Replies

The bitmap file type should still exist. It isn’t the most popular file type any more because it tends to generate big files, sometimes very big. GIF files have also fallen out of favour, though I think for somewhat different reasons.

These days JPEG (aka JPG) files are probably the most common. The PNG format has achieved some modest popularity too.

I think the OP was really asking about his File > New menu rather than the existence of bitmap files per se, but when selecting a format I would suggest that ‘horses for courses’ is usually more apposite than popularity.
JPG is great for photos, because it offers far more compression than other formats, but should be avoided for cartoon-like images, line drawings and ones with text because it adds annoying artefacts around such features.
For a lot of purposes other than photos, PNG is good because it includes zip compression. Use it for screenshots (and if there is a photo on the screen background, turn it off temporarily).
GIF has largely been supplanted these days by PNG, but is used for animation, which PNG does not support.
TIF remains the granddaddy of the image world, supporting a wide variety of internal formats which is both its strength and weakness — not all viewers support all the possibilities. It is great for multi-page files (that contain more than one image) and for formats like CCITC Fax 4 which provides unparalleled compression on monochrome images.

Is there a way to alphabetize my docs by folder and the remaining docs that are not in a folder, rather than doing it manually? If so, can someone please let me know how….many thanks, John

I don’t know what you want. Do you want a list of your files in alphabetical order by folder? If so, open a Command Prompt window for the top folder (what I presume you mean by the location of ‘docs that are not in a folder’) and issue
dir /s/b/O:N >List.txt
This will create a sorted file of filenames. The important thing is that all your documents must be in this top folder or one of its sub-folders. If you need to filter the list, e.g. to only include Word documents, use something like
dir /s/b/O:N >List.txt *.doc*
Put it in a batch file if you want double-click convenience.
If this does not meet your requirements (e.g. files dotted around various locations, you want to rename files in some way etc.) please let us know what you want to achieve. We can’t guess.

Sorry, didn’t see your post where you say you did try WordPad.

Another suggestion — Word 2003. Create your own toolbar with your favourite features and turn off all the built in ones. It isn’t hard to do.

I guess it comes down to what you do with the program. You mentioned producing newsletters. You would have been better off with a DTP package. Word is trying to be all things to all men and that is what makes for the bloat. And its not really being ideal for a lot of its purposes.

The trouble is for software publishers is, give 5 users a word processor and they each want 5 different features!

Why not try WordPad as strollin suggested? What features does it lack that you need? Knowing exactly what you need might help us guide you.

There is a very big difference between “Word can’t do” and “I don’t know how to make Word do”.

Rebuke accepted. Chapters starting on odd or even pages can be done with sections, I have discovered, but the fact that it is far from intuitive and took some Googling to find does support my argument that Word is far from ideal as a document processor. It has no concept of ‘chapters’ (for example) so it all has to be kludged with manual changes which, if the structure changes in some way, have to be removed and re-kludged as the OP found when he repaginated.
Another example, that bugs me far more often than the chapter issue, is lists. For a professional appearance I want a certain amount of leading after a list. I have to kludge it by expanding the ‘space after’ of the last paragraph in the list, and if I later need to add a further item to the end of the list, I have to remove the kludge and kludge the new last item. I find myself doing this all the time, even in relatively short documents. And all because Word does not let you assign things like ‘space after’ to a list as a structure. Even less does it let you assign all the properties of a structure like a chapter, section or subsection in one place, so that you define a section, for example, as having a certain paragraph style for the heading, another for the body, define which page it starts on or whether it is continuous, whether numbering restarts and so on. Instead we have to do it manually for each new section, which is error prone and any changes have to be applied to every section individually. It is a word processor, not a document processor.

The software alternatives are a bit thin on the ground however… IMO, Word is the tool of choice for authoring… Newer database-type tools that separate content from formatting such as Madcap Flare are worth exploring if you are really keen…

Alas. I certainly can’t afford what Flare costs for my modest usage. Thank you for your suggestion, though. I have investigated Lyx but it has a steep learning curve and cannot rival EasiWriter which I remember from my Acorn days (and is still available for RiscOS from Icon Technology). It showed that an easy to use, intuitive document processor that can span the range of ‘type and go’ wordprocessing for a one page letter through to a complex structured technical manual is possible. This is a big gap in the market. But the sheer power of Word’s stranglehold, so that even the alternatives are just imitations of it, seems to have deterred anyone from attempting to sell an alternative at anything less than corporate pricing.

How is this book going to be published? It sounds like you need a proper structured document writer rather than Word. For example, you should be able to specify that chapters always start on an odd page and it will do it without your needing to insert page breaks manually. Word is pretty hopeless at that sort of thing (you can set a style to put a page break before, but not specify a start on an odd or even page), and won’t output provisional quality typesetting either, e.g. it doesn’t suppress space before paragraphs at the top of pages. You really shouldn’t have to mess about changing section and page breaks manually. What if the publisher changes the paper size from what you have assumed? All that manual pagination will be useless. You need to set the function of each division of your text — chapter / section etc — and let the software sort out the formatting.

That said, I cannot recommend a WYSIWYG structured document writer to the OP. Has anyone got any recommendations as I want one myself?

*Least important are your OS(es) which can be restored rapidly over the internet likely for free.

I would agree with much of what you say, though you forget that the OP has an SSD. But I don’t agree that the system partition (if that is what you mean by the above comment) is easily replaced. If I have to reinstall Windows it takes two days to re-install all my applications and configure the OS and applications to my satisfaction. A system image is a far quicker way to get back on my feet!

Do not put anything in the SSD partitions as such – they are for the OS / OEM recovery – just use C: for all programs and data because you want fast access. There is no need to leave lots of space free on the SSD, 20% is plenty of spare for the SSD to do its stuff.
I would not load any software on the 3TB because, again, you want access speed.
cheers, Paul

I would agree with Paul’s last comment, but I don’t think putting your programs and data on C: is a good idea. It’s because of those image backups. If any partition is going to get messed up, it will be your C: drive. So keep it as small as possible and don’t have any important data (documents, pictures etc) on it. My system partition is 80 GiB and is currently just over half full. You might want more if you have lots of RAM and use hibernation because the hiberfil.sys is on this drive. If anything goes wrong, you should have a recent image to restore from and it won’t overwrite more recent copies of your documents.

Your data partitions are a different matter. You don’t need images of pure data partitions. A file-based backup program like Cobian is best for this. You need only backup files that have changed, and can keep a file history too in case the current copy gets corrupted or you need to go back to an older incarnation of your document.

You can move the My Documents folder to the data partition just by dragging it out of C:Users into a new location. Windows automatically updates the registry so programs that default to My Documents still work. Same applies to My Pictures, My Music etc.

Personally I have a partition just for program installations as well. 10 GiB is enough. But you could do this on the data partition. The point is, don’t install new programs to the C: drive.
I also put my page file in a separate partition — you definitely want it on your SSD though. All to keep my images small and thus quick to make and restore.

With your 250 GB SSD, you could have 80+ for system, 10 for programs and still have 150 GB for your most frequently used documents. The 3 TB disc would be for large files like videos and backups. Though don’t rely on this disc alone, in case a lightning strike or fire puts paid to the whole box. Keep doing your external ones too, swopped out to an external location like your workplace, and you should be well protected.

It might not be fashionable to partition drives a lot, but you will be glad of it when something goes wrong.

I use these two macros and assign keyboard shortcuts to them. As you can see, they have been with me a while!

Code:

Sub SetMarker1()
‘
‘ Macro recorded 11.10.98 by A C Rowland
‘
    With ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
        .Add Range:=Selection.Range, Name:=”Marker1″
        .DefaultSorting = wdSortByName
        .ShowHidden = False
    End With
End Sub

Sub GotoMarker1()
‘
‘ GotoMarker1 Macro
‘ Macro recorded 11.10.98 by A C Rowland
‘
    Selection.GoTo What:=wdGoToBookmark, Name:=”Marker1″
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = “”
        .Replacement.Text = “”
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
End Sub

You don’t need to load the adins to do that. Simply go to Image>Resize/Resample. Resize the image and then do a Copy/Paste or a Save As.
Jerry

True, but the Save for Web option in the File menu is very good and far superior results when you want to decrease the number of colours as well. Decreasing bit depth is a great way of reducing file size, in addition to or instead of resizing — especially useful when resizing is not an option, e.g. if it would make text too small.

I think this was more of a problem with the old thermionic valves (tubes to you Americans) than with modern electronic circuits. The threat of global warming is a far more real one — I switch off at the wall when I am not going to use the computer for a bit, e.g. overnight. How long do you want your computers to last? I have an 18 year old computer in the loft that still works, but I wouldn’t want to use it in everyday life!
The only time I have had something go wrong when powering on was when the heating had been off for a week because we were away over Christmas, and I switched on before the house had warmed up. That put paid to a hard-drive, which was painful because they were expensive on those days and it took a lot of floppies to back it up, and therefore hadn’t got a recent backup. But that was over 20 years ago…

Eraser (http://eraser.heidi.ie/) has options to wipe unused space and the recycle bin as well as files and folders. And it’s free.

These people are clever. They don’t start the conversation saying, ‘This will take 4 hours and cost you $200,” they start with something small and credible and slowly draw you in. They keep asking you questions and make it hard for you to think. I had one of these calls and they claimed to be from a Microsoft partner and gave the name of a genuine company. I checked on the Internet while they spoke and it was indeed a Microsoft partner — but of course, they were not from that company. I wrote to the company afterwards and warned them that people were perpetrating fraud in their name and suggested they put a warning on their home page to help the unwary. They assured me they would never cold call anyone like that, but didn’t put up a warning (at least not quickly).
I wasn’t fooled, but less technical people might be.

If I understand this correctly, you currently use mail merge to create a set of cover sheets, then use “another program” to combine that cover sheet with the manufacturer’s specifications and the drawings into a single PDF file. Presumably you do the combining manually now and the program cannot be automated (or scripted, or batched).

If it were me I would keep the same process but automate it. You can use command line tools like PDF Tools or pdftk (http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) to merge PDFs from a batch file. Practice ‘by hand’ till you understand the syntax. pdftk –help gives lots of information. Example:
[INDENT]PDFTK cover1.pdf, specs1.pdf drawing1.pdf output combined1.pdf
[/INDENT]If your mailmerge database is in Excel now (you mentioned Excel but I wasn’t sure whether you were using it at present), simply add another two columns, for the specsheet and drawing filenames. Then on a second sheet, build up the commands: put pdftk in the first column and replicate down, and output in the fifth column. Use Excel links to grab the filenames from your ‘database’ sheet. If necessary, do a bit of combining, for example to add a full path in front of the filenames so they go to the right folder.
Finally, export the second sheet as a text file. Point to File > Save As…. and use ‘Formatted text (space delimited) (*.prn).
Rename the .prn file to .bat and execute it.

You could automate the renaming step with another batch file containing
[INDENT] rename *.prn *.bat[/INDENT]

You could also automate the production of sheet 2 using VBA if you feel up to it 🙂

If you are not using Excel as the database you may have to adapt this method a bit to output the batch file automatically.

I am just a bit concerned that the D: drive may not have been what other posters assume is an OS recovery drive. Usually, in my experience, recovery drives do not appear as a drive letter in My Computer. Can you recall what files were in that drive? Was it always ‘full’ (solid colour in My Computer)? A recovery partition would not fill up over time — or shouldn’t!

One possibility is that the partition was used by a backup program that came with the computer. It may be referred to as a ‘vault’ or something similar. If it filled up, the program may have been running automatically at intervals, in which case we would expect it to throw a wobbly next time it tries to run.

Would you follow PaulT’s instructions to get into diskmgmt.msc — or right-click My Computer, point to Manage, then expand Computer Management (Local) > Storage > Disk Management? Make the window large enough to show the information clearly and make a screenshot (press Alt-PrtScr) and paste the image into this forum.

Oh and PaulT probably found out his little gem (which was new to me too) by reading forums 😉