Can someone please tell me why in the world I can’t simply right-click on a file in Windows and copy it’s complete file directory path and name?
There are many times when you want to share the specific location of a file with someone in an email or perhaps a user guide document and there’s no quick way to do this.
I know you can open the folder, start typing the file name in the address path field and then copy it out of there, but doesn’t that seem pretty convoluted process?
Some people would recommend I just right-click on the file …read more

One of the great tools you can get with the PowerToys I talked of earlier is the PowerToy Calculator. A feature you may not be expecting with the application is tools for converting a variety of measurements from English to Metric equivalents and more.
As you can see from the screen shot above, all the basics you probably wonder about frequently are available.
In addition to the conversions, you get all your basic calculator option, including graphing and trig functions too. You know all that cool stuff you used to use with your Texas Instruments T51 calculator in high school.

After doing some research on my AutoPlay and autorun.inf questions earlier I was reminded about some of the features that are available for tweaking your Windows XP install with the PowerToys applications like TweakUI.
Here’s a quick reminder about some of the other tools that are available:

Color Control Panel Applet: Professional-level photographers and designers know that getting consistent, accurate color from file to screen to print and beyond is a requirement for great results. This new tool helps you manage Windows color settings in one place.
SyncToy: With new sources of files coming from every direction (such as digital cameras, e-mail, …read more

I’ve got this Maxtor 320GB USB external drive that I use to store just about everything on that’s not a program or crucial for my laptop to run. The problem is when I plug it in my computer the AutoPlay routine always tries to scan the entire contents of the drive, which is entirely unnecessary.
I’m also prompted each time after the AutoPlay scan completes to then choose what action I’d like to take on the drive since it contains more than one type of digital content.

So, here’s my question. How can I edit the autorun.inf file to tell …read more

This is perhaps one of the most impressive tricks I’ve seen recently with using Microsoft Word.
Have you ever had the occasion when you needed to select a chunk of text out of a document, but it wasn’t necessarily in a straight line or list that you needed to grab?
If you’ll look at the image above as my example, let’s say I had the list of items on the left, but wanted to get rid of all the text on the right (highlighted in the blue block). The lines of text on the right are part of the lines of …read more

I found a really cool tip today in my email inbox from Microsoft on their Tips and Tricks Special Delivery.
It’s a very quick way of sharing your availability with someone based on your calendar.
When you’re looking at your calendar in Outlook 2007, there’s a link on the left-hand side labeled "Send a Calendar via E-mail".
Click on this link and you’re then prompted for choosing your calendar you want to share and then the settings of what you want to share as you’ll see below.
You can select a date range like today, tomorrow, 30 days, or custom dates.
You can decide …read more

One of the problems we’ve been running into recently is that in an application we’ve developed for a client in Access, the form sizes are continually being forgotten. From what we’ve researched it appears that the issue mentioned in this comment on this post are what we are experiencing.
We’re developing the application in Access 2007 and it’s being saved to and deployed on Access 2003 desktops.
I’m curious if anyone else has experienced this and perhaps has come across a work around. We obviously don’t want to revert to an older version of Access 2003 as our development platform and …read more

One of the things I haven’t been doing lately is archiving my old email in Outlook 2007. Part of the reason I hadn’t been doing it is because I didn’t like how everything worked.
First I should say that I don’t maintain a lot of information in my email. I don’t just hang-on to emails. I either pull the information out of them that I need and keep it stored in another custom application I use, I just delete the email. For that reason, what I want to archive and not is pretty specific.
With a little bit of investigating …read more

Image: Microsoft Tips and Tricks Special Delivery website
Are you still adjusting to the Office 2007 Ribbon? What about just touching the surface of some of the features and resources that are available to you in a variety of Microsoft software applications?
Microsoft has a Tips and Tricks Special Delivery Newsletter that’s loaded with some helpful and handy suggestions for how to get more done with the Microsoft products you’re already using everyday.
Here are some of the ones I’ve enjoyed recently:

Customize the default Word template – always use narrow margins, Arial font, double-spaced paragraphs? Then this tip is for you.
Preview …read more

Image: Screen capture from Microsoft Word 2007
I’ve been spending lots of time working on some mail merge documents for a client lately. One of the tasks we’ve accomplished is to embed a logo into the header of the document that changes based on another mail merge field that’s pulled into the document.
Everything works great except for one problem, the image always comes up as a broken image link with the red-x displayed where the image should be.The user has to do the following steps to make it work:

Double-click on the header to open it for editing
CTRL+A to select everything …read more