The Help Desk

Working with e-mail attachments

Eileen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:13:42 +0000

A big mistake people often making in working with Outlook e-mail attachments is, working directly on the attachment instead of saving it first. Yes, it’s a few more steps, but I have actually had clients lose hours of work by making this one mistake. If you have the attachment open, then click off of it onto another e-mail task, you will get a warning message. Ignore that warning at your own peril! The correct procedure is as follows:

1. Save the attachment into a folder, i.e., “Documents”
2. Open it separately and make your changes.
3. Re-attach it to your reply e-mail or to a new e-mail.

If this happens to you, it’s possible to recover your changes, but it’s not guaranteed. Be safe: work on your attached documents separately and save yourself a big headache!

CCleaner for a quick troubleshoot

Eileen — Thu, 13 May 2010 03:09:16 +0000

I recommend Piriform’s CCleaner program as a one-stop troubleshooting step for slow performance. This handy program will find and get rid of trash and temporary files and is completely customizable. Run it regularly to maintain your machine, then run the Registry Cleaner afterward. Be sure to back up your registry first – it gives you this option before the cleaning begins.

The best part about CCleaner is that it is free! Try it at the following link:

CCleaner Download

Edit a Word document from within Print Preview

Eileen — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:13:24 +0000

This is one I did not know – you can actually edit a Word document while in Print Preview! If you click the Magnifier icon in the Print Preview toolbar, it will change back to the I-beam for editing. Any edits you make will be retained when you go back to the regular view. Just click the Magnifier icon again to get the Zoom function back.

Pin a fave to your Recent Documents list in Office 2007

Eileen — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:40:19 +0000

This applies to any Microsoft Office 2007 “recent document” list. You do, of course, know that by hitting the Office Button (the “marble,” the magic button, the round logo at the top left), you can view many useful menus including the Recent Documents list? (In previous versions, it was under the File menu.) This is a very handy shortcut to pull up the last few documents you’ve viewed in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Office 2007 has really improved this little feature with the ability to “pin” something there permanently. If there is a document you don’t want pushed down to the bottom or dropping off of this list, you can click on the little pushpin icon to the right of each document title. This will keep the document on the list permanently, thus providing you a quick and handy shortcut to your most-used documents.

Windows 7 installed

Eileen — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 03:05:25 +0000

I recently installed Windows 7 on my desktop, on which I previously had Windows XP SP3. The installation went really well with hardly a hiccup. Since I couldn’t upgrade, I was forced to not only clean up my hard drive, but to back up its contents as well (which I highly recommend YOU do!). I bought a 1 TB external drive which now backs up nightly. 1 TB is 1,000 GB, which is an insane amount of space that I doubt I will ever fill up.

I did have two issues pop up: my old Visioneer scanner was not supported, so was not installed during the upgrade. Surprisingly, my old Lexmark Z11 printer was supported, but it didn’t work right away. With some tweaking and some web searches, I got both devices to work with the brand-new OS.

So far everything has worked VERY well, even my old programs which I continue to install as needed. I have to say that I like Windows 7 very much and it’s the first operating system I have ever pre-ordered. Congratulations to Microsoft for a great job on this one.

The Help Desk Blog

Eileen — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:51:41 +0000

This blog is to offer help with computer problems and questions. I do this for a living and on the side, and just thought I would try out connecting this to my WebCastle site for interest. Please submit your computer question or problem within the Comments, and I will do my best to help!

Eileen