September 2007 Newsletter

Hello. Well, while Claire’s been writing the digital photography book I mentioned last week, I haven’t been lazy, honest! I’ve been finishing off a pair of books that follow on from Computers One Step at a Time and The Internet One Step at a Time. They’re not out until the end of the month but I’ve put up a a special webpage for subscribers only, where you can read more about it (and the CDROM that is included) and, if you like, pre-order it. www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/secretpage2.htm

Only people who have bought one of my books before and newsletter subscribers can pre-order, and you get a free extra booklet What You Should Know About Your PC Keyboard for doing so as it helps me know how many books to print! Have a read: www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/secretpage2.htm

Mini-article – 3 tricks for printing webpages
Lots of sites nowadays, especially articles, forms and the like, have a special ‘print’ button or a link to a ‘printer friendly version’. You can then print them out as normal with no problems at all. Look carefully for these – they’re often small and tucked away at the bottom or over to one side, but they can save a lot of hassle.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of webpages that don’t have a handy print version. If the page you want to print doesn’t, it’s a good idea to do a Print Preview before you start printing.

To do a Print Preview, just click on File in the top left corner of the screen and choose Print Preview from the list that pops up. If you have the latest version of Internet Explorer, click on the little arrow next to the picture of the printer on the right instead, then select Print Preview.

The problem you’re most likely to come across is the right hand side of your page being cut off. The first thing you can do to try and solve the problem is to change the left and right hand margins. Go to the File menu, select Page Setup, and a window will open with a bit about margins at the bottom.

If it’s still being cut off, it’s back to File and Page Setup again. You get that same window, and this time you want to look to the left of the bit about margins.

You need to change the “orientation” from portrait (which is what it’s automatically set to) to landscape. That makes it print sideways instead of vertically – pretty much any webpage will fit this way round. It does mean it takes more sheets of paper to fit it all on, though, so I only use it when I need to, not all the time.

Download/website of the month – police auctions
It’s a website this month. www.police-information.co.uk lists all the auctions and sales of lost property that the police have kept for a while and no-one’s claimed. Apparently they have quite a lot of stuff that never gets claimed, so if they don’t sell it, it would just end up thrown away – what a waste! On the site, click on police auctions on the left (you’ll probably need to scroll down the list a bit) and you’ll get a list by part of the country, so you can see any auctions near you.

Reader’s Question
I keep seeing Tiny URL and SnipURL in the newspapers. What are they?
These two things are basically the same – just done by different companies. They’re used to turn a long web address like www.someshoporother.co.uk/uk/online-offers/products/gadgets3/gdj4/3175638.htm into something easier like www.snipurl.com/tea-strainer. You type the short one in and it automatically takes you to the long one.

Word to the Wise – default
It’s another case of the techies taking a normal word and using it to mean something different. When you’re talking about computers, default doesn’t mean to default on a payment, it’s means the automatic or initial choice. For example you can have your windows in any colour, but blue is the default – it’s what you get if you don’t change anything.

That’s all for this month. Don’t forget to have a read of the information about my new books, here: www.helpfulbooks.co.uk/secretpage2.htm.

Thanks

Tim Wakeling

All the above © Tim Wakeling 2007