Technology for small businesses
I had recently a few requests on creating PDFs, and I thought I would share my thoughts with you.
In our company we almost don’t use Acrobat Destiller or the Acrobat Plug-Ins into Office to create PDFs. We create many PDFs with PDF995 available for free at PDF995.com. It is a two step installer and you will get an advert popping up after each use if you don’t buy it for $9.95, but we like the files it creates. Well working with minimum issues. And fast.
If you are using Windows Vista you know that Vista tries to figure out what kind of files you have in a folder and tries to show them to you in an “optimized” view.
You also probably know that that is not always accurate and that Vista doesn’t always respect your wishes when you change the view.
How about if Vista wouldn’t try to guess anymore?
You can download ExplorerView and disable the automatic content detection to stop Vista from guessing.
101 Fantastic Freebies
PC World Canada has a nice reference of 101 great free services and programs at PC World.
There’s something for everyone.
PC World:
Whether you’re partial to online services or to downloadable software, here’s the Web’s best free stuff and it’ll keep you productive, secure, and entertained.
PC World Canada has a very nice list of free and shareware utilities that can help speed up your PCs.
Just go to PC World to find short descriptions of these utilities and the places where to get them.
You can tell the computer to beep at you when you hit the CAPS LOCK key.
In Windows XP, click the Start button, select the “Control Panel” and then open the “Accessibility Options”.
In the “Keyboard” tab, check the “Use ToggleKeys” box. You may also want to go into the settings beside it and turn off the “Keyboard Shortcut” to it.
In Windows Vista, click the Start button, select “Control Panel” and then click on “Ease of Access” followed by “Change how your keyboard works”.
Select “Turn on Togglekeys” and you may also want to deselect the feature to toggle it by pressing the NUM LOCK for 5 seconds.
Then just confirm everything and you are ready to go.
Most computers in businesses and personal homes still run Windows XP and haven’t been upgraded to Vista.
If yours is one of them, head over to PC World to get a great compilation of tips on how to make it work faster and better to work with.
Internet Explorer asks you if you want to save passwords on webpages; which can be handy, but also dangerous – especially on banking sites. More about that below.
But let’s assume that you decided at some point to not save a password on a non-critical webpage, but now you want to – and Internet Explorer isn’t asking you any more…what to do?
Just go to logicalexpressions.com and follow the instructions and you are ready to go again.
Now, how secure are the stored passwords? Have a look at labnol.org to see – and download some software from there if you need to recover some of your Internet Explorer passwords.
When working in Outlook, and especially when syncing with mobile devices, it can happen that you have duplicate items created. 10 items isn’t a problem, but 100 or more can get tedious to clean manually.
There is software available to help you sort through the duplicates quickly. I have listed four of them below. They range in price from $15 to $30 and differ slightly in operational modes and user interface. They all have trial/demo versions though so you can get a feel for which one you like best.
But don’t forget – always make a backup of yout Outlook .PST file before running any of these programs.
anti-dupe.com
nomoredupes.com
outlook.duplicate-remover.com
duplicatekiller.4team.biz
Update: I just heard about a free program that may work for you: http://www.vaita.com/ODIR.asp
If you work with the Track Changes function in Word, you know that you can’t track the changes if it is not turned on – or can you? If you still have a copy of the original document, you can:
With the edited document open, choose Tools -> Track Changes -> Compare Documents. In the Choose a File dialog box that appears, navigate to the original unedited document and click Open. A new document will appear with every change made between the two documents highlighted or, in Print Layout view, commented. All you have to do now is work on that new document and choose Tools -> Track Changes -> Highlight Changes and be sure that you’ve enabled the Track Changes While Editing option so that any changes you make from now on are also tracked.
If you want to open the network connection list in Vista, it is quite a bit more complicated than it is in XP, where you could just right click Network Connections and click Properties.
In Vista you can go through several clicks in the Control Panel – or you can just type ncpa.cpl in the search field on the Start menu. Press the Enter key and the network connections list appears.
You can also take this one step further and create a shortcut to the network connections list.