FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  220 (13/07/00)

CHANGE OF STYLE

Windows 98 lists my files with dates as month/day/year instead of our usual day/month/year system. Can I change this? 

Harry Ashworth

A nice easy one to begin with. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel and click on the Regional Settings icon, select the Date tab, click on the Short Date Style drop-down menu and select ‘dd/MM/yy’.

SHRINK TO FIT

My daughter recently got married and I want to send photographs of the happy day to all our friends by email. I have tried scanning the photos, saving them to a file in My Documents, and sending the file as an attachment, but this takes ages. Can you help? Is there an extremely user-friendly software package I could buy? My computer does have WinZip, but I'm uncertain how to use it. Please help this very proud, but electronically challenged mother of the bride!

 Jo Rogers

It sounds as though your scanner is saving images as bitmap (extension *.bmp) files by default; these are very large and can easily run to several megabytes, which is far too large to send over the Internet. The solution is to ‘compress’ the file; the most widely used image file compression scheme for Internet use is JPEG (file extension *.jpg), which can reduce an image file by a factor of 10 or more, without any significant loss of quality. If your scanner has the option (check the Help file) change the format it saves files to *.jpg, or open the image file in a paint program like ACDSee (available as shareware from sites like www.tucows.com) and use ‘Save As’ to save it as a *.jpg file.

ICON GRABBER

I have spent some time trying to work out how to print a toolbar icon in a Word document - I am trying to create a ‘How To’ sheet. For example a copy of the chart icon in Excel would be very useful in my How to Sheet in Word.  I know Alt + Print Screen prints the whole screen but how do you print just a single Icon?

Linda Fawthrop

You can easily ‘grab’ individual icon from a Windows folder with a program like Icon Collector. (The chart icon you are looking for can be found in: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office). This excellent little program is freeware, very easy to use and available from www.jumbo.com; it’s quite small (480kb) and only takes a few minutes to download.

TANGLED WEB

Beginner here, so not very technical.  If I've got an interesting part of a page in a website, how do I manage to print just that bit? What usually happens is that the wretched thing goes back to the beginning and I get a load of guff that I don't want.

Pam Waller

The simplest method is to highlight the text or image you want to print then press Ctrl + C to copy it to the Clipboard, if it’s text open your word processor, or Windows WordPad, for an image use Paint, then press Ctrl + V to paste the item into an open document or desktop, you can then print it in the usual way. Some browsers have a facility to ‘switch off’ graphics and banners etc., but you may still end up with bits of the web page you don’t want.

FIRE CONTROL

I recently purchased a Sony DCP-3 digital camcorder. With it came a brochure showing different accessories you could buy. One was a lead to connect camera to your computer and download your films for editing. I purchased a lead from a Sony shop but then found I couldn’t connect it to my computer because it doesn’t have a ‘FireWire socket’. When I asked in a local store about adaptors or kit to install on my computer, I was told that because it is new technology there is nothing available. I was wondering if you could help me out, as I have a lot of digital films I want to edit.

Graham Parker

That shop assistant was talking a load of old twaddle. However, before you go any further make sure your PC is up to the job of video editing. It should be a reasonably recent model with a fast Pentium or Pentium class processor (400MHz or better), lots of RAM (at least 64Mb) and masses of hard disc space (preferably 8Gb or more). If so you can go ahead and fit a FireWire DV editing card. Prices start at around £100 for cards like the Pyro 1394DV and DataVision DV capture, all cards come with editing software to get you started. However, it’s a quite a business so it’s a good idea to read up on the subject first; magazines like Computer Video will give you a good insight into what’s involved, and places to buy the bits you will need.

ALL WRAPPED UP

Is there a way that text can be wrapped around a picture using Microsoft Word in the same way that it can be done when drafting a web page using FrontPage 2000?
Ken Cardy

Have your document on screen and change to Print Layout (or Page Layout in Word 97) on the View menu and place the cursor roughly where you want the picture to go in the text. Right-click into an empty area of the tool bar and on the drop-down menu that appears choose Picture. The Picture toolbar appears, click on the first Picture icon, locate the image, click Insert then resize and position it as necessary on the page. Next, select the Text Wrapping icon (fourth from the left) and choose the wrapping style, resize or reposition the image to get the effect you require.

INSTALLING TWEAK

I have recently downloaded MS PowerToys and Tweak UI for Windows 95 in the hope that removing programs in future may be accomplished without problems.  I am now unsure how to use these features. The PowerToys are installed on the hard drive and their icons show in My Computer.  Have they been automatically added to Win 95 and become active when using Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel or do they have to be separately selected? 

Laurie Taylor

Strictly speaking Tweak UI and the rest of the PowerToys suite of programs are desktop customisation utilities, in other words they change the way Windows looks and works, without you having to delve into the Registry. You would be better off with a program like CleanSweep or Undelete to tidy up your hard disc. To install a particular PowerToy, Tweak UI say, open the folder where they’re kept and look for the *.inf file associated with the program (i.e. Tweakui.inf), right-click on it and select Install from the drop down menu. Tweak UI will then be automatically installed in Control Panel. Other PowerToys without an *.inf file, like ‘Clock’ can be run from the program’s *.exe file, which you can right click on and send to the desktop, or drag and drop into the Start Up folder (Start > Programs) so that it starts when you boot up Windows.