61. Print your document pages in the correct order

Most printers – especially home inkjets – print onto the side of the paper that faces upwards. So, if you’re printing a multi-page document, the first page emerges face up, then the second page lands on top of it, and so on. At the end, you have a pile of sheets with page 1 on the bottom and the last page on top, and then you have to deal them out from top to bottom to reverse their order. Wouldn’t it be helpful if they could be printed in the correct order – from last page to first page – to save this bother?

Well, in Microsoft Word they can. It just takes a quick change to one of Word’s options and your documents will always be printed this way:

* Word 2013/2010: click the File tab and choose Options. At the left of the window that opens, click Advanced. Scroll down to the ‘Print’ section and tick the box beside Print pages in reverse order, then click OK.

* Word 2007: click the circular Office button and then click Word Options. At the left of the window that opens, click Advanced. Scroll down to the ‘Print’ section and tick the box beside Print pages in reverse order, then click OK.

* Word 2003/2002: choose Tools > Options and select the Print tab in the window that opens. Tick the box beside Reverse print order and then click OK. 

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60. Windows 7, a long goodbye

It’s been with us for over four years now, but Windows 7 is just starting to bid us farewell. Microsoft announced in December 2013 that it’s no longer selling Windows 7 at retail. In other words, you can’t nip into a computer store and buy a boxed copy of Windows 7 to install.

The same announcement also included the news that Windows 7 would cease to be sold with new PCs after October 2014, but apparently that was a mistake. Microsoft is now saying that the date for this is ‘to be determined’.

Whatever the actual dates, the time has come for Windows 7 to bow out. However, like all Windows-related goodbyes, this one will take a long time. If you use Windows 7 and you can’t be tempted away from it by Windows 8, Microsoft is going to continue supporting it and supplying regular updates for it until 2020.

But perhaps that isn’t going to matter. Perhaps you could be tempted away from Windows 7 after all. You may not have been enticed by Windows 8, and you may have turned your nose up at the improvements brought by Windows 8.1, but the word is that Windows 8.2 is going to be a more attractive proposition. Two little snippets have just been leaked by Microsoft insiders:

?The new-style Windows 8 apps, which currently occupy your entire screen when you use them, will be able to run in ordinary windows on the desktop, just like all the other programs we’ve been using for donkey’s years.

?Having brought back the Start button in Windows 8.1, Microsoft will bring back the much-missed Start menu in Windows 8.2.

If these two rumours do turn out to be true, it will be hard to find any reason to stick with Windows 7. The implication is that Windows 8.2 could have everything we know and like about Windows 7, coupled with some clearer thinking about the newer elements of the system.  

From PC Tips for Seniors www.pcforseniors.co.uk.

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59. A Great Application to use with your Kindle

Everywhere I go now there are people sitting on beaches or by the pool or at airports etc. reading their latest book on a Kindle. In a previous article I showed you how to transfer books from your PC to your Kindle using the built-in File Management software on your PC.

All of this is still valid but there is another much easier way to transfer books straight onto a Kindle, and maybe rename them or change the cover picture etc.

I speak here of Kindle books which you may have been given or have downloaded from the Internet, NOT those you purchase from Amazon as the latter are transferred to your Kindle on demand.

There are many types of ebooks out there on the Internet and they have different extensions to their file names. Files with extensions .mobi and .prc are already compatible with the Kindle whilst the other main category is the .epub extension which cannot be used directly.

Now if you search out and download a programme called Calibre, a genuinely free piece of software (although they welcome small contributions to help with their development) which will keep all of your books together, enable editing of their titles or cover pictures, and will also translate books with a .epub extension into a .mobi book allowing it to be read on the Kindle.

Full instructions come with the download of the software and it is simplicity itself to install and use. One of its beauties is that it recognizes when you have your Kindle plugged in to the PC and when you want to send a book to the Kindle you click on its title in Calibre then click on a button at the top which says “Send to Device” and the transfer is done for you.

I have several collections of books by my favourite authors and obviously the titles don’t necessarily follow on from one another. I rename my books so that they display in the correct order. For example, my books by Peter Robinson about Inspector Banks, the detective in Yorkshire, I rename them with the prefix “Banks 01.....”, “Banks 02......” etc.

These titles are then transferred to the Kindle along with the book allowing easy finding of a book in a particular series or genre. 

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58. The Crypto Locker Virus

Ever since I have been running the U3A Computer Skills Group I have emphasised the need for a solid backup of essential data on our computers. It is very important that data and software can be recovered and re-installed should the worst happen and your hard drive fails, somebody deletes important bits of your operating system, or as is happening more and more frequently your PC becomes infected with one of the latest viruses called Ransom Ware. In this the virus can completely encrypt your entire PC then you will receive a message asking for money to de-encrypt it. THIS IS NOT A JOKE OR A RUMOUR, IT HAPPENS AND THERE IS NO SOLUTION. Even paying the ransom is no guarantee that your data will be released. The virus deletes itself after encrypting your data so there is no use trying to find and destroy it, the damage is done and the de-encryption key is the only thing which will cure the problem. Even the mighty Kaspersky company say that the encryption key is unbreakable.

Not only does your internal hard drive become encrypted but every externally attached drive which is switched on, and even your networked colleagues or Home Group who are attached to you when the virus strikes will be affected.


The way to avoid this happening is quite simple, do not open attachments or links in emails unless you are rock-sure of the validity and source of the email.
 
This is, I admit, a very glib answer. Who amongst us has not clicked on an inviting looking link or attachment and it is mainly good luck that we have not been infected with some sort of virus. The rule however still holds true.

If the worst does happen then obviously you are not going to hand over money to some crook who has just screwed up your PC in the hope that he does not do a runner, leaving you in the mucky stuff. Now is the time to reinstall your entire system from that emergency backup we discussed earlier. What do you mean you haven’t got one?

If you look at the Computer Skills Group, page on the U3A website there is a link at the bottom of the page to detailed instructions on how to create both a complete backup of your system disk, AND an emergency recovery disc from which you can reboot your PC then go on to re-install all of your software and data.

It is not too difficult and needs only basic skills. The instructions are detailed and advice on where to download the necessary applications is included.

DON’T GET CAUGHT OUT - DO IT NOW.

For more information and help Google "Cryptolocker Virus"

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57. Easily Select a Large Quantity of Text

When you’re trying to select text in a long document, the usual way of doing it is by swiping over it with the mouse. You move the mouse to the left of the first word, press and hold the left mouse button and drag downwards until you’ve highlighted what you want.

As long as you can see both the beginning and the end of the text you want to select, this method works a treat. But what if the end of the text is somewhere below the bottom of the window? In this case, as you drag the mouse downwards, the whole document suddenly shoots upwards at an alarming rate and you find you’ve selected reams of extra text!

Here’s the trick to doing this in a more-controlled way. Start by clicking to the left of the text you want to select, so that the cursor is flashing beside it. Then (taking care not to click anywhere else in the text), scroll down to find the end of the text you want to select. When you can see it, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click to the right of the last word (or punctuation mark). When you do this, all the text between your first and second clicks becomes selected.

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56. How strong are your online passwords?

You may have read that the online systems of the major software company Adobe were hacked recently.

The hackers got away with the account details of 38 million Adobe users, and that’s an awful lot of passwords. Or is it?

Well, no, the actual number of passwords seems to be disappointingly small, because so many people were using the same easily-guessable passwords.

When the stolen data began appearing on hacker websites, a security researcher named Jeremi Gosney analysed it to see what he could learn about users’ password choices. The top choice, picked by almost two million Adobe users, is '123456’. And amazingly, the third most popular choice was the word ‘password’. The list also includes such gems as 'qwerty’, ‘000000’ and ‘iloveyou’. A notable feature of this Top 20 list is that not one of these passwords includes a capital letter or a symbol. In fact, the entire Top 100 passwords contains not a single uppercase letter or symbol.

The research revealed another interesting fact. Adobe allowed its users to set a so-called ‘password hint’ – a clue to the password – with the intention that if you’d forgotten your password, you could have the hint displayed as a reminder. Apparently, the majority of Adobe users had simply typed their password itself as the hint, thus cheerfully allowing their passwords to be displayed to any passer-by who wanted to know them.

The lessons to be learned from this security breach and others like it are straightforward. First, if you use the passwords ‘123456’, ‘qwerty’ or ‘password’ for anything at all, you might as well not have a password! Second, if you use the ‘password hint’ option to re-enter your password itself, rather than just an oblique clue to it, you don’t really have a password at all. And third, however simple a password you choose, throwing in a capital letter or a symbol (+, *, %, $, etc.) immediately takes your password out of the Top 100 and makes it far less guessable. Be aware however that simply substituting symbols for characters in popular words is the next worse case. Any hacker worth his keystrokes will have no trouble with ’Pa$$word’ ‘He110’ or ‘HarryP0tt3r’, so be careful.


The fourth lesson, unfortunately, is that the first three lessons don’t seem to be getting through!   

55. JPEG, Bitmap, GIF, PNG – What’s the Difference?

In most areas of technology, whenever a fight starts there tends to be just one winner. For instance, remember the battle for video-recorder dominance back in the 1980s between Betamax and VHS? They slugged it out for a while, VHS won, and Betamax slunk off to its corner. In computing, though, everything can be a winner as long as it has some modicum of usefulness. Prime examples of this are picture files, which you can save in a confusing variety of ways.

Whenever you save a picture in a picture-editing program, you’ll regularly choose between the ‘Big Four’ file formats mentioned in the title of this item, and perhaps a few others that don’t really matter. But what’s the difference between them, and which should you use?

Bitmap: this is the simplest type of picture file. Every individual dot of colour that makes up your picture is saved into the file in a long stream of numbers. The file isn’t compressed (you’ll see the significance of this in a moment), so a bitmap file can be huge. Let’s say you take a photo with a 5-megapixel camera, load it into a picture editor and save it as a bitmap (a file with a .BMP extension): that file will be about 16 MB. It’s big, but it’s an absolutely faithful copy of what you see on the screen.

JPEG: this is a file with a .JPG extension, and it’s the most common format for photos and any other pictures with true-to-life colour. The difference between a JPEG and a bitmap is that a JPEG is compressed: if you load that same 5-megapixel photo into a picture editor and then save it as a JPEG file, the file you get will be under 1 MB. That’s tiny compared to the high-quality bitmap, but there’s a reason it’s so small: the JPEG format uses ‘lossy’ compression.

The word ‘lossy’ is one that probably looks quite technical, but it’s actually another of those slightly-silly computing words. It really does mean that you lose something – there’s a loss. What you lose with JPEG is some of the fine detail in the photo, so the quality isn’t as good as that of the bitmap. And if you repeatedly edit a picture, save it as a JPEG, edit it again, and save it as a JPEG again, you’ll lose more and more detail each time.

GIF: here’s a spot of welcome relief – if you’re editing photos, you don’t care about GIF! It’s mainly used for hand-drawn artwork, such as cartoons and logos.

PNG: in case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced ‘ping’, and it’s a lovely file format. It’s a little like JPEG, in that it’s compressed, but that compression is ‘lossless’. You can probably guess what that means: none of the detail is removed from your picture. Returning to that 5-megapixel photo which ended up as a 16 MB bitmap (or a 1 MB JPEG with its quality reduced), a PNG version should be a little under 4 MB and will look just as good as the bitmap.

Most digital cameras save their photos as JPEG files, and that’s as a trade-off between quality and size. The quality won’t be quite as good as it could be, but that powerful compression means you can take and store lots of photos. If you copy those photos to your PC and keep them as they are, unedited, it’s fine to leave them as JPEG files.

But if you’re serious about photography and you use a photo-editing program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel PaintShop Pro, then a better choice is to use PNG throughout editing and keep it at the end. The lovely thing about PNG is that it covers all bases: it retains all the quality of the original, so it’s fine for editing, but it’s nicely compressed so it doesn’t take up a huge amount of disk space.


From PC Tips for Seniors www.pcforseniors.co.uk.
(c) PC Tips for Seniors

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