MATTERS ARISING FROM THE MEETING ON 27th OCTOBER
Future Themes
After Christmas, sessions will continue, but I do not propose to repeat the current course for the third time. I am looking to you, the audience, for suggestions as to what YOU would like to see discussed in these sessions. Please e-mail me you ideas, to questions@billnot.com
Saturday's Meeting
We had an attendance of 15, a few of whom were new - welcome!
We discussed the "copy and paste" facility which enables you to take a chunk from a screen display and use it in a document or similar you are composing. Naturally, we concentrated on copying from Internet Explorer. All you do is to select, by dragging the mouse across it with the left button held down, the item(s) you wish to copy. They will be highlighted. Now, from the menu, select "Edit" then "Copy". This will place your selection into a special application always running in the background, the clipboard. Now switch to your destination document, make sure the cursor is where you want the clip to be pasted, and select "Edit" then "Paste". You can only paste data of a type understood by your destination application. For example, only text can be pasted into Notepad. However, we briefly mentioned Wordpad, a basic but useful word processing applet which comes as part of the Windows package, and which will accept both text and graphics in most formats.
We had cause to talk about the "Find" facility, found on all Windows95 or later systems. This will find a file anywhere on your system from just a snippet of the name. Very useful if you know you've saved a file somewhere, but you just can't remember where! From the start menu, simply click "Find" , fill in the name (or partial name), select the drive or directory you wish to search and click "OK". There may be many "hits", but hopefully the file you want will be amongst them.
Something we touched on which wasn't in the notes is the browser cache. When you download anything from the Internet, the computer stores it in a special area. It's only after a period of time, when the cache has filled with newer data, that it gets deleted. This enables you both to find something you recently looked at, and also to rebrowse your more recent pages offline, which can save money.
The next session, about Newsgroups, is on November 10th. As a change from Microsoft software, I shall be demonstrating using the free program, Free Agent, which you can download from
http://www.forteinc.com/agent/download.php
If you are interested in newsgroups, you may wish to download and try this software before the class.