MacValley Users Group Tips

NAVIGATIONAL BUTTONS

INTERMEDIATE TIPS
• If you have an ISP that doesn't offer nationwide access via local or 800 numbers and you tend to be on the road fairly often, it may be worth your while to get an AOL account. No, this doesn't mean that you have to ditch your current ISP and use AOL as your provider (and thus be forced to wade through mountains of SPAM in order to get to your real mail). Keep both accounts and when you're on the road, log into the local AOL number, launch your regular email client, and check in as usual. Your email client will search across the web for your regular ISP's POP server and download your email (using AOL as a conduit) to the email client.
Note: AOL won't relay outgoing mail through its service. In other words, you can't route outgoing messages through AOL to your ISP for subsequent delivery.
• There are times when it's nice to have two Microsoft Word 98 documents open, side by side - when you're comparing two versions of a document, for example. Problem is that when documents are placed side by side, your monitor may not be wide enough to display the text of both open documents - invariably you wind up shrinking the windows so that the right side of the text is hidden. Fortunately there's a workaround for these situations.
From Word 98's Tools menu, select Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, select the View tab, if it's not already selected, and then click the Wrap to window option that appears at the bottom of the dialog box. Click the OK button and you'll see that the text in both document windows now wraps to the right edge of the window (and will resize if you expand either window). Fear not, if you print these documents, they will print using the normal margins - this variety of word wrap is for display purposes only.
• Apple's made big improvements to the Mac OS over the years but regrettably, most Open and Save dialog boxes have benefited little from these improvements. Like those who came before you, you must manually dig through folders to navigate within these dialog boxes. Unless, of course, you use St. Clair Software's $25 shareware control panel, Default Folder.
This very popular piece of shareware provides you with four buttons that allow you to navigate quickly through your Mac's folders. Using Default Folder you can determine where you want each application to save files as well as maintain a list of favorite and recently accessed folders. Additionally, you can click on an open window in the Finder to have that window's directory displayed in an Open or Save dialog box. You can also get info on a file or folder from within one of these dialog boxes. Default Folder 3.0.5 can be found at http://www.macdownload.com.
• Those with the new "ROM in RAM" Macs may have noticed that after awhile their computers take longer to start up - a couple of flashing folders appear before the Mac gets around to starting the march of icons. This can happen after you've reset the Mac's PRAM or installed the iMac Firmware Update 1.0. To eliminate this delay, simply open the Startup Disk control panel and click on the internal drive (yup, even if it's already selected).

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			INTERMEDIATE TIPS • If you have an ISP that doesn't offer nationwide access via local or 800 numbers and you tend to be on the road fairly often, it may be worth your while to get an AOL account. No, this doesn't mean that you have to ditch your current ISP and use AOL as your provider (and thus be forced to wade through mountains of SPAM in order to get to your real mail). Keep both accounts and when you're on the road, log into the local AOL number, launch your regular email client, and check in as usual. Your email client will search across the web for your regular ISP's POP server and download your email (using AOL as a conduit) to the email client. Note: AOL won't relay outgoing mail through its service. In other words, you can't route outgoing messages through AOL to your ISP for subsequent delivery. • There are times when it's nice to have two Microsoft Word 98 documents open, side by side - when you're comparing two versions of a document, for example. Problem is that when documents are placed side by side, your monitor may not be wide enough to display the text of both open documents - invariably you wind up shrinking the windows so that the right side of the text is hidden. Fortunately there's a workaround for these situations. From Word 98's Tools menu, select Preferences. In the resulting dialog box, select the View tab, if it's not already selected, and then click the Wrap to window option that appears at the bottom of the dialog box. Click the OK button and you'll see that the text in both document windows now wraps to the right edge of the window (and will resize if you expand either window). Fear not, if you print these documents, they will print using the normal margins - this variety of word wrap is for display purposes only. • Apple's made big improvements to the Mac OS over the years but regrettably, most Open and Save dialog boxes have benefited little from these improvements. Like those who came before you, you must manually dig through folders to navigate within these dialog boxes. Unless, of course, you use St. Clair Software's $25 shareware control panel, Default Folder. This very popular piece of shareware provides you with four buttons that allow you to navigate quickly through your Mac's folders. Using Default Folder you can determine where you want each application to save files as well as maintain a list of favorite and recently accessed folders. Additionally, you can click on an open window in the Finder to have that window's directory displayed in an Open or Save dialog box. You can also get info on a file or folder from within one of these dialog boxes. Default Folder 3.0.5 can be found at http://www.macdownload.com. • Those with the new "ROM in RAM" Macs may have noticed that after awhile their computers take longer to start up - a couple of flashing folders appear before the Mac gets around to starting the march of icons. This can happen after you've reset the Mac's PRAM or installed the iMac Firmware Update 1.0. To eliminate this delay, simply open the Startup Disk control panel and click on the internal drive (yup, even if it's already selected). Beginner Tips Power User Tips Tips Main Page Product Reviews