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 and choose "Create Shortcut" and then send the person that shortcut. That doesn’t really make sense to me either. It’s just annoying. I want the plain and simple text path and file name for the file.

Post from: EveryJoe

Quickly Copy File Name and Path

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.

Post from: EveryJoe

Easy Conversions with PowerToy Calculator

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, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops), SyncToy can help you copy, move, and synchronize different directories.
• RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer: Are you a serious photographer? Now you can organize and work with digital RAW files in Windows Explorer (much as you can with JPEG images). This tool provides thumbnails, previews, printing, and metadata display for RAW images.
• ClearType Tuner: This PowerToy lets you use ClearType technology to make it easier to read text on your screen, and installs in the Control Panel for easy access.
• HTML Slide Show Wizard: This wizard helps you create an HTML slide show of your digital pictures, ready to place on your Web site.
• Open Command Window Here: This PowerToy adds an "Open Command Window Here" context menu option on file system folders, giving you a quick way to open a command window (cmd.exe) pointing at the selected folder.
• Alt-Tab Replacement: With this PowerToy, in addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the page. This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.
• Tweak UI: This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
• Power Calculator: With this PowerToy you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions.
• Image Resizer: This PowerToy enables you to resize one or many image files with a right-click.
• CD Slide Show Generator: With this PowerToy you can view images burned to a CD as a slide show. The Generator works downlevel on Windows 9x machines as well.
• Virtual Desktop Manager: Manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar with this PowerToy.
• Taskbar Magnifier: Use this PowerToy to magnify part of the screen from the taskbar.
• Webcam Timershot: This PowerToy lets you take pictures at specified time intervals from a Webcam connected to your computer and save them to a location that you designate.

Some of the ones that I’ve already enjoyed and played with before are the TweakUI and ALT-TAB Replacement, SyncToy, Power Calculator. The Virtual Desktop Manager seems cool and looks like it might be part of what we were looking for when managing virtual workspaces while working on different client locations or projects.

What are you favorite Windows tweaks and toys. Have you used PowerToys before?

Image: Windows PowerToys icon from the PowerToys website

Post from: EveryJoe

Revisiting Some Windows PowerToys

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 it to never scan when I plug-in the drive. It would really be nice of the "Take no action" selection would be remembered.

Image: Snagit of Windows OS features and autorun.inf file on my machine

Post from: EveryJoe

Customizing and Editing Autorun Settings

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 text that I want to keep.

I can’t just select the chunk on the right and leave the list of text on the right unselected in the document. Or can I?

Did you know if you hold the "ALT" key down while dragging your mouse in a Word document you can select the text that you specifically grab with your mouse and cursor. It doesn’t automatically jump from line to line as you extend your selection.

In the example below I held down "ALT" and then dragged my cursor from the bottom-left corner of the blue box up to the top-right corner of the box to select the text as it’s highlighted.

I then just hit the "DELETE" key and ta-da! I’ve got my list of text on the right that’s ready to be edited, all left alone in their lines of data.

There are a number of times where this has come in handy for me, now that you know it’s possible. Let me know where you’ve used it and how it’s helped you.

Image: Snagit of Word application in Office 2007 suite

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Select Non-Linear Text in a Word Document

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 to share "Full Details", "Availability Only" or "Limited Details". As well as deciding how you’d like to format the display of the calendar for the other person.

In the example below I’ve only shared my availability with no details for the next 7 days to the user. What you see below is embedded into an Outlook message that I can quickly send to someone with the information.

In addition it’s also shared as an .ics attachment so they could open it in their calendar as well.

Pretty nifty wouldn’t you say?

This would come in handy in just about any use, but I think would be really great for people running small businesses and managing their time themselves. A quick way to share their calendar and say, "Let me know what works for you and we’ll book it!"

Image: Snagit of Outlook 2007 calendaring functions

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Share Your Outlook Calendar Availability Quickly

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 the client is probably not going to upgrade everyone to 2007.

Here are some of the suggestions that were received in comments.

• Set "pop-up" to Yes
• resize on load in VB
• Auto-Resize = Yes, Pop Up = Yes, Modal = Yes

Any other suggestions out there?

Image: Snagit of Form Property Sheet Window from Access 2007

Post from: EveryJoe

Access 2007 Forms Sizing Forgotten

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 of the options available in Outlook I’ve discovered how to setup my archiving process to work a little more closely to how I would prefer.

I want to archive my mail by individual client account so that I can immediately jump to the archive folder I’m wanting to review quickly the information that’s stored there. I had originally tried to setup this process in the basic archive rules, but it never seemed to quite work the way I had preferred.

Now I realize that I should have setup the archive settings at the individual folder level which you can achieve by right-clicking on the folder of email you want to archive and then clicking on the "AutoArchive" tab as shown above.

Just select the 3rd radio button "Archive this folder using these settings:" and specify what you want to happen.

The other key benefit of this method for me is that I can archive each client’s email into their own separate archive file in my folder directory structure.

How do you manage your e-mail in Outlook? What tips do you have?

Image: Screen capture from Outlook 2007 by Jason Bean

Post from: EveryJoe

How to Set Folder Level Archive Instructions in Outlook 2007

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 PowerPoint slide – show in edit mode – handy for when you’re making small adjustments and want to see exactly how the finished slide will look
• Smarter Navigation in Word – would you rather scroll up and down by heading instead of pages? This tip shows you how.
• Save Commonly Used Tables – do you present the same types of table data in your documents over and over? This tip shows you how to save your table settings and quickly insert them into future documents.

These are just some of the tips that have been delivered into my Inbox over the last few weeks. You can get tips on Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, Microsoft OneNote and more. I normally keep them handy in a folder and look for them if I ever forget something in the future. They’ve come in very handy.

To sign-up to receive the Microsoft Tips and Tricks Special Delivery Newsletter just click the link and follow the instructions provided.

Post from: EveryJoe

Microsoft Provides Some Great Tips

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:

1. Double-click on the header to open it for editing
2. CTRL+A to select everything in the header
3. F9 to force refresh the fields

After the user does this the correct image displays as expected and the mail merge finishes up beautifully. The only problem is that the user has to perform this manual step each time and increasing the manual steps for a user to complete is never helpful or encouraged whenever it should be possible to eliminate those steps.

Image: Screen capture from Microsoft Word 2007

I know in the configuration of the INCLUDEPICTURE field that there’s the checkbox for "Data not stored with document" which we have checked.

Note: There’s a whole different issue about why the Insert form above isn’t located anywhere near the "Mailings" tab in the UI Ribbon. We won’t go into that though.

The problem again is that I can’t figure out a way to force refresh these fields.

A friend pointed me to this blog entry for Word 2003 Header and Footer Field Refresh for Multiple Section Documents. I thought was going to give me what I was looking for but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

I’ve entered the code in as expected but it’s still not working. Anyone have any ideas? I’ve sent a shout out to a couple of folks that work for Microsoft in their Office and Word groups, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Really looking for an elegant and simple solution to eliminate the manual refresh steps by users.

I posted this question about my INCLUDEPICTURE problem on the Microsoft Community forums.

Post from: EveryJoe

Auto-Refresh INCLUDEPICTURE Field in Word 2007 Mail Merge