It's all too easy to overlook some of the free software and features included with Windows and we use up disk space by installing software that's not really needed.
One of our worst mistakes is not to properly refer to the help system in Windows itself and other software we run. The help system has been refined over the years and Windows XP has a most comprehensive amount of content. For example, start up XP's Help and Support, click on Core Windows Tasks and choose Working with Files and Folders. All of us can pick up a tip or two in this section which covers so much of how best to work with Windows.
When you're not sure of which general topic might cover a particular item you'd like more information on, use the Index or Search facility. You'll get back a list of topics and often the Related Items is useful.
The software we use from one day to the next without thinking too much about how we work, such as Outlook Express, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, each have their own help topics. Actually it can be a bit of fun to look back through the help information and compare how we normally work with a program and how the help tutorials suggest we do certain tasks.
Windows Media Player's help is a good example of a wide range of information which we can overlook. For example, do you know how to change the colour of your player? webDotWiz found the relevant button to click when he was looking through WMP's help for something else.
As well, WMP has lots of information about different music file formats, CD formats (e.g., the difference between a data CD and a music CD), playing DVDs, and making music compilations and burning them to CD.
So before you rush out to buy a piece of software, check Windows first because you may already have something to do the job. For example, if you want a wordprocessor for the occasional letter and document, WordPad is a good choice and it's been there since Windows 95. Printing photos? In XP, there's a wizard to help you adjust the photo size to the paper you're printing to. Viewing photos and graphics? XP has an in-built picture and fax viewer, and as well, you can set your My Pictures folder to view your photos as a slide show.
Computers are supposed to make life easier and one important skill to achieve this is the use of Copy and Paste. Sometimes we think of only copying and pasting text between one part of a document in our wordprocessor to another. But Copy and Paste has always been an integral part of Windows which means we can copy text from one program and paste it into another (or others), or we can copy a picture from one program into another. As well, we can copy files and folders and paste them into other folders. All this is explained in detail in Windows help.
Copy and pasting should enable you to do away with having to write any notes with pen and paper for example. Notepad (another program that's part of Windows) is a simple text editor - that is, it only keeps text and we can't add any fancy formatting - which you could use to collect snippets of information you copy from, say a web page, into a Notepad text file for later reference.
The best way to improve your copying and pasting skills is to write up a document that's important to you. You'll need to edit it by shifting around words and sentences and this is the time to put a bit of pressure on yourself to become familiar with copying and pasting. Who wants to spend time having to re-type loads of information?
Over the years, instructions such as "Hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse over text to select it" has been shortened down to just "Select the text". So be aware of the change in jargon.
Save a lot of time and effort by becoming proficient with Windows copy and paste.
