Most users of Microsoft Excel are aware of the fill-down handle, allowing you to click and drag on the small square at the bottom right-hand corner of a cell to fill the contents of subsequent cells with the same data or data fitting the pattern of the selected cells. If you would like a quicker way to fill-down, then simply double-click on the fill-down handle (small square) and it will automatically fill-down. Be aware, in order for this to work there must be data in other columns as Excel will determine where that data ends and stop the fill-down at that point.

On your recommendation many years ago I installed the free version of ZoneAlarm as my firewall. It was very successful and I recommended it to many others. Last week I received a major update to my McAfee Virus Scan Plus which immediately and regularly locked up my system and frequently switched off McAfee. It was fully resolved by removing ZoneAlarm and using the Microsoft firewall. I understand this is a common problem for McAfee and ZoneAlarm. My question to you is how effective is the Microsoft firewall? Can we rely on it as we did with ZoneAlarm? I have researched the Microsoft firewall for Windows XP (SP3) and it appears to be fairly basic and limited in its effectiveness. Do you have any comments or advice? (more…)

Many users of Word are not aware of a very simple, yet very effective, formatting tool called a page break. Page breaks do exactly as their name implies – inserts a break between pages. Too often I see people holding down the return button on their keyboard to fill a page with blank lines so that it splits across to a new page. This is possibly the absolute worst thing you can do in a document, since if you add more text to that page those blank lines will be pushed down onto the next page, creating whitespace at the top. It’s also a horribly inefficient way of getting a new page. To insert a page break in Word, simply put the cursor where the break should be inserted and press the CTRL + ENTER key combination. If you would like to see the breaks in the document, turn on show formatting in Word by either clicking the formatting ¶ button in the Word toolbar or pressing the CTRL + * key combination (as the * is above the 8 on the keyboard you may need to instead use the CTRL + SHIFT + 8 key combination). Pressing this key combination again will toggle formatting symbols off.

My computer is around 7 years old and slow and freezing on a regular basis. Are there any free downloads which I can use to fix this situation? The computer is running Windows Vista. (more…)

My computer was flood damaged except for the hard drive. I bought an external SATA docking station so that I could connect the hard drive via USB to my new computer. I managed to find most of my data (pictures, documents, etc) but I cannot find my emails from Outlook Express 6. These emails contained quite a bit of important information, so it would be good to regain access to these. Can you help? (more…)