Helpful hints: Computer tips

[jacks girl]

I hope this can become one of those threads that stay alive for a long time and that can help many people learn little things about their computer that they didn't know.

I'm sure that most of you know what I'm about to say but this weekend at the viewing of my Aunt Shirley I spoke with 5 young women all from the ages of 28 to 60 and none of them knew that you could dim the light on the computer screen.

Did you know this, that if the light is too bright on your eyes you can dim the light. I keep mine very dim for my eyes are sensitive to light. The Contrast and hue and Brightness are on the front of my Dell so they are easy to find.

[Lookin^Up]

On Word documents, if you can't figure out how your manuscript is formatted you can click the little paragraph symbol in the toolbar. It looks like a backward P with a dark counter and two stems. When you do that, all the spaces show up as middle dots, all the optional hyphens (looking like long L's face-down), and where the paragraphs start and end. It also shows all the page breaks you've inserted.

[jacks girl]

cool Looking, i always wondered what that P was.

[Phy]

As a professional writer, I pay close attention to how documents are created 'under the hood', using styles instead of manual formatting to do most of my work. I don't work with the Paragraph button clicked, but it's a nice tool to know about, and I do use it frequently.

[Lookin^Up]

Another feature I've found useful is the AutoCorrect Options in the Tools dropdown. If you find yourself misspelling a word the same way consistently, you can enter the misspelled version in the left window and the correct spelling in the right, and click Add. Then every time you accidentally misspell that word in Word, it will automatically correct it as soon as you hit the space bar or a punctuation mark.

It's also useful as a macro shortcut for frequently typed words and phrases. For instance, I've programmed AutoCorrect to print "Jesus Christ" every time I type "jc".

[jacks girl]

cool looking I'm glad I started this thread.

jacks