When working with heavily formatted Word documents, often it can be useful to remove all the formatting. For example, to copy the plain text into another document or, if you want to start fresh and reformat the document, using your preferred formatting conventions. Manually removing the formatting from a document can be a time consuming and cumbersome process. However, there is a much easier way to remove the formatting. Select the entire document (using the ‘Edit’ menu > ‘Select All’ or CTRL-A) or select just the portion of text on which you wish to remove formatting. Then, press CTRL-SHIFT-N. This will change the style for the entire document to ‘Normal’ and in the process remove all formatting on the selected text. (more…)

When including URLs in email messages, placing a period (full stop) after the URL (e.g. should the URL be the last word used in a sentence) can cause problems. Depending on the email client used to send the message and the email client used to read the message at the recipient’s end, the period may be joined onto the URL link. This means when the recipient clicks the URL, the URL (with the period at the end) is processed and could cause problems, such as not loading the website. So to play it safe, I suggest you put a space between the URL and a full stop, for example: ‘http://www.siliconkid.com.au .’ (more…)

While the newer versions of Windows Media Player are rich in features such as visualizations, some people do not like all these features and instead prefer the older-style Windows Media Player. Those people will be glad to hear Windows Media Player 6 is still included with Windows XP. To start WMP 6, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘mplayer2.exe’ then click OK. You will just need to be aware that obtaining codecs to playback certain newer file formats could be difficult, given the discontinued support for WMP 6 following the release of newer versions of this software. (more…)

When browsing files and folders (though My Computer or Windows Explorer) the file/folder items can be displayed multiple ways, one of which is arranging the icons in groups. This can be enabled by right-clicking within an empty space in the folder listing, and in the context-menu that appears, select ‘Arrange Icons By’ > ‘Show in Groups’. While this will still display the items arranged by the nominated criteria (e.g. Name, Size, Type, Modified) it will also categorise (group) the items under headings. For example, should you have the icons arranged by Name and enable show in groups, the items will be categorised under headings such as ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, etc. Likewise, if the icons are arranged by Type, they will be categorised under headings such as ‘Application’ (e.g. EXE files), ‘Application Extension’ (e.g. DLL files), ‘JPEG Image’, etc. (more…)

Windows Defender (Beta 2) was recently released by Microsoft and is the final name by which the Microsoft antispyware software will be known (i.e. superceding the current Windows Antispyware software). If you are currently using Windows Antispyware Beta, you should be prompted to upgrade to Windows Defender (Beta 2). You can also download Windows Defender (Beta 2) by visiting the Microsoft Download site at: www.microsoft.com/downloads. (more…)