and select "Word 97-2003" from the "Save files in this format" drop down section. Click "OK." Now our files will save as ".doc" by default.

Perhaps a more efficient method for users still utilizing older versions of Office is to surf over to www.microsoft.com/download. In the search box labeled Search Download Center type in Office Compatibility Pack for Word. Download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint File Formats and follow the steps to install it on the computer. Remember this is for older versions of Office and is not needed if running Office 2007 or 2010. This download is a file converter that will allow older versions of Office to open, edit and save the .docx formats as if they were .doc files.

For those of us still using Microsoft Works Word Processor or Works Spreadsheet this converter also allows Works to open .docx files however some of the font, paragraph and other special formatting features may be lost or modified to allow the file to open in Works.

While the downloaded file converter is an easy way to extend the capabilities of our software, the software itself, old or new has many converters already built into it. Again using Word as the example, if we click on File then Open and browse through the folder where our documents reside we will see a list of all the files there that have the default format. Older versions will list document ending in .doc and new versions will display documents suffixed with .docx. But if we look at the bottom of the dialogue box we will see a dropdown box labeled Files of Type. If we click on the pull down arrow a list of formats that Word has the capability of opening. Even files created in other company’s formats such as WordPerfect can be converted and opened by Word. If the file we are looking for still doesn’t appear there, we can change the File of Type to (All Files.) This may let us see the file we want in the list but doesn’t guarantee it can be opened.

From this dropdown we also have the ability to take a document and convert it and save it to any of the formats listed there. So if we know that the person to which the document will be sent does not have Word, Wordperfect some other productivity suite, we can save it in .txt or .rtf which can be opened in Notepad if necessary.

And don’t forget, if we don’t have Office or WordPerfect and finances are an issue, surf over to www.openoffice.org and download the latest version of OpenOffice. This is a fully capable productivity suite that can open and edit .docx, .xlsx and .ppsx files and save as .doc, .xls and .pps files.

Nobody has to know we live on the bleeding edge.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

Traveling? Read the Paper anyway!

An e-mail of great magnitude arrived this week from faithful reader Walt. “I am traveling up north and make sure I read your column each week in the electronic version of the Sun. I also like to send the column to some family members. The printed version I just cut out, copy and send, but this electronic version will not allow me to highlight the column and paste it into an e-mail. If I send a link from the page, my relatives are asked to subscribe before they can view the column. Is there any way to send the electronic version to my family?”

This question arises fairly often but Walt even followed up with a phone call so let’s examine the issue. The starting point is a subscription to the Sun. Fire up the computer and surf over to yoursun.com. Click on the copy of the paper of choice. Navigate to the Electronic Edition. The options available are a seven day trial or for just $3 a month, the paper and of course Bits and Bytes will be available anywhere we travel and can reach the Internet. If already a subscriber to the printed version, we automatically have a subscription to the electronic version as well.

The next step in sharing with family is to login to our Electronic Edition, use the navigation tools to find the Bits and Bytes column. Double click on the column to open it in a separate window. From the toolbar at the top click print. This opens a printable copy of the column. From here we have a few options. The column can now be highlighted, copied and pasted into an e-mail for that nephew in Michigan, or when the printer dialogue box appears, send the print job to the printer listed as Microsoft XPS Document Writer. The print job will ask us to give the job a name and save it on our computer. We can then e-mail that document to anyone and they can open it in Internet Explorer. Or the long way would be to print the column, put it in a scanner, and then e-mail it from the scanned copy. Note to those that want past columns, the Electronic Edition archives past copies of the paper. If searching for past Bits and Bytes columns simply search the Wednesday copy of the papers. (Martha, what date was that great column?) Don’t forget, additional columns appear at courtnederveld.blogspot.com.

Special alert: A new scam appears to be making the rounds. We have all gotten the e-mail from friends whose e-mail account has been hacked telling us to click a link because it is something neat. Spammers are trying to infect machines or get us to wire money to Elbonia. Now, the e-mails claim our friend is updating their phone book and please send them our phone number or have gotten robbed in some foreign country losing their passport/money and would we wire them a few thousand till they get home. Call and verify, don’t e-mail the phone number.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

Is it Gerbil or is it …

I know, I know, how could anything about a computer be funny? Actually there is nothing funny about a computer. However, sometimes as a computer tech, there arrives a moment with a computer user that simply screams out for something truly silly. This is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Several years ago, visiting my wife’s sister and her family, they decided that since I was there, they would purchase their first computer. I went with them to a store selling computers and we picked out a very nice IBM model. This was a top of the line, 486 processor, (I always wondered 486 what?) We added a mammoth 14” monitor that took two men and a small pony to lift, and of course the flagship Microsoft Windows 95.

Once we got home, we opened the box and there it was in all its shiny glory. We carefully began to attach all the cables and surprise, surprise, didn’t end up with any extra cords. Now the moment of truth. I let my sister-in-law push the power button and viola, lights came on, the monitor glowed and there in front of us was the Windows 95 desktop. (OK, there might have been a three or four minute gap from pushing the button to seeing the desktop but you get the idea.) It was a glorious moment. In one $1700 movement of cash, my sister-in-law’s family had leaped into the high tech age. The world of surfing the net, email, blue screens, lockups, and an investment that in four years would be worth nothing, assuming it still worked. But then…..

My sister-in-law picked up the mouse and said, “What is this?” Now a sympathetic human would have begun the explanation of exactly how this human-machine interface device worked and why it was so important to the ease of using the computer. But a computer technician sees the world through wavy glass. “That is a gerbil,” I said.

My sister-in-law was born at night but she wasn’t born last night. Boring into my soul with her “You had better not be messing with me look.” She proceeded to tell me that the people at her work were referring to a “mouse” that they used to control the computer. What to do, she obviously had some points of reference that had her pointed in the right direction? So, I did the only thing a good husband could do, knowing full well that anything I said would be immediately reported to my wife. (I was treading on very, very thin ice.)

I then related how, Xerox had actually developed the mouse and given it to Microsoft, (She certainly wouldn’t know any better.) And that IBM used a proprietary device for moving the cursor and couldn’t legally call it a mouse. Consequently, since IBM was bigger than Microsoft, (at that time it was) they called it a gerbil.

Sometimes when you tell a story like this, the person listening looks around for confirmation. My sister-in-law looked around and saw my son who also dabbled with computers at the time and she asked him if it really was a gerbil. Usually at this point life ends and you go home. But, my son simply nodded his head and said it was true. So for the rest of the weekend, I helped my sister-in-law’s family learn how to use the computer, always referring to the gerbil.

Fortunately, we left that Sunday night and headed home. Monday my sister-in-law went to work and told all her coworkers about her new computer and the gerbil. Monday night our phone rang. It wasn’t pretty.

If you would like the true skinny on the evolution of the mouse, go to http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/. There are pictures of old gerbils; I mean mice, and their predecessors.

I wonder if she wants me to help with the next technological marvel?

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

No, not a wedding registry.

I was struck with an interesting phenomenon the other day. Riding my bicycle along a section of US41 and because of the amount of traffic, traffic lights and maybe some other issues I couldn’t see, I was actually traveling faster than the cars trying to get to their destinations. County and state spend millions of tax dollars on computer controlled lights, intersection control islands, stripes, arrows, signs and driver education only to watch traffic grind ever slower and slower. They even hire more consultants to suggest improvements that ultimately lead to… longer commute times.

Computers are similar to highways. It seems that the longer we have a computer the slower it gets. Like our roads, the obvious answer reminds me of the question about ducks flying south for the winter in the familiar V pattern. . Why is one side of the V longer than the other? Because there are more ducks on that side. Why does traffic move slower? More cars. Why do our computers run slower? More programs.

How can we improve performance? The answer seems self evident. For roads, remove cars. Computers, remove programs. But even this solution poses its own problems. There is an area just north of Veterans Blvd that was platted many years ago. Roads were put in, but nothing else. There is virtually no traffic but it is used to illegally dump, and off-road vehicles tear up the landscape. We could resolve some of the issues by tearing up the roads and returning the area to its natural state. The same plan can be used to clean up our computers by removing unused programs and files. But a magic bullet would be faster, so we hire more consultants for the roads and we download Registry cleaners that promise to speed up our computers after only a few minutes and $49.95.

What is the registry? The registry is a system-defined database used by the Windows operating system to store configuration information. More simply, it is a road system that the computer uses to find everything loaded on it and make use of it. It also stores the settings we tell a program to use when we install it. It makes sense that if parts of the road become unusable, or go to dead ends, our computer will slow down as it navigates through the maze.

Many folks have downloaded purported registry cleaning programs that promise to instantly remove dead registry entries and thereby speed up our computers. With flashing screens and impressive looking charts they boldly declare our computers are riddled with registry errors. Errors? What they are locating are leftover registry entries that are tied to nothing. Cleaning the unused entries from the registry would at best speed up any search for information within the registry which almost no one does. Oddly, if it were this simple, one wonders why Microsoft, the creators of Windows, does not provide a registry cleaner. They should know the ins and outs of the registry better than anyone. Perhaps a clue comes from Mark Russinovich, Ph.D. Computer Engineering, Microsoft Technical Fellow who states "A few hundred kilobytes of unused keys and values causes no noticeable performance impact on system operation. Even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches."

Registry cleaners, while apparently having no effect on performance, do allow us to perform registry hygiene by cleaning up dead entries. Generally these dead keys and values are created by the removal of programs via the Add/Remove feature in Windows. The problem with the $49 registry cleaners is that they have an automatic feature that most of us use. This automatic feature does not discriminate; it just removes keys and values. To demonstrate the danger of the automatic feature, I recently tested one of the “leading” registry cleaners on my test PC. It ran a scan, found over 400 registry “errors” and then removed them. I restarted the PC and it would not boot up. Apparently some of the registry “errors” were critical to the operation of Windows. The moral here is that if you must use a registry cleaner, find one that can be run in manual mode, has a backup feature that allows the restoration of entries removed from the registry, remove only those entries left from program removal and is FREE such as Piniforms CCleaner or included with a leading antivirus suite such as Norton’s PC Tuneup.

McAfee and Norton Security Suites along with most major antivirus programs provide a registry cleaner under the tools section. Another FREE cleaner can be found at www.ccleaner.com that has a backup mode just in case. Before taking any action regarding the registry be sure that you only change values in the registry that you understand or have been instructed to change by a trusted source. Be sure to back up the registry before making any changes.

Keep that traffic flowing.

Speaking of Bicycling, Check out www.peaceriverridersbicycleclub.com for the upcoming Wheels and Wings IV bicycle event. It’s a Bicycle Ride an event and a party!

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words.

The beauty of video is that it can, in ways that words can never convey, make very clear the workings of almost anything. Please take the time to watch this video. That’s all I have to say this week.
PC Tech Support Telephone Scam

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

Dude! What’s Your Function?

William Henry said, “All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.” Clients tell me they are afraid to try things with that shiny new computer because they don’t know what will happen. Others forge blindly forward punching buttons, clicking the mouse on this icon or that link all in the hope that the computer will sanguinely accept random actions and create a coherent result. Others race to the book stores to purchase books and DVD’s that portend to solve all computer problems in just a few minutes of our time. For those who will and those that won’t, perhaps some simple explanations will open the floodgates of knowledge.

It was only a couple of decades ago that all computer functions were initiated via the keyboard. Users would type in enigmatic lines of text to instruct the calculating connivance on the proper steps needed to reach a desired result. Some may remember CTRL – P or ALT – F, commonly used to print and to select the file menu. With the advent of the mouse many of these commands have faded from memory but they still lie buried in the operating systems code.

One overlooked area of our computer is the keyboard. We are familiar with the letters and numbers in the traditional QWERTY layout, letters below and numbers above. But what are those mysterious keys at the top of the keyboard labeled F1 through F12? What are they for, what do they do? These keys are called Function keys. They are and can be reserved to perform specific actions if pressed.

Our computers have layers of systems that run simultaneously each supporting the next. The next time we start our computer, look carefully at the screen that displays the manufacturer’s logo. The computer is starting up according to instructions held in the BIOS. (Basic Input Output System) This is a set of instructions that tells the computer how to start, initiate the mouse, keyboard, load the hard drive and find and load any peripheral hardware attached to the computer such as DVD drives, Floppy drives, and external drives. The BIOS also reserves several of the function keys. At the bottom of the Logo screen will be some statements such as F1 – Enter Setup, F10 – Boot from LAN or F11 – System Recovery. Another reserved function key is the F8 key which alters the start up of Windows to allow the user to start the machine in Safe Mode. This is a diagnostic mode used if the computer has some problem that prevents it from booting correctly.

Once the computer has booted up and the operating system is up and running, it takes over some of the function keys and gives us quick access to a variety of features. Let’s take a look at some of the common function keys and how they can save us time over using a mouse. One of the most useful keys is the F1 key. This will almost always open a Help screen. Holding down the ALT key and then pressing F1 will open the Windows Help and Support Center. Even within a program such as a word processor or even a browser window, F1 will open a help screen.

F3 will generally open a search feature for Windows and many other programs. For example, we open a large webpage and we want to quickly find the part about bicycles. Press the F3 key and a search field opens. Type in bicycle, click Find and we move directly to the part of the document we need.

Using the ALT key with a Function key adds another layer of direct actions. ALT – F4 will close the open window while F4 will repeat the last action. Example, we want to be emphatic about something by type “very” several times. We can type it once then tap the F4 key a few times and “very” repeats.

If we are surfing the web and typing in different addresses in the URL (Universal Resource Locater) address bar, just tap F6 to move the cursor to the address bar. F11 will change the browser to full screen mode. Tap the F11 key again and it reverts to the default size.

The function keys can perform different actions in different programs and some can even be programmed for user defined purposes. Using Excel, we can define specific formulas to function keys to avoid having to type out long formulas over and over. Don’t be afraid to try different keys and discover what they do. A key tap can be much faster than dragging a mouse.

Different (key) strokes for different folks.

Don’t forget, these and many other tips and tricks are in my book Grumbles From The Keyboard. Click on the links to get yours right away.

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Start 2013 with some FUN and GOOD eats. Epicuria is a cookbook like none you ever read before. You’ll suffer confusion as you try to decide to shelve it with the cookbooks or the adventure novels. Get yours today!

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734