Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P29 doc

Curing Some Evils with System Restore 254 When you enable System Restore, it automatically creates a restore point every day, just as a snapshot of your up-and-running machine. It also creates a restore point any time you add a new device driver, receive an automatic update from Microsoft, or install certain new applications. In my office, I make it a point to manually record a restore point any time I am about to significantly change settings or install a new program. Sometimes this results in a duplicate restore point — my manual point plus the one automatically created in certain circumstances; as far as I’m con- cerned the duplication is no big deal. I’d rather have a pair of rescue rafts than none. System Restore works only with NFTS-formatted disks, which is the current drive standard. It doesn’t protect drives with FAT32 and earlier FAT file systems. When good intentions go bad This section’s main title indicates that System Restore can cure “some” evils. Alas, the utility isn’t perfect. System Restore doesn’t copy every single system file, and sometimes the one that goes bad isn’t included. You can restore all you want and not fix the problem. Another situation that can arise: Something goes wrong with one or more of your system files while the machine is running, and you keep using it for a while before realizing you need to go back in time. In certain circumstances, your system may endure some additional changes (or even corruption) after the most recent restore point. How to defend? Backup, backup, and backup. Don’t rely on your machine to always be there for you; make copies of essential data files on a regular basis and store them on external drives or disks. Restoring your system settings Follow these steps to use System Restore: 1. Save any open files and close all programs. 2. Make sure you have current backups of essential data files. 3. Click the Windows icon. 4. Choose All Programs ➪ System Tools ➪ System Restore. Alternately, you can go to Control Panel, click the System icon, and then choose the System Restore tab. The utility asks if you want to create a restore point (to set one manually) or if you want to choose a previously recorded snapshot. 18 140925-bk03ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 254 Book III Chapter 4 Honk, Honk! Windows Backup and Restore Utilities Curing Some Evils with System Restore 255 5. Choose one of the following: • Create a Restore Point • Restore My Computer to an Earlier Time If you want to do a restore, you’re shown a calendar; days with one or more restore points are in bold. The Windows Vista version automatically displays data from the past five days; you can click the check box to show restoration points older than that. See Figure 4-6. 6. Select a restore point just before the day and time you began experi- encing problems with your Windows installation. 7. Highlight the checkpoint you want to use and click Next. The computer chugs along for a few moments preparing the information it needs, and then the system reboots. You’ve nothing to do but wait. If the restoration is successful, a screen appeared when Windows loads; if the restoration fails, your system restarts in the same condition it was before you attempted a fix. You can try again by selecting a different restore point. Figure 4-6: A manual selection offers recent restore points. 18 140925-bk03ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 255 Curing Some Evils with System Restore 256 Try to choose the most recent restoration point when you knew the machine was working properly. Going further back than necessary could result in dis- abling updates and changes that you’d rather have available. In normal operations, any time you choose a restore point, System Restore automatically makes a snapshot of the day’s files so you can undo any prob- lems you might introduce reaching further back on the calendar. However, if you use System Restore when the computer has been booted in Safe Mode, you can’t directly undo the restore. Instead, you have to run System Restore again and choose a specific previous restore point. 18 140925-bk03ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 256 Book IV Using Common Applications The Slide Sorter window in PowerPoint lets you see dozens of slides in a presentation. 19 140925-pp04.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 257 Contents at a Glance Chapter 1: Writing Documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .259 Processing Words No Matter the Program 259 Knowing What Elements to Expect 260 Starting a Document 263 Formatting a Document 266 Advancing Your Microsoft Office 2007 Functions 284 Formatting Files in Word 2007 285 Controlling Microsoft Word from the Keyboard 286 Chapter 2: Crunching Data with Spreadsheets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .299 Starting the Incredible What-If Machine 299 Spreading out an Excel 2007 Sheet 301 Printing Excel Spreadsheets 305 Introducing New File Formats of Excel 2007 306 Taking Excel Shortcuts 307 Chapter 3: Presenting Yourself with PowerPoint Professionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .313 Pointing out Your Power Spots 313 Designing and Refining a PowerPoint Presentation 315 Putting on at the Ritz 328 Presenting New PowerPoint 2007 Features 331 Taking PowerPoint Shortcuts 333 Chapter 4: Checking Your Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .345 Picking a Calendar 345 Making Contact 350 Going Old School with Address Book 354 Watching It Fly 356 19 140925-pp04.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 258 Chapter 1: Writing Documents In This Chapter ߜ Going from typewriter to typesetter ߜ Formatting, styles, themes, and other flashy stuff ߜ Finding, replacing, and changing text and styles ߜ Discovering new Microsoft Office file formats I ’m going to skip right over Neanderthal cave drawings, ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls, the handwritten Magna Carta of 1215, and the Declaration of Independence of 1776. And I’m not going to discuss the first mechanical typewriters of the 19th century. All these prior technologies were just variations of a brush and ink or chisel on stone. If you made a mistake you had to go back and redo your work; if you wanted to move a sentence from one place to another you had to cut and paste (with a scissors and glue) or start over from “When in the course of human events . . . ” It was only 40 years or so ago that engineers and programmers began work- ing with the concept of applying computer memory and processing power to the job of creating, correcting, revising, and perfecting an assemblage of characters strung together into groups that had individual and collective meaning: words, sentences, paragraphs, and entire manuscripts. Processing Words No Matter the Program In this book I primarily use examples of office productivity tools from the Microsoft Office suite: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. I have chosen these because they’re the most commonly used applications. You may have a different set of tools on your machine because you found some special features that suit your needs better, or you prefer a different piece of software because you like the way it’s organized. And some users make decisions based on cost; you can find shareware office applications and even free tools offered by major companies like Google. 20 140925-bk04ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 259 Knowing What Elements to Expect 260 However, the basic concepts of word processing are the same for all of the various tools. You type, the computer puts the words up on the screen, and together you and the machine make them into pearls of wisdom, beautifully typeset, and safely stored away for the ages. The most important thing to look for in any word processor is its ability to exchange documents with other applications. You can do your writing and processing in Microsoft Word and send it to someone who works with Corel WordPerfect or Google Docs (one of the cloud computing products that exist on the Web; see this section’s sidebar). I’d never recommend using a word processor that can’t read files created by any major competitor and can’t save a version of its own files in a format that the others can use. In this chapter I concentrate on some of the less obvious or more useful features that sometimes even the most experienced users overlook. Knowing What Elements to Expect The days of the manual typewriter offered a limited number of choices when it came to the design and appearance of a typed page. You could mechani- cally adjust the amount of white space on the left and right sides of the page by setting margins, and you could start each page a particular distance down from the top and end at certain height above the bottom. Everything else — underlines, footnotes, page numbers, chapter and section headings, and the like — were all done by hand and eye. High-school and professional school classes devoted entire semesters to mastering the art of manual formatting. Today, you merely have to choose from an ever-growing menu of options. You can make your documents simple or complex; your choices ensure consistent and neat presentation. Figure 1-1 is a sample page from Microsoft Office Word 2007. Get on my cloud A developing trend in applications — one that may or may not become the way everyone works in coming years — is the use of Web- based applications, also known as cloud com- puting. In this design, the software exists mostly somewhere out there on the Internet while your documents reside on your laptop or sit on a server maintained by the company that offers the software. 20 140925-bk04ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 260 Book IV Chapter 4 Writing Documents Knowing What Elements to Expect 261 The elements of a complex document typically include ✦ One or more fonts ✦ Headers and footers (labels that appear at the top or bottom of each page) ✦ Page numbering ✦ Footnotes ✦ Citations ✦ Mathematical equations ✦ Index ✦ A table of contents ✦ A bibliography To ensure consistency across a project or for all work done in a particular department or an entire organization, you — or a supervisor — can create a document template to apply to any or all files of a particular type. Figure 1-1: A chapter in progress under Word 2007. This new edition added a changing ribbon of options that adjusts to the work being performed. 20 140925-bk04ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 261 Knowing What Elements to Expect 262 My back pages In my first job as a newspaper reporter, I began with a manual typewriter and was thrilled when I was upgraded to an electric version. My type- writer, that is. But here was how my words made it from my hand-scrawled notebook to the front page of the Gazette: I pecked away to write sentences on a piece of paper. If I made a mis- take, I backspaced and X ed it out — or just reached into the machine with a thick, soft pencil and struck out a word or a sentence. If I wanted to move paragraph five to become paragraph two, I removed the sheet of paper and, with scissors and a role of clear tape, rearranged the paragraphs. When the article was done, I yelled, “Copy!” and a young kid would dash from one of the corners of the newsroom to grab the sheaf of pages I was holding in my hand. He or she would move over to a shelf along the wall and tape the pages one to another so that they were in a continuous roll. After a copy editor had gone over the story — penciling in corrections and doing some addi- tional cutting and pasting — the entire roll would be placed in a metal cylinder and sent through a whooshing pneumatic tube down two floors to the pressroom. And there a typesetter (a human, not a machine) would mount my roll of words onto a stand and retype the characters and words into a machine that would set type. There was one last step: A proofreader (a person, drawing a paycheck) read the typeset text and compared it to the typewrit- ten, hand-corrected, cut-and-pasted original. The first processed words As the computer began to become relatively common in offices in the 1960s and 1970s, the first connection between “secretaries” and the machine were introduced. Xerox, IBM, and Wang were among the first companies to offer electric typewriters that had a way of storing words or sentences or even entire documents. The devices began with small blocks of memory in the machine that allowed for corrections, and then we moved onto larger storage devices including paper tape and eventually to magnetic disks. But it really was not until the late 1970s before workstations connected to a central room-sized computer allowed the first text editors to replace backspacing, pencil marks, scissors, and tape at the keyboard. And then history — at least as it concerns the written word — was changed forever in 1981 when the first IBM PC was introduced. Swept aside by technology The first word-processing software for personal computers (including Multimate, WordPerfect, and WordStar) swept aside almost any reason to hold on to rolls of paper, paste pots, and scis- sors. Also swept aside: copy boys and copy girls, pneumatic tubes that carry documents, typeset- ters to retype edited manuscripts, and proofread- ers. And in most offices, personal secretaries and entire squadrons of workers in the “typing pool” were let go (which was bad) or given more mean- ingful and professional job assignments. Look at this revolution in one other way: With the arrival of the personal computer and its laptop cousin, job descriptions have changed to include a multitude of other tasks. The person at the keyboard no longer merely writes a memo or a letter or a book called Laptops All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies. You’re also correcting your own mistakes, editing and revising the structure of your work, and saving a copy for future use. And in the process you’re also designing a format, setting the type, and trans- mitting it to a printer or sending it across the world in a stream of 0s and 1s for reconstruction at the other end. 20 140925-bk04ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 262 Book IV Chapter 4 Writing Documents Starting a Document 263 Starting a Document The arrival of Microsoft Office 2007 brought a large, round button in the upper-left corner of the editing screen; the Microsoft Office Button replaces the File menu of previous Office versions, and you can get to many places and do many things from that single button. See Figure 1-2. Open a blank document and start typing: 1. Click the blank page icon (part of the Office toolbar). If you want to get there another way, try one of these methods: • Press Ctrl + N. • Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click New. A menu appears. 2. Double-click Blank Document. 3. Click the Microsoft Office Button. Choose from a set of options that opens: ✦ New. Opens an empty unformatted file. ✦ Open. Opens a previously saved file. Windows Explorer opens the folder Word most recently used to store a new or revised file; you can also nav- igate to any other folder or location on your laptop or on an attached network or Internet location. ✦ Save. Saves the currently active and open file in the same location it currently resides. ✦ Save As. Allows you to select a specific file format for the current file: • Word Document. This new format is based on the Open XML specifi- cation. Files are stored with a .DOCX filename extension and gener- ally require about half the space as previous Word file formats. • Word Template. A special form of file that can apply settings to new or existing documents. • Word 97-2003 Document. A way to save a file created in Microsoft Office 2007 in the older (and larger) file format used by the previous few generations of the program. • PDF or XPS. Lets you save a file created in Word in the Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) specification, whose files can be viewed or printed on other machines exactly the way you intend. XPS is a similar fixed-layout electronic file format promoted by Microsoft. 20 140925-bk04ch01.qxp 4/8/08 12:39 PM Page 263 . or a book called Laptops All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies. You’re also correcting your own mistakes, editing and revising the structure of your work, and saving a copy for future use. And. Allows you to select a specific file format for the current file: • Word Document. This new format is based on the Open XML specifi- cation. Files are stored with a .DOCX filename extension and gener- ally. half the space as previous Word file formats. • Word Template. A special form of file that can apply settings to new or existing documents. • Word 97-2003 Document. A way to save a file created