Silicon Kid Website

For all those Mac users here is a very useful tip. In Mac OS X you can configure hot corners, which will trigger a certain event when the mouse is moved to a particular corner of the screen, such as showing the screen saver or minimising all windows and displaying the desktop. To configure hot corners, go to the Apple menu > ?System Preferences? and open the ?Desktop & Screen Saver? preferences. Click ?Screen Saver? and the ?Hot Corners? button.

In early May, Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released. This service pack contains all the updates which have previously been released for Windows XP, plus some new features. Although these new features do not greatly affect the user experience, they do provide some added functionality for back-end services. While you may not notice a major difference after you have installed SP3, it is good practice to install this latest update for Windows XP. Service Pack 3 is available for download from Windows Update (http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com).

Often I am asked where to find particular commands in Office 2007, given the completely new user interface in this product. Microsoft has published a very useful command guide that maps commands in Office 2003 to the relevant commands in Office 2007. The guide for Word 2007 is available at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100744321033.aspx. The guide for Excel 2007 is available at: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA101491511033.aspx .

Following on from a Tip of the Week published a few weeks ago, about pasting text into Word without formatting, a reader has suggested another method to remove formatting from pasted text. Andrew from Jerrabombera recommends a free utility called ClipboardFusion (http://www.binaryfortress.com/clipboardfusion) which sits in the system tray monitoring the clipboard and removes any formatting from copied text (so such formatting is not pasted into the destination document). Thanks to Andrew for this tip.

Word 2007 has some very good improvements for the usability of Word, making relatively simple operations must easier to accomplish. One of my favourite aspects of Word 2007 is the new ways to display documents to assist in ease of reading and display. In Word 2007 click the ?View? tab and within the ?Zoom? section you will see various options. Some good features are the ability to click ?One Page to have the entire current page displayed on screen, ?Two Pages? to display two pages on screen, and ?Page Width? to display the current page at the full width of the Word window. Additionally, within the ?Show/Hide? section you can tick ?Rule? to display the Word ruler (a must if you are working with tabs and other formatting in Word) and also ?Thumbnails? which will open a pane on the left-hand side of the screen to show all pages of the document in thumbnails, allowing easy navigation between pages.