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I cannot provide a way with code to pick the first and last shape on a particular page but the following code will help you step through and delete them one by one. As written, this works with text boxes.

Sub TextBoxDeleteOneByOne()
‘ Scroll through all text boxes, delete if directed to
Dim shp As Shape, intNbrShapes As Integer, vResponse As Variant
Dim strBoxNbr As String, intBoxNbr As Integer, strMsg As String

intNbrShapes = 0
For Each shp In ActiveDocument.Shapes
If shp.Type = msoTextBox Then
intNbrShapes = intNbrShapes + 1
shp.Select
‘ Scroll through the active document so that the current selection is visible in the document window.
ActiveWindow.ScrollIntoView Selection.Range, True
strMsg = shp.TextFrame.TextRange.Text

vResponse = MsgBox(“Text box name: ” & shp.Name & vbCrLf & “Text Contents: ” & strMsg & vbCrLf & “Delete?”, vbYesNoCancel, “Finding Text Boxes”)
shp.Select
If vResponse = vbYes Then ‘ User chose Yes.
shp.Delete
Else
If vResponse = vbCancel Then
Exit Sub
End If
End If
End If
Next shp

End Sub

In the 3/14/2011 newsletter in the “Readers with ideas…” section you quote someone describing a way to minimize the ribbon:
“a command nicely hidden in the down arrow to the right of the quick-access toolbar. Unfortunately, Microsoft messed me up again with Office 2010, replacing the nice old trick with a new arrow that directly minimizes the Ribbon … [You can also minimize the Ribbon by double-clicking a Ribbon tab. – Ed.]”
For those of us who prefer keeping our hands on our keyboard the simplest approach is Control-F1 – it toggles the ribbon on and off.

Susan Bradley: “I’d love to interview that 39 percent and ask them whether they really wanted to install updates at shutdown” I do not have that feature enabled on my laptops as that would be a nuisance. But I very much appreciate it on the desktops we have at home. We typically shut them down at night and so I can let Windows do its update at that time and head off to bed without thinking about it again. There is also the choice of clicking the appropriate button to say “no thanks, do not install the updates now, just shut down”.

Nice article, thanks. I use another alternative to Dropbox that encrypts before uploading – JungleDisk. https://www.jungledisk.com/. If you do not put a lot of data there it is pretty cheap – you pay a sliding rate based on the amount of data you store and upload and download. I use it to share files within the family and $3/month covers us. I, too, was suspicious of using the cloud but Steve Gibson examined JungleDisk and gave it a thumbs up in episode 123 of the Security Now podcast. http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm. You have a choice of Amazon or RackSpace servers for where your files are stored.

It doesn’t do the incremental backup of Dropbox but otherwise it is pretty convenient. I have it configured to create a virtual drive on each machine so I just have to tell the kids to put a file on the “R drive” and they know what to do. That also lets me isolate the kid’s machine from my work computer on our home network just in case.

Regarding the question “what if my password manager vendor goes out of business?” Like others I occasionally print my passwords and store them in a secure location. I also use the paid version of LastPass so that I can use their off-line program, LastPass Pocket. It keeps an encrypted version of your data on your hard drive. I keep date-stamped versions of my offline file in a variety of places so I am hopefully protected from the worst scenarios. I used to use KeePass and really liked it (my wife still uses it) but since I operate on multiple computers the convenience of having a synced version of my passwords won out.

I was concerned about putting such important data in the cloud but was convinced that LastPass did it right by Steve Gibson’s Security Now! episode 256 (http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm). As others have noted, your data is stored encrypted and LastPass does not have the key.

I agree with those grousing about the ribbon. I’m a power user, have been using it regularly for a long time, and still find it frustrating and non-intuitive. The biggest irritation in my mind is that the QAT is mouse-centric. I hate being forced to use the mouse. I am much much faster if I never have to take my hands off the keyboard. I used to have customized menus to handle the things I do over and over – that meant I could do things in two-three keystrokes (Alt-x-z). You can use keystrokes to get at commands added to the QAT but I don’t know how to customize those keystrokes – is that possible? I’d love to hear how. In the meantime I can memorize a few numbers to get at the things I do the most often but that is no where near as useful as keystrokes that actually correspond to meaningful words, which I could accomplish in the old drop-down menus.

I have been using Norton’s Online Family. The basic version is free. It seems to have a low resource requirement and is easy to set up. It does not require that you install the rest of Norton’s antivirus suite. (I use Microsoft’s free version instead.) I get emails when the kids try to visit sites that are blacklisted. I haven’t researched its site blocking features extensively but so far it seems to be working. I cannot say it is a bullet-proof solution but we look over their shoulder quite a bit, too.

https://onlinefamily.norton.com/familysafety

Re Diagnosing strange .exe start-up files
I occasionally search the internet for files I see running in my system however it seems that most of the hits I get in Google are to sites that are trying to sell me their software for fixing problems on my hard drive. The useful information is limited and the “use our software to scan and fix your problems!!!” language is plentiful. Can you recommend some sites that are particularly useful for this kind of research?