RileyTec Tips

One of the most irritating things I find about Microsoft Office XP is its insistence on automatically customising all the menus based upon how often you use each command, leaving all the other menu options hidden under those infurnal double-arrows. To turn this off and have your MS Office XP applications show their full menus all the time, open any Office application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), and select Tools then Customize. Now select the Options, check the box marked Always show full menus and hit the Close button. Those hideous double-arrows will never be seen again.

If you ever used a System 7 Mac, you will probably remember the character palette. Just like the character map in Windows, you can find all sorts of symbols that are not easily reproduced on a keyboard. Strangely, this feature seemed to have disappeared in OS X. However, it does still exist, it is just not a standalone application any more, now it is really a component of each application. You can find it in the Edit menu of nearly all applications and it is called Special Characters. You can also launch the character palette using Command-Option-T.

When a dialogue box appears, there is usually one choice highlighted and pressing Enter will just accept that default choice. You may like to be able to select different options in the dialogue box using Tab and Shift-Tab as you can in Windows. To enable this functionality open System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse and then the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Now select the All controls radio button and you will be able to Tab navigation in all dialogue boxes.

It is pretty straightforward to take a screenshot and bring it into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation. But that is longer than necessary, you will end up with an additional file on the desktop and the website in your presentation will not update automatically. A more dynamic way of doing this involves loading the website into your presentation but unfortunately, this only works with Keynote and not PowerPoint. To accomplish this, you simply drag the small icon that is on the left side of the url in your web browser over to the Keynote presentation. You can then be sure that your Keynote presentation will stay current no matter when you show it. Even if you do not have internet access, it will simply show the latest downloaded version. One other small caveat to note is that this only works with Safari and Camino, so no Firefox.

What are known as shortcuts in Windows environments are called aliases in Apple OS but, frankly, the process of creating them can be a pain. When you use the Make Alias menu item or Command-L shortcut in Finder, it creates the alias in the same folder and adds alias to the name. You then have to move it around and rename it. However you can create an alias while dragging it to another folder. You simply have to hold down Command-Option while dragging it. An arrow will appear showing you that you are indeed creating an alias and not moving the original file. This is faster not only because you will not have to subsequently move the alias but also, Finder does not add alias to the title so you do not have to rename it.