The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Ask George George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
Automatically indenting new paragraphs
Question:
I've switched to Word 2007 but now find I can't set up a Word doc to indent
automatically for each new paragraph (as I could with previous versions of
Word).
Answer:
There are several ways to achieve this. One way is to use the setting on the
ruler. If it is not visible then click on View, and tick Ruler to bring it up.
Highlight your document (Ctrl + a) then on what appears to be an hour glass,
drag the top section, which is the first line indent, to where you would like
the indent to be and all paragraphs will be automatically indented. This method
is good for occasional use.
For permanent use I suggest that you open a blank document and modify the
paragraph property and save it as the default template. Click on the Home tab
then click on the very small down arrow on the Paragraph section to bring up the
Paragraph dialogue box. There set the indent to your liking and click on the
Default... tab and say yes to making it the default for all new documents.
Reducing size of sound files
Question:
I need to send music files [my recording of bagpipe music which I've
composed] overseas, but
as .WAV or MP3 files I still have 1,500 KB which is a bit large to send. Can you
suggest how to
reduce these, or a file extension to reduce their size please?
I normally record in Goldwave.
Answer:
If you have only a couple or so to send then 1.5 MB each is
probably OK. Most mailboxes are about 10 MB and assuming that they are half
full, two times 1.5 MB with the encoding overheads still comes to under 4 MB. If
you are sending many then there are ways to substantially reduce the size of the
MP3 file. Forget about the WAV format as this is not going to be suitable.
As the MP3 format is already very compressed, using a program such as WinZip
will only reduce the file size by about 2%. Your choices are to convert from
stereo to mono which will reduce that file to about 1 MB if this is acceptable
to you. Further reduction in size is to reduce the sampling rate and even to
save as a WMA (Windows Media Audio) format as this can give smaller file size
than MP3. Saving as a mono file and reducing the sampling rate to 48 kbps the
resultant 1.5 MB file is halved but there is a loss in quality. As to whether
this it very noticeable depends on the listener's sound system and their
hearing.
AVI to DVD conversion
Question:
Is there any way to get video
footage done from a camera
with an AVI format onto a format compatible to be read by a DVD player?
Answer:
There are many software packages to make this conversion. Using Google to
search for AVI to DVD produced over 3 million hits.
See:
http://en.sofonic.com/search/avi-to-dvd-freeware for a selection of free software.
Sending bulk e-mails
Question:
I send out regular emails to about 300 members of a
bushwalking club but the !Ws I have tried such as Bigpond, Hotmail and Yahoo
usually bounce back the emails if my
email group is larger than about 50 addresses. This requires me to set up
smaller groups and send about 10 separate emails. Is there a solution?
Answer:
I am well aware of this problem but I am not aware of an easy solution. If
your Internet account is registered in a business name then the limits are
substantially higher as the ISPs are aware that a business does need to send out
newsletters etc. For the home user there is another catch, although you may
break up your mailing list into many groups of 49 users, the ISPs may have
another limit
of how many messages you are allowed to send in any one hour. A typical limit
may be as low
as 200.
One way is to use a program such as Mailbomber or ElectraSoft that are designed
to overcome the limitations set up the ISP. If your total number is not too
large, say several hundred then Gmail may be suitable.
Can I boot from a XP floppy?
Question:
On a laptop running Windows XP I have made a start up disk for Drive A using
Windows XP. The process created a config.sys and an autoexec.bat file on the 3
1/2 floppy. It boots alright but it cannot access the hard disk. Can you please
tell me what I need to do to correct this?
Answer:
Virtually every laptop with
Win XP will be NTFS formatted as this is more robust and has
many other features and benefits. DOS cannot read any NTFS disk or partition,
and so you cannot boot from a floppy and see your
hard disk.
You must boot from the Windows XP CD or from some other special CD that that has
an operating system that can recognise the NTFS file system and large drives.
Your floppy Start Up disk will have only DOS and a capacity of only 1.4MB, and
you need many megabytes to load the most stripped down version of XP.
