34. Choosing the correct dictionary for "spell-check"

This is a problem often encountered. You open a Microsoft Word document sent by email and notice that  words like ‘colour’ or ‘centre’ are given a wiggly red underline.

Obviously Word thinks they are spelled wrongly, and when you right-click the words to look at the suggested spellings, you see ‘color’ and ‘center’. Clearly Word wants to use American spelling, but why? And, more immediately, what to do about it?

The reason is fairly straightforward: Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checkers support many different languages, and you can tell Word that certain parts of a document (anything from a single word to the entire document) are written in, say, French, Spanish or Italian. Word will then consult the appropriate dictionaries when it checks those parts of the document.

The solution is straightforward. Start by pressing Ctrl+A to select all the text in the document. Having done that, look at the status bar running along the bottom of the Word window and you’ll see English (U.S.) (in our subscriber’s case, or perhaps ‘French’ or some other language). Click on English (U.S.) and a ‘Language’ dialog will open. In this dialog, find and select English (U.K.) and click OK. That tells Word to treat the entire document as being written in British English, and all those errant red underlines will disappear.

Incidentally, this tip is worth keeping in mind if you do ever need to type in different languages in Word. Rather than putting up with all those foreign words being marked wrong, just select them, click that ‘Language’ button in the status bar, and select the appropriate language from the list.

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33. Easily copy text from the Internet or an email

I often copy text from web pages when compiling notes for the Interest Groups I organize within the U3A, or indeed for the snippets of advice which appear on this page.

Many times the information on the page from which I am copying contains Hyperlinks (those words which normally appear in blue and are underlined). These hyperlinks are meant to let you move to other pages for additional information, or they may pop-up underlying text etc.

If I were to copy this text into a word processor such as Microsoft Word, these hyperlinks will remain in place but would be of no use as the pages to which they link are still out there on the Internet.

Now you can take the arduous route of removing all these links manually, and if your text comes from Wikipedia this could take some time, or you can easily and simply remove them as you paste the text into Windows' most simple word processor - Notepad.

This tiny program which most of us only use to read .txt files can save a lot of time when copying formatted text from the Internet or indeed from one document to another.

Notepad supports very little formatting so all that italicised, bold, underlined, superscripted, or hyperlinked text will simply become normal text when pasted into Notepad. After the text is all pasted into Notepad you then may copy it into your main word processor and format it as you wish.

This tip can also be used if you want to print out an email. Normally the option to print an email gives you a big coloured Gmail or Hotmail heading and all sorts of other rubbish which wastes ink and paper. By copying just the text you really need into Notepad, you may then print off the information in a simple way, or if you need to format it with bold or underlined words you transfer the text into the word processor of your choice.

32. Add your own words to the dictionary in your word processor

When you’re typing in Microsoft Word or other WPs, you’re probably used to seeing your misspellings underlined in red. These handy red squiggles draw your attention to mistakes, and you can go back and correct them – either by editing them yourself or by right-clicking them and choosing the word you meant to type.

It’s important to note that these red underlines don’t necessarily indicate a mistake, though. More accurately, they indicate that the word you typed doesn’t appear in Microsoft Word’s dictionary, and although it’s a fairly comprehensive dictionary, it certainly doesn’t contain every known word. As a result, all sorts of names and specialised words that you type correctly could be given the red-underline treatment.

A good habit to get into is to add those to Microsoft Word’s dictionary so that it recognises them in future. That way, you’ll notice any words that really were mistyped and – more helpfully – a finished document should always be pleasingly free of red underlines.

Adding words to the dictionary is easy: when Microsoft Word gives them a red underline, just right-click them and choose Add to Dictionary from the context menu. (Make sure you really have typed them correctly before doing this, though!) Straight away, Word will remove the underline from the word you right-clicked and, whenever you type it in future, it will be treated as correct.

You should take great care however as your Word Processor is unlikely to spot words which are actually spelled correctly but used in the wrong way. For instance if you meant to say "tongue" but you typed "tong" your WP will ignore it as it is in itself a correct word.

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31. PC problem preventing access to online banking

If your PC is more than around 5 years old, here’s a problem you may well run into. There are various ways in which you might discover it’s happened, and a friend of mine found out in quite an unusual way. At many of the websites he visited, he saw a message like this:

“There is a problem with this website's security certificate. The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid. Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.”

Effectively, whenever he arrived at a ‘secure’ web page (one whose address starts with ‘https://’), he was being told that the page wasn’t secure at all, and therefore wasn’t to be trusted. The security certificate issued to the website to prove its authenticity had the wrong dates on it: either it had expired, or it didn’t become valid until some future date.

If this happens on just one website, there’s obviously a problem with that site’s security and it’s not to be trusted. However, if every secure website has the same problem, there’s something more unusual going on. I asked him to check the date and time on his PC by holding the mouse over the clock on the taskbar and, sure enough, it was shown as being a little after midnight on 1st January 2003!

This little error prevented him from accessing his online banking page.

This wrong date on his PC is the culprit. When his web browser checked the issue dates of the security certificates at websites he visited, it found that those certificates were not due to become valid until some date well into the future – in other words, well after January 2003 – so it understandably felt there was a security problem with the sites.

This is an unusual and roundabout way of discovering your PC’s date is wrong, as I mentioned earlier. More common ways are to find that every email message you send was seemingly written years ago, or to notice that the clock doesn’t tell the right time (or show the correct date).

The reason this can happen is due to something you may have idly wondered about: how your PC ever knows the correct date and time when it spends so much of its time switched off. The answer is that these details, among others, are stored in a computer chip named the ‘CMOS’ (pronounced see-moss) and a tiny battery powers this chip. When that CMOS battery is on its last legs, one of the symptoms is that it loses track of the date and time. You’ll either start seeing very erratic dates and times or you’ll find the time set to midnight on 1st January of some long-past year.

The CMOS battery is a little disc-shaped battery of the type used in watches, and it generally has a lifetime of 5–10 years. If you discover that your own PC’s CMOS battery needs replacing, it’s a cheap part to buy, and a quick and easy job for someone who knows their way around the innards of a PC.

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30. Prevent Word Turning Web Addresses into Links

Here’s a tip from the ‘Daft Features of Microsoft Word’ department (and a busy department that is!). When you type a web or email address into a Word document, you’ll find that Word turns it into a hyperlink. In other words, the address turns blue and gains an underline. It also behaves like a hyperlink, more or less: if you hold down the Ctrl key and click that link, you’ll be whisked to the web page in question (or, for an email address, a blank email window will open).

What’s daft about this? Well, I suppose daftness is in the eye of the beholder, but since Word is mainly used for writing documents that will be printed, and you can’t click a hyperlink on paper, those addresses might as well be left as you typed them.

If you find this behaviour as daft as I do, there are three ways to prevent those addresses being turned into links:

Method 1: Undo the change
When you type the address, and then type a space or punctuation symbol or press the Enter key to start a new paragraph, that’s when Word converts the address to a link. As soon as it does that, press Ctrl+Z to undo the change and revert to ordinary text.

Method 2: Convert to plain text
If Word has already created a hyperlink in one of your documents, right-click that link and choose Remove Hyperlink from the context menu that appears.

Method 3: Turn off the feature entirely
This is what I always do in Word, because I never want blue hyperlinks in documents. Follow the appropriate steps for your version of Word:

Word 2010/2007: In Word 2010, click the blue File tab followed by Options; in Word 2007, click the circular Office button and then Word Options. Click the Proofing item on the left, then the AutoCorrect Options button, and select the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Remove the tick beside Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, then click OK in both windows.

Word 2003/2002: Go to Tools > AutoCorrect Options, switch to the AutoFormat As You Type tab and remove the tick beside Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, then click OK.

(With thanks to PC Tips for Seniors)

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29. In praise of the iPad

Ever since the iPad was announced I have been telling people that it is not for me, it is just a large iPod Touch, it won’t run MS Office applications etc. etc. Add to that the number of my colleagues who have bought an iPad then spent the next few weeks trying to turn it into a Windows mini-PC by buying apps to liaise with MS Office, apps to make it print, methods of adding storage, and any other thing you can think of to change the product from what it was designed to be.

I did however want a tablet PC for its size, portability, etc.

Whilst preparing for our seasonal migration to England I was looking for a better method of connecting to the Internet than the Vodafone-type dongle we used previously. Living in the countryside, on a caravan park without our own telephone landline poses connectivity problems and our Internet connection has to be via a mobile phone network. Of the major networks we found Three to be the best for 3G in the area where we live in the Yorkshire Dales. O2's phone connection is good but they do not recommend using their network for the Internet.

Looking through the options on Three's website I found that they offer a laptop or iPad as a means of connecting to their 3G network. This gave me the push I needed and with a large chunk of mental rationalisation I went for the iPad-3, 32GB, 3G model. It costs me £25 per month and is like a mobile phone contract. I stay with Three for the two year contract, and included in the charge is 15GB of Internet traffic per month and no initial charge for the iPad itself. (In Spain I had been paying 34 Euros per month for only 10GB of traffic from Vodafone and this does not include an iPad although it does include a wireless router). There are lots of pros and cons to argue about the cost of the contract in the UK but over 2 years I am happy to pay for this solution.

And so to the iPad itself. It is just a joy to use. I read all the pitfalls before I decided to buy it so was well prepared for the things it will not do. For instance it has only 32GB of on board storage which nets down to about 27GB after the operating system etc. This storage can not be increased neither can you insert a memory stick or card. By modern day standards this is not a lot but you have to remember what the iPad is for.

I would not use it as my only computer. It works extremely well as a supplementary PC as long as you have another one at home on which to store your large amounts of data, films, music etc. 

What it is though is a very stylish and easy-to-use portable device on which you can create documents and spreadsheets, receive emails, navigate using SatNav, surf the net, take photographs and short videos, talk to people via Skype, play games (if you really want to, but not on mine whilst I breathe), read books in PDF, Kindle, or epub formats, read newspapers, watch films, listen to music (it is a full blown iPod), and view your favourite photographs. It will act as a Wi-Fi hotspot so that you can connect other PCs to the Internet. It is a fully functional iPod. You can watch full length films on it. It is instantly "on" when you open the case or slide the unlock icon on the screen and a full charge will give you up to 10 hours of use. The display is the best display you will ever see. I don’t let the lack of storage become a drawback as films, music, books, or other data may be removed when not required and replaced by other data as you would with any other portable device.

Applications for it are either free or are usually quite cheap. Apple produce their own version of a mobile Office Suite which produces files which may be saved as Microsoft compatible files. Compatibility is not 100% as some of the clever things which may be created in Pages (the word processor) will not work in MS Word. However the finished document can easily be saved direct from the iPad as a PDF document thereby keeping all that clever formatting. The spreadsheet application is called Numbers and to date I have not really given it a thorough workout but I expect great things from it. Both applications come with a huge supply of templates so that you can begin to easily create beautiful looking documents or spreadsheets from the off. Total cost for both apps is less than 14 quid.

Both of these major apps have their detractors but what doesn't. Some of the comments I have read are from people who have bought an iPad and are expecting it to act like a full blown desktop PC. Get real! If you want all the bells and whistles of MS Word then pay the price for MS Office (about £170) and there they will be. All of this extra functionality (and there is not really much extra you can do in Word) can then be used on a net book if you want portability.

From all this it may be gathered that I have been converted to being a fan of the iPad. I would like to become a fan of Apple overall as I also love the iPod and iPhone but alas their computers are outside my price range at present. Add to that the fact that my friends in Spain who I teach in our Computer Group are all on MS Windows then it becomes less of a viable move.

If the lottery comes up then blow it, I will have both. 

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28. How to avoid unwanted downloads whilst installing software

There’s a particular type of question I often hear which goes something like this:

“I was updating my favourite anti virus program and have ended up with a new browser and search engine. Where did all this come from, and how do I get rid of it?”

In many cases, these unexpected extras do indeed make changes to your web browser’s settings, changing your home page or search page to something you didn’t (and wouldn’t) choose yourself. The reason they do this is a simple one: money. Every time someone arrives at their home page or search page, they make a few pennies. But, since few of us would choose to visit those pages (indeed, wouldn’t even know of their existence), they sneak their software onto as many PCs as they can, causing our browser’s settings to be altered and forcing us to visit those pages regularly – perhaps numerous times every day.

Whatever it is that’s sneaked onto your PC and started doing this, it can be removed. However, the steps to take for removing it will vary depending on what it is, and could be quite complicated, so I can’t give you any general steps. What I can do, though, is to tell you how to avoid this type of thing in the first place.

These sneaky extras usually arrive when you’re installing some other program. Often without realising it, you’re agreeing to install this unrelated ‘extra’ along with the program you really wanted, so pay attention to these three simple tips:

•  When you’re about to click the button or link that downloads the program you want, have a quick look around it to see if there are any ticked boxes nearby. You may see an option saying something like Also include Such-and-Such in my download or Set Such-and-Such as my browser’s home page and search page. If you see anything along those lines, remove the ticks before starting the download.

 •  When you’re working through the steps to install a new program, don’t be tempted to just click Next, Next, Next to rush through it. You may be rushing past a ticked option that effectively says ‘Yes, muck up my browser settings for me.’

 •  When you start to install a program, look out for an option that offers a choice between a Custom installation and a Full, Typical or Complete installation. If you see this, always choose the Custom option. This way, if the program you’re installing does come with an unrelated, undesirable extra, you should see a step asking whether you want to install it. While the Full/Typical/Complete option may seem preferable, it gives the setup program carte blanche to install extras without asking you.

 Incidentally, don’t be swayed by the fact that some of these ‘extras’ involve a well-known name. I’ve installed many programs which, along the way, ask if I also want to install Google’s Chrome web browser or a McAfee security scanner. The fact that these extras come from big, famous companies doesn’t mean you want them!

(With thanks to PC Tips for Seniors)

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