Windows Tools, Help & Guides

The other day I was asked by my boss to convert our product sheets to editable word documents for translation purposes. Now I am somewhat reluctant to let other people mess with my design. Especially if they have no idea about design or layout in general. My biggest concern is that they are going to somehow mess up the design or product photos (which is quite easy to do in Word). In situations like these I normally ask for the translated text in a word document and paste it in myself, making sure everything looks as it should. This time however I remembered an old trick, the Page header.

The page Header (or Footer) allows you to place layout items in a locked layer behind your word document, not just for header (or footer) text, page numbering, company name etc. but also background images, text blocks and so on.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are using a smaller Laptop (netbook etc.) you are facing the problem (or should I say challenge) of  low screen resolution.

The lack of space (on your screen)  makes it difficult to see all the information you want at all times. I use my netbook as my primary email and communication computer. Mostly because of its handy size and portability. The resolution is a mere 1024x600px which is to say at least not very High-Res. When it comes to using programs like Outlook, Word etc. with large ribbons or toolbars, the space available for work is, somewhat limited.

Luckily Office has one feature that gives me a bit more space for my chores: Temporarily hiding the Ribbons   Read the rest of this entry »

We talk a lot about Windows 32 and 64-bit around here. If you’ve purchased a PC from the shelf, there’s every chance you don’t know whether it’s running 32 or 64-bit Windows. Most computers sold today come with 64-bit Windows installed (needed to utilize >3GB RAM, which is now commonplace in standard PCs); here’s how you can check for yourself:

Read the rest of this entry »

A while back we looked at how could disable IE9’s GPU rendering abilities.

As other browsers in the market are yet to fully catch up to Microsoft in this arena, GPU rendering or acceleration will likely not be enabled by default.

If you use Google Chrome and it’s at version 8 or above (Wrench > About Google Chrome) and your hardware can support it, GPU acceleration and rendering can be enabled.

This Quick Tip is going to show you how.

Read the rest of this entry »

So InPrivate Filtering has had a dose of steroids and changed its name (confusingly) to Tracking Protection. Tracking Protection helps protect users from being tracked online by blocking third-party content such as images, text & cookies. By importing a Tracking Protection List (much in the same way we used to import .xml files with pre-defined filters in IPF for IE8) we can better lock down our privacy and rid ourselves of ads.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we bring you a quick tip with which you may or may not be familiar. On it’s own, this tip isn’t useful but this is a supporting guide for tutorials where you’re told to change a file extension without any explanation of how to show the extension (disabled by default in Vista and 7) in the first place.

This guide will show you how to show file extensions in Windows XP and Windows Vista/7.

Read the rest of this entry »