Refresh Technology Limited

Warning for Apple users – Mac Defender Scam

Steven Sumpter — Wed, 25 May 2011 11:45:28 +0000

Apple users should be aware that there is a new attack affecting Macs. If you see a web page or software which offers you “Mac Defender” “Mac Security” or “Mac Protector” it is a scam, and you should not enter any card details. Your computer has been infected by malware which has redirected your web browser in an effort to steal credit card details.

Apple will issue a software update which will remove the malware. Alternatively, you could use the removal tool from Icronic.

Mac Defender Removal Tool from Icrontic

More information from Apple

Marketing on twitter: how to get noticed

Steven Sumpter — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:11:16 +0000

In this article we will discuss various different ways of using Twitter and how to make use of it as a small business. The advice contained here is aimed at the very small business, as well as individuals who are their own brand such as authors, journalists and artists.

Types of Twitter user

There are several kinds of Twitter user, they are not mutually exclusive.

The first kind is the social user. The social twitter user enjoys friendly banter with others, engages in random conversations, and plays #hashtag games. (Witty comments all posted using the same keyword prefixed with a # so that others can see and join in.) They may well present information or a persona that they would not want to be linked with their professional life. This kind of tweeter generally follows and engages with most of the people that follow them. This is the average twitter user.

The second kind is the reporter. The reporter actively seeks out news stories and items of interest and then retweets them to their followers. The reporter is often also a social user.

The third kind is company announcements. This is what it sounds like; a business that uses twitter purely to announce products, articles, press releases, or other commercial events.

The fourth kind is the damage limitation account. Typical of very large business such as BT or the Royal Mail, these exist purely to sweep twitter for negative information and respond to it in as low profile a way as possible, and fix the problem as quickly as possible to make it go away. This kind of user may even delete tweets once a problem is dealt with.

A final, rare kind, is the spoof account. Two popular ones are @Queen_UK and @DMReporter, spoofing the queen and the Daily Mail respectively.

Business use of Twitter

I believe that most businesses do not make enough of the opportunities provided by twitter. How do you define a successful use of twitter? Well, most people would say that followers are a good indicator. That isn’t good enough on it’s own though, to be successful I believe that those followers must be engaged with the business. Don’t forget that the primary type of twitter user is the social user who is there for the conversation. Many businesses use their twitter account purely as a stream of announcements. The problem occurs because even if that business has many twitter followers, they may not be engaged by those announcements. It is very easy for the follower to skip over the announcement and scroll past to a more interesting conversation with another twitter user. So how can this be addressed?

The simple answer is that a business presence on twitter must not be just a stream of announcements or even just responding to negative comments, but must be real people engaging in real conversation. A decent amount of activity is key. There are a few different ways to achieve it.

The more charismatic business leaders often use twitter in their own right, and represent their business too. In this way they interact with thousands of others creating a sense of personal connection with themselves and their business. People such as @DuncanBannatyne and @Memset_Kate are good examples.

Some businesses have a team of people that work behind one twitter account. This is usually the damage limitation kind of account, but sometimes it is genuine advice and help combined with occasional sales patter. @Simplybusiness is a good example of an account with multiple people behind it, yet still engaging with people by offering tips and advice and answering questions.

Other businesses have a team of staff with their own twitter accounts. These accounts may again be used in any combination of the ways listed earlier.

Getting noticed

However you set up and manage your presence on Twitter, you need to be noticed to be successful. How do you do that? Here is my guide as to how a small business can build their presence on Twitter. This information is based on my collected observations, and is provided on a “do as I say not as I do” basis!

First of all, set up your account properly. Enter a good description and a link to your website. Change the background. Upload a photo or a company logo. Don’t make it too much like spam – exhortations to follow you or purchase your services will get you blocked by many people.

Follow some other accounts. Don’t just do this based on who you think should notice you, but on who you want to pay attention to. Search for relevant businesses and subjects, or, if a personal account, look for people that you know to be interesting.

After that, watch your twitter stream.

Reply to questions and take part in discussion.
Retweet (pass on) interesting items brought up by people that you are following.
If you see something that you like elsewhere on the internet, post it on twitter.
Contribute useful information that people want to pass on. Provide links, pictures, and wise or witty comments when possible.
When relevant, use popular hashtags to be seen by more people.
Mention what you do or what you sell, but don’t constantly bombard people with it. An occasional notice is all right, constant bombardment will get you reported for spam.
When you do need to announce something, do it at the right time for your target audience. If like me you are an insomniac and tend to finish things in the middle of the night, repost them when people are awake.

Retweeting

There are two conventions on retweeting. The original method involved copying the tweet that you wished to quote in to a new tweet, and adding the prefix “RT: @name:” in front of the quote, and perhaps adding a comment too. On seeing the popularity of retweeting, Twitter added a Retweet link to their interface. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in the same way; the official retweet method will cause the tweet to appear in your followers Twitter stream but it will not be obvious that you placed it there. Instead, the original tweeter’s picture will appear, and your name will be shown alongside the retweet. Where possible, it is a good idea to use the original manual method. Doing that will allow you to add a comment alongside the quoted tweet and will ensure that replies come to you and not to the original tweeter, thus starting conversation. If other people retweet the same information in turn, your name is likely to stay in their retweet, whereas if you used the official method it will not.

Conclusions

If you do all these things then people will start to follow you and talk to you. Reply to them and build up relationships. These relationships are the key to twitter. Use Twitter as a social network first, and an advertising medium second and you won’t go far wrong.

An explanation of twitter

Steven Sumpter — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:49:22 +0000

This is a description of how twitter works. It is very hard to see the point of twitter unless you try it, but this should help those of you trying to understand the references to it in the news.

Twitter lets its users post a public message (tweet) of 140 characters in length. Those messages are automatically seen by their followers. Anyone can follow any other Twitter user and their tweets will be displayed in their “Twitter stream.” A tweet can also be aimed at or mention a person by including their name prefixed with an @ symbol. For example “@Refreshtech Hello Steve!”

In addition, tweets can contain a subject prefixed with a # (a hash) and that is called a hashtag. Clicking on a hashtag brings up a list of all the other tweets containing the same hashtag. In this way it is possible to see a stream of tweets on a given topic. The most popular hashtags at any one time are called Trending Topics. Twitter shows a list of these on the front page. Finally, if a person likes a tweet they can “retweet” it which will send it out to all of their followers.

While most tweets are just inane chatter, many complete rubbish, a tweet that contains concise, well-written information, a link, a picture or a video, and that has the right hashtag is likely to be retweeted by a good percentage of people that see it. In turn it can be retweeted by their followers too. There are some people that have much more influence than others often because of the speed of their information or the quality of presentation, and these people tend to have more followers than average, and achieve far more retweets then others.

When a good tweet with a hashtag appears, it can be retweeted over and over again because the tweet appears in the search for a given hashtag. Someone sees it, likes it and retweets it. Since the retweet also has the hashtag, the tweet appears in the twitter stream again and the whole process repeats. A really popular tweet can appear over and over again for hours.

It is through the use of hashtags that groups, events and protests are organised using twitter since all the people involved post their tweets with the chosen tag and then reads all the other tweets with the same tag, enabling group discussion and sharing of information.

Many businesses use twitter, some to announce events or changes, some to communicate with other businesses, and some to talk with their customers. Many businesses monitor twitter for mentions of themselves, to promote the positive mentions, and to address the issues in the negative ones.

Twitter is a wonderful tool for organising events and attracting support, an incredibly fast way of getting news hours before the BBC or Sky news catches up, and fantastic for sharing information. Twitter allows the masses to communicate directly with large business and with people in high places. Only on twitter can you post a message about an organisation or an MP and get a reply from them within a short time. Only on twitter do businesses rush to address any grievances that have been posted up for all to see.

Amazon Kindle: getting the content you want

Steven Sumpter — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 17:23:32 +0000

I have recently come in to possession of an Amazon Kindle eBook reader. Amazon have gone out of their way to make it as simple and easy as possible for the purpose of reading books. This device fulfills its purpose perfectly, allowing me to download books from the Amazon store and read them on an electronic ink display that is far closer to real print than it is to a computer screen. I get all the advantages of reading on an electronic device, but I find myself reading blissfully uninterrupted by tweets, emails and messages, and without the tired eyes that I would get from reading on a computer. There are even several thousand free out-of-copyright books available on the Amazon store – just go to the Kindle ebooks section and sort by price to see them. If that isn’t enough, many more out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg are available in ebook versions for the Kindle. You can even download them directly from the Kindle by getting hold of The Magic Catalogue available here.

But books are not all that I read.

Like many people, I have a number of websites that I visit on a daily basis. Websites that provide news. Websites that have the latest technical articles. Websites with comics. (I can’t do without my daily Dilbert cartoon!)

The thought occurs to me: I have all these things that I like to read every day. And I have a perfect reading device in my hands. Can I combine the two?

My first thought of using the ‘Experimental’ web browser that is built in to the Kindle was quickly shot down. The browser is a simple affair, and can just about handle a mobile version of most websites but is not adequate for my daily web browsing.

Getting content on to the Kindle

There are three ways that content can be transferred to a Kindle.

The first way is to purchase the material via Amazon’s web store. The Kindle makes this even easier by linking directly to the store from the Kindle device itself. Alongside the books there are newspapers, magazines and even blogs. The upside of this is that if the content that you require is listed here, getting it is a matter of clicking through the store and choosing to subscribe. The downside is that it will cost you. The prices listed for the magazines and daily newspapers are not a bad deal, in my opinion. They will cost you less than the standard printed version, and they will automatically appear on your Kindle as they are published so that, for example, the Independent or the Telegraph can be waiting on your Kindle for you every morning as you sit down to breakfast or get on a train. The blogs, on the other hand, are less of a good deal. For a start, the list is limited to a selection of popular and relatively well known blogs. One that I read regularly is charged at £1 per month. Another is £1.99. Taken individually, these prices are small but they soon add up to a hefty monthly payment for what amounts to retrieving the articles from the websites via the same RSS mechanism that I can use on my PC for free. Even worse, the website owners receive only 30% of the price that Amazon charges.

The second way to get content on the Kindle is to plug it in to a PC and to drop documents on it as though it were a memory stick. The Kindle is actually quite accommodating for this purpose; accepting PDF files, saved HTML web pages and word documents, as well as several other types of file. If you have a word document to review, or a PDF article that you have downloaded, this method works well. If, on the other hand, you would like to read many documents every day, this method is cumbersome and annoying. For a start, by the time you have saved every web page that you wish to read, you might just as well have read them on the computer!

The third way to get content is to email it to the Kindle. Every Kindle has an email address (actually, two of them) and you may send files of any kind that the Kindle will recognise as an attachment by email to yourname@kindle.com and it will appear on your kindle within a few minutes. This method works well, but again is fiddly if you have a lot of articles to read. It could also cost you a little bit. If you have a 3G Kindle, it will retrieve your articles via the 3G mobile phone network, and you will be charged depending on the size of the document that you have sent. The charge can be avoided by sending to the slightly different address of yourname@free.kindle.com although you will have to have WiFi turned on and connected in order for this to work. If your Kindle has only WiFi and no 3G, neither address will be charged.

We have three different methods of getting content on to a Kindle, but still no satisfactory way of transferring daily website content on to it without a lot of hassle. This is where third party tools make their entrance. Over the last few days I have tried Instapaper, RekindleIT and KindleFeeder.com.

Instapaper

Instapaper is not aimed exclusively at Kindle users; it is actually quite a useful tool for just saving articles to read later. Unfortunately it has not been the hit that I would have liked it to be. The principle is quite nice. I placed a bookmark in my bookmarks bar as a button and authorised Instapaper to send documents to my Kindle. (The website will tell you how.) On finding a web page that I wanted to save and read later on my Kindle, I clicked that button and a few seconds later a message informs me that the article was saved.

To read the saved articles there is a choice. I can visit the Instapaper web site where there is a list of all the web pages I have saved for later. From there it is possible to follow the link back to the original web page, or click on a “Text” button which provides a much simplified view of the article for easy reading on the computer screen. This mode of operation is quite useful as a short term bookmark service even if you don’t have a Kindle.

On that same web page there is a heading on the right called “Download” and one of the choices under that is an icon labeled “Kindle.” I can click that icon to download a file which ends in “.mobi” – this is an ebook version of all the articles that I have saved. Once downloaded, I can simply attach the file to an email and send it to my Kindle email address, which can be found on the Amazon web site, and the saved web pages appear in a new book on my Kindle.

Buried deep in the settings of Instapaper there is also an option to send the file to my Kindle automatically once per day. Unfortunately in the week or so that I have been using it I have not been able to make this function work, although the “send now” button in the same area does work occasionally.

RekindleIT

RekindleIT is a powerful tool for reading long articles from the web. It requires a little configuration; I had to sign up to an account, then follow the instructions to create a bookmark button to sit in the browser toolbar and to tell Amazon that the email address used by ReKindleIT is allowed to send things to my Kindle.

Using RekindleIT is easy. On finding a long web page, I first click on the RekindleIT bookmark button. In the window that pops up, I enter my Kindle username (found on the Amazon web site) and then tick the “Reformat Article for Kindle” box if the page is quite complex, and click on “Send this file” to finish. The article is emailed to my Kindle after a short delay.

I have used RekindleIT many times in the last few days. Any time a website article that I am reading is likely to take more than a minute or two to read, I send it to my kindle with RekindleIT. This has been a much more pleasant and focused way to read a lot of articles.

kindlefeeder.com

Most web sites provide what is called an RSS feed. An RSS feed is simply a list of headlines, summaries, and possibly whole articles from a website. Using an RSS reader such as Google Reader, it is possible to list headlines from many websites all together in the one place. Obviously the idea of using the Kindle as an RSS reader is quite appealing.

I found kindlefeeder.com to be something of a disappointment, but that isn’t actually their fault. The service is good. I signed up on the website, and was quickly able to add a number of RSS feeds to my list, both from a huge selection that they already know about, and adding some that were not listed. After choosing the RSS feeds that I wanted, it was simply a matter of clicking a button to have the whole lot delivered as an ebook to my Kindle.

Unfortunately the actual contents of the ebook were disappointing. Most websites, it turns out, do not include the whole article in the RSS feed. Taking the BBC news RSS feed as an example, what I actually got on the Kindle was usually the headline and about 20 words from the article summary, and a link to the article on the website. Although the Kindle has a web browser, it is not very good at all and I saw little point in using kindlefeeder to send what amounted to a set of links to my Kindle.

I also found that kindlefeeder can send regular updates to a Kindle automatically if you pay for the premium version, which is currently $20 per year.

Conclusion

So which options have I ended up using? Well, for a couple of frequently updated websites that I read a lot, I took the easy option and I subscribed via the Amazon store at a cost to me of £1 – £2 per month per site. It works well, and I receive every article from those sites as soon as they are published.

Up until getting my Kindle I have read the BBC news website for my daily news fix but for the first time ever I am regularly reading a daily newspaper which I have subscribed to via the Kindle at a cost of £14 per month.

Any time I come across a long web page that I want to read, I now hit the RekindleIT button, and with a couple of clicks it is sent to my Kindle. I tend to use RekindleIT rather than Instapaper because I am too impatient to wait a few hours to get several documents together, as well as due to the problems I have had with Instapapers automatic delivery.

Where Instapaper has proved useful to me is when reading a series of web pages, or articles or stories that have been spread over several pages. I have taken to sending each page to Instapaper, and then sending the Instapaper to my Kindle as a self contained book about that one subject.

I never did manage to get Dilbert to appear daily on my Kindle. I will let you know if I ever do.

If you would like to know more about the Kindle, Ultimate Kindle is a good place to start. If you don’t own one yet, you can purchase yours here:

Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite – Latest Generation

Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G + Wi-Fi, 6″ Display, Graphite, 3G Works Globally – Latest Generation

Ten rules to keep your computer safe and fast

Steven Sumpter — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:45:48 +0000

Here are our top tips to keep your computer safe from infection and running smoothly. If any of these tasks seem daunting, Refresh Technology will be pleased to help you with them. A computer health check and software clean up is just £15 if you bring your computer to our office.

Don’t use Internet Explorer, use an alternative like Firefox or Chrome and install Adblock Plus to block adverts as they can be a source of infection.
Install some anti-virus software and make sure it is up to date.
Make sure that Windows Auto Update is enabled and is always up to date.
Backup your data to a USB memory stick, hard disk or via an online service.
Look out for fake messages about virus infection that do not come from your anti-virus software.
Do not install software from websites that you do not know.
When installing software, use the advanced option if available, and make sure to untick any toolbars, browser add-ons or extra software that might be included with it.
Consider removing any software that runs in the background, it will slow you down.
Do not run any software sent to you by email, even if you know the sender.
Don’t click on any links in an email purporting to be from your bank or from Paypal. They are probably fake.

Microsoft Powerpoint – The Basics

Alex Walters — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:45:35 +0000

Microsoft PowerPoint is a piece of software that allows you to create, and manage presentations. You can use a presentation for a variety for reasons such as illustrating a talk, preparing simple handouts on a lecture you have give, or just leaving some information running in a continuous loop on a screen, or the list goes on, it’s a very useful piece of software. The aim of this guide is to show you have to create, save, re-open and close a PowerPoint Presentation using PowerPoint 2003 or PowerPoint 2007.

How Do I Tell Which Version Of PowerPoint I Am Using?

As this guide is split I thought I’d best start by showing you how to check which version of PowerPoint you have installed on your computer. There’s a couple of different ways of doing this.

1. Check Your Desktop Icons

On your desktop (the screen with all the icons that you see when you first log into the computer) there is normally an icon for PowerPoint. If you click on this is should show the name of the software it will open below the icon stating either Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, or Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 (pictures below).

2. Check The Start Menu

If you cannot find the icons for Microsoft PowerPoint on your desktop, you can try looking at your Start Menu to see if this holds any clues. By clicking on the Start Button and going to all programs you should be able to find an option for Microsoft Office 20XX – this will then tell you which version of PowerPoint you have installed on your system:

Note – The screenshots in this guide have all been taken on a computer running Windows XP. If you’re using a computer running Windows Vista or Window 7, instead of a button saying “Start” you’ll have a circle with the Windows logo in it, at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen. This will respond in the same way as the “Start” button shown above.

3. See What The Software Looks Like

If you’re still unsure as to which version of PowerPoint you have installed on your computer you can have a look at the software itself for a clue. Microsoft gave the interface a large overhaul between PowerPoint 2003 and PowerPoint 2007 so by looking at what it looks like when you open the software it can give you a clue as to which version you are using.

If the software you have installed is PowerPoint 2003 or older then when you open the software it will look like this:

However if you are using PowerPoint 2007 or a more recent version it will look more like this:

Hopefully we have now been able to identify which version of PowerPoint you are using. If you use the links below they will take you to the relevant section of the guide for the software you have.

Powerpoint 2003 – The Basics

Alex Walters — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:44:13 +0000

Please read Microsoft Powerpoint – The Basics before reading this article.

Starting A New Presentation

Starting a new presentation in PowerPoint 2003 is very easy. All you need to do is open the software and it will load itself into a blank presentation ready for you to edit.

If you already have a presentation open it’s just as easy. All you need to do is click the new presentation button in the tool bars (circled below).

Or you can go to the File menu, and choose New. This will behave slightly differently and a Screen will appear to the side of your presentation giving you some options (these are circled in the screen shot below)

- Blank presentation will create a new empty presentation for you to work on with the default presentation style (a title and a sub-title box) – you can change the style for each slide within the presentation.

- From design template will allow you to create a presentation based on a template provided by Microsoft – you are given a selection to choose from and then all the slides you add will be formatted in the same way.

- From AutoContent wizard will ask you to give some information about what you you’re your presentation to do, and then prepare a presentation which is prepared for you to add your information into. The templates provided are slightly more corporate focussed and have been designed to look professional with as little setup as possible.

- From Existing Presentation allows you to create a new presentation that is based on one that you have already created – you could use this if you want to replicate the style of a different presentation without having to recreate it in its entirety.

- Photo album offers you a wizard to create a very simple photo album. You can select which photos you would like to be included in your presentation and which order you would like these photos to be in, the presentation will then be generated automatically for you.

- Templates – Templates are presentations that have all ready been created which allow you to setup your presentation into a style you’ve already used before – you can use this if you want your presentations to match – say you writing a handout for a series of talks. In the Templates section there are options for templates that Microsoft has created online, templates that may already exist on your computer, and Templates on other websites. If you click one of these it will bring up a File Open box pointing to the relevant location allowing you to choose the template that you wish to use for your presentation. There’s also a search box so you can find a specific style quickly.

When you hover over one of these options your mouse point will turn into a little pointing hand, and the text will be underlined. If you click then PowerPoint will create a presentation of the type you have chosen (or display the File Open dialog box if you wish to use an existing presentation or a template).

Saving a Presentation

After you have been working on a presentation you will want to save your work so you can return to it at a later point. There’s two ways you can do this you can click on the Save button (circled below). If the presentation is one that you’ve used before this will save any changes you’ve made, otherwise the Save As dialog will appear allowing you to choose where you would like to save your file and what you would like to call it. The default location that PowerPoint (or any of the Microsoft Office applications) will choose to save is a folder called My Documents; if you’re unsure about what you’re doing this is a good place to save as it is also the first place the Microsoft PowerPoint will look for files when you come to open them.

Top Tip – We’d always recommend calling the file something that’s descriptive of the contents so you’re able to find it again easily.

The other way to save a file is to use the options in the File Menu. If you click on this you will see three different options for saving (circled in the picture below).

Save will save your presentation in exactly the same way as the Save button I described above – if it’s a presentation you’ve already created it will just save any changes you’ve made, otherwise it will display the file name dialog box asking you to choose when and where you would like to save your presentation. As we mentioned above the default location that PowerPoint (or any of the Microsoft Office applications) will choose to save is a folder called My Documents.

Assuming that you’ve already saved the presentation once Save As is used to create a copy of the presentation that you are working on. If you click on this PowerPoint will bring up the File name dialog box and ask you to choose where you would like to save the file, and what you would like to call it. This won’t change the original file that you opened but will save any changes you have made to the presentation.

Save As Web Page gives you the option to save your presentation in a format that is readable by Internet Browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. This is useful if you have a presentation that you are looking to publish onto the internet but probably isn’t the best save option to use when working on a personal file! When you click on this you will get a different version of the File Name dialog box which will take you through the different options for saving as a webpage and we’ll come back and look at this in a later tutorial.

Opening A Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation

Well you’ve setup your new presentation, spent some time putting information into it, turned off the computer for the night, it’s the next morning and you want to add some more information how do you access your presentation to be able to do this? Well once again it’s very easy and there’s three ways of doing it.

You can click on the open button (circled below) this will then open the “File Open” dialog box. In this screen you can navigate to the file you wish to open and click the Open button, your presentation should then load. The windows will automatically start looking for files in the My Documents folder but don’t worry if you saved your presentation elsewhere as you can navigate through your computer in the same manner as you would when use Windows Explorer.

Alternatively you can go into the File menu, and choose the option “Open” (circled below). Once again this will give you the File Open Dialog box, allowing you to choose your file and then click on the open button to load the presentation. Remember to save when you’ve finished editing it!

Finally you can go into the file menu, and at the bottom of the list of commands will be the names of the last five presentations you accessed (circled in the screenshot below). If you click on the name of the presentation you would like to open, then that presentation should open instantly for you.

Closing A Presentation

When you have finished working with your presentation it is always important to close it properly. When you have finished with your presentation if you go into the file menu there is an option saying Close (circled below).

If you have made any changes to the presentation PowerPoint will bring up a message asking if you wish to save your presentation.

Be careful, if you click No any changes you’ve made to the presentation will be lost and you’ll have to re-do them if you want to keep them. If you click Yes, any changes you’ve made will be saved and the presentation will be closed. Finally if you click Cancel you will be returned to your presentation and nothing else will happen.

That’s the end of this guide – click here for the same functions in PowerPoint 2007 and stay tuned for more guides coming soon.

About the author
Alex is a guest contributor to the Refresh Technology website. He has experience of providing IT Support for one of the largest Local Authorities in the country. He seemed to become the go-to guy for problems with MS Office, though Excel still slightly scares him.

Powerpoint 2007 – The Basics

Alex Walters — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 21:43:50 +0000

Please read Microsoft Powerpoint – The Basics before reading this article.

Starting A New Presentation

Starting a new presentation in PowerPoint 2007 is very easy. All you need to do is open the software and it will load itself into a blank presentation ready for you to edit.

If you have an PowerPoint window open it’s easy. All you need to do is click the round circle with the windows logo in the top left corner of the software (circled below). This will give you access to the file menu.

In the menu that’s displayed choose the first option in the left column – New.

This will bring up the new workbook screen (shown below) allowing you to choose from a standard blank presentation, any presentation templates that are installed on your system, a copy of a presentation you have already created, or a Template provided by Microsoft through their website.

On the right hand side of the screen there will be a preview of the presentation that you are about to create to give you an idea of what the finished product will look like. The catergories to left-hand side are broken down as follows.

- Blank and recent – this gives you the option of a blank presentation which is an empty presentation for you to work on, or any templates that you have used recently. This functions almost like a collection of your favourite different types of presentations.

- Installed Templates – this will give you a selection of templates installed on your computer and allow you to use one of these for creating your presentation

- Installed Themes – This will allow you to create a new presentation setup around a specific theme or colour scheme. This can be useful if you want all your presentations to look similar.

- My Templates – allows you to select specific templates and to use this menu as a shortcut for loading them.

- New from existing… – will allow you to create a presentation which is a copy of a presentation you’ve already created

- Microsoft Office Online – Microsoft provides a range of templates in different categories. These are presentations already setup to specific designs that only require you to fill in the relevant data. These presentations all come from the Microsoft website so may not be available to you if you don’t have a internet connection.

If you select the template that you would like to use in the centre area of the screen, it should then be highlighted in a yellow/gold box. You should then be able to click the create button in to the bottom right corner to create the new presentation.

Saving a Presentation

After you have been working on a presentation you will want to save your work so you can return to it at a later point. There’s two ways you can do this, if you haven’t edited the quick launch icons in Microsoft PowerPoint you can click on the Save button (circled below). If the presentation is one that you’ve used before this will save any changes you’ve made, otherwise the Save As dialog will appear allowing you to choose where you would like to save your file and what you would like to call it. The default location that PowerPoint (or any of the Microsoft Office applications) will choose to save is a folder called My Documents; if you’re unsure about what you’re doing this is a good place to save as it is also the first place the Microsoft PowerPoint will look for files when you come to open them.

Top Tip – We’d always recommend calling the file something that’s descriptive of the contents so you’re able to find it again easily.

The other way to save a file is to use the options in the File Menu, which is accessed by clicking the circle with the Windows Logo in the top left corner of the software. If you click on this you will see two different options for saving (circled in the picture below).

Save As will expand out into a range of different options as shown in the Screenshot below:

The different options do the following:

- PowerPoint Presentation – this allows you to save your presentation as a standard PowerPoint presentation. You should be able to open this on any computer which has Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or later installed. If you try and open this file type of a computer with an older version of the software installed it may not open if the correct convertors haven’t been installed.

- PowerPoint Show – This will save your presentation into a format where it can be viewed by not edited. This is good if you wish to email your presentation to someone to view but don’t want them changing the slides. This will save to slightly different format called PPS.

- PowerPoint 97-2003 Workbook – This gives you the option to save the presentation as though it was created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 or earlier. This may lose some of the newer features, but should allow you to open the presentation on an older computer without encountering any problems.

- Open Document Presentation – this is a format where the coding it uses is freely available on the internet. This means that different pieces of software can read the file without needing the specialised de-coders that Microsoft provides. You are unlikely to need to use this format as most pieces of software can read PowerPoint presentations without a problem.

- PDF or XPS – this will export you presentation into a PDF or XPS document. A PDF document is a fairly universal document that can be read as long as you have a free piece of software called Adobe Reader. The advantage of this format is that the presentation is guaranteed to look the same, no matter which computer it is opened on, and it is also very hard to edit a PDF report. If you are submitting a presentation digitally for a report or presentation that it is normally recommended to convert it to PDF first. The XPS file format is very similar to the PDF format except that this has been created by Microsoft. XPS files need a special viewer that is not always installed on Windows XP computers, but should be included with the operating system on Windows Vista or Windows 7 computers. While these both offer similar options PDF tends to be used more because it is more easily accessible.

- Other formats – this allows you to save your presentation into all the other formats that PowerPoint can support saving into. You are unlikely to need to use these given that the common save formats are all covered above.

Opening A Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation

You can click on the open button (circled in red) and this will then open the “File Open” dialog box. In this screen you can navigate to the file you wish to open and click the Open button, your presentation should then load. The window will automatically start looking for files in the My Documents folder but don’t worry if you saved your presentation elsewhere as you can navigate through your computer in the same manner as you would when use Windows Explorer.

PowerPoint will also keep a record of all the files that you’ve worked on recently (circled green in the screenshot). This will show the last ten presentations that you’ve opened, as well as any presentations that you open regularly. If you want to open a presentations from here you just have to move the mouse over it so the name highlighted in a yellow box, and click – the presentation should open.

Top Tip – when you are working on a presentation it’s a good idea to save at regular intervals so you don’t lose any work.

Closing A Presentation

When you have finished working with your presentation it is always important to close it properly. When you have finished with your presentation if you go into the file menu which is accessed by clicking the circle with the Windows Logo in the top left corner of the software, there is an option saying Close (circled below).

If you have made any changes to the presentation PowerPoint will bring up a message asking if you wish to save your presentation.

That’s the end of this guide – click here for the same functions in PowerPoint 2003 and stay tuned for more guides coming soon.

Free Software! What’s the catch?

Steven Sumpter — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:47:07 +0000

Imagine that you have just bought a new computer. It might have cost you upwards of four hundred pounds. So you get it home, plug it in, manage to look at some web pages, and… then what?

You probably want to use it to type some letters. You want to create your Christmas cards on it. You want your children to do their homework on it. But there is a problem. You don’t have the right software to do it.

If you just want to jump to the list of recommended free software, click here

What is software?

Software is what tells your computer how to do a given task. It controls what you see on the screen, what your documents look like, and what you can create. You may have seen a lot of fuss recently about the iPhone and other mobile phones using ‘Apps.’ Apps is short for applications which is just another name for software.

Typical software on a home computer

A home computer typically has software installed for these tasks:

An operating system such as Windows or Mac OS X (Normally supplied with the computer.)
Security software to keep viruses away.
A web browser to view web pages with.
Web browser plugins including Flash, Java and a PDF viewer.
An office suite for producing documents.
Page layout software for desktop publishing.
Email software. (Not required if you use Web email)
A music player and store.
Instant Messaging and communications software.
A photo and image editor.
CD and DVD creation software.

What came with your computer?

When you purchase a new computer it will come with some basic software that you need to get going, normally including Windows which tell the computer how to do the most basic things. You will probably also have a (time limited) trial copy of some anti virus software to keep your computer secure, and you might even get a copy of Microsoft Works which provides basic capabilities for typing documents and using spreadsheets. Most people will purchase some form of security software and a copy of Microsoft Office, at some considerable expense. A typical cost is around £40 for a copy of Norton Internet Security, and £90 for Microsoft Office Home and Student edition. If you are purchasing for business use, the price of Microsoft Office rises dramatically to around £190 for Microsoft Office Home and Business edition. (You will be breaking your license agreement if you use the home and student version for business.)

These costs are not small, especially if you consider the price of Microsoft Office for business can be more than half of the cost of your new laptop. So is there a way around these costs? Don’t worry, there is.

Free software. No, really!

It may surprise you to learn that you can find much of the software that you need for free. Software can be free for a few different reasons, and there are some different classes of ‘free.’

The first kind of free is simply a loss leader for a business. Often software will be free for home use, but as soon as it is used for business a more costly license must be purchased.

The second kind of free is trial software, which lasts for a limited time before you must purchase the full version, or has less features than the full version.

The third kind of free is “Open Source” software. It is software that has been written by one or many people collaborating, often via the internet, to produce the software that they want to use. The result is given away for free to anyone that would like it. Not only that, but they also release the code and the documentation that was used to create it, so that anyone with the knowledge how can modify the software for their own purposes. The most popular license used for open source software, the GPL, specifies that the software can be sold or given away, but whoever receives it can also sell it or give it away, and the source code used to create it must also be available. The concept of open source software might be difficult to grasp if you are not a programmer, but it has given the world a wealth of software for every conceivable task, all available for free.

So what is the catch? Well, in some cases you might get a cut-down version of the software. You might be encouraged to pay to upgrade to a better version. In the case of most open source software, there is no catch at all for the end user!

Recommended free software

All of this software can be obtained by downloading from the internet. You will require a broadband internet connection for this purpose. This list is largely aimed at users of Microsoft Windows, a similar list for Macs will follow soon.

Security and Anti-virus

One of the most popular free anti-virus products is AVG Anti-virus. It is free for personal use only, with payment required for business use or if you need more features.

My personal favourite security software is Avast. It too is free for personal use, with payment getting you more features and a business license.

Microsoft have their own anti-virus product called Microsoft Security Essentials. It does not have as many features as the previous two, not scanning emails or web sites being obvious missing features. It is, however, free even for business use if your business has less than ten computers.

Office productivity suite

There is only one real free competitor to Microsoft Office, and that is OpenOffice.org. (Usually referred to without the .org, but technically that is part of the name!) OpenOffice started life as Star Office, which was commercial software but it was then bought by Sun and released as open source after which it received many contributions from other programmers and is now a polished and successful product. Now owned by Oracle, OpenOffice is available free to all, even business users. Oracle also sell support contracts for OpenOffice if a business requires it. Please note that OpenOffice saves documents in Open Document Format, an standard that older versions of Microsoft Office do not support. If you need to open your documents with Microsoft Office then you should make sure that you choose the correct file type when you save them.

Google Docs is an interesting alternative to traditional office software. It is accessed entirely through a web browser and your documents are all stored on Google’s servers via the internet. Although fairly simplistic and lacking many features, Google Docs is capable enough for writing most standard documents and keeping simple spreadsheets updated for your accounts. A paid version is available which is aimed at businesses, allowing them to easily share documents within the business and providing support.

Desktop Publishing

The best free software for page layout work (desktop publishing) is produced by Serif Software. Serif PagePlus is a very capable application, and this writer uses it to produce all of his flyers, business cards and other advertising materials. Registration is required before it will function. The paid version offers a few extra features such as the ability to produce print-ready documents suitable for sending to a printing company.

The open source alternative is called Scribus, and like all GPL software is free for everyone. It does not have all that many features yet, but it might do what you need.

Music and Video

Windows is supplied with Media Player which does a reasonable job of listing your MP3 music collection and playing it in the order that you want.

If you want to play something that Media Player can’t handle, VLC is the answer. VLC, short for Video Lan Client (but you didn’t need to know that!) is open source software that can play back just about any kind of music or video file.

If you want to purchase music, iTunes is a pretty good place to go. A must if you have any Apple iPod, iPhone or iPad, it puts the music player, internet radio, and the purchasing of music all in the same place.

Spotify is a very nice system that will ‘stream’ music straight to you. You don’t get to keep the music that you listen to, and it has adverts between tracks, so it is a bit like a radio station where you choose the playlist.

Photo

There are quite a few options for photo editing. It is quite likely that you received some simple software with your digital camera or even your scanner. If that fits your needs, great. If not, the next alternative is Google Picasa. Picasa gives you simple tools to fix up your photos, and then provides an easy way to upload them to Google’s servers and share them with your friends. It’s completely free for everyone.

For more serious, more capable editing, Paint.net is an open source tool with many features and also a ‘plugin’ system that can add many more. It can read and save just about every type of image too and is free for everyone.

Serif PhotoPlus might be what you need, especially if you are also using PagePlus. It requires registration and some features are not available unless you purchase a license but it’s a good bit of software.

Microsoft have their own offering as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite, called Live Photo Gallery.

Accounting

Even accounting can be done with free software!

VT Cash Book is simple software that can be used for recording all transactions, and can produce reports such as profit and loss, balance sheet and ledgers reports. More capable versions are available from the same company should you outgrow Cash Book.

TAS Basics is a cut down version of TAS Books. It can be used for any size company, although lack of certain features may prompt you to upgrade once your business is large enough.

QuickBooks Simple start Free edition might do the job for you. It is the same software as used by much larger companies, but you will be limited to a maximum of 20 customers and suppliers. If you do business with the same few people all the time, it might work for you.

Brightbook is free for all, for any size business, and is accessed entirely through a web browser. It can produce invoices and even link to Google Checkout to process payments.

Web browser

A web browser is what shows you most of the internet. When you click on the big blue ‘E’ you are using Internet Explorer. You got a copy of Internet Explorer bundled with Windows, so why would you want to use a different web browser? Security is one overwhelming reason, with just about any browser being more resistant to virus infection than Internet Explorer is. Speed is another reason. Some alternative browsers include Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. Of those, Firefox is the most popular, and Chrome is the fastest, simplest, and most secure.

Email

Most home computer users have web based email these days. That is, they access their email via a web page. Most people in offices use email software such as Microsoft Outlook. If you have Windows XP, then you have Outlook Express supplied with it. I strongly recommend that you do not use it. Windows Vista comes with a more up to date application called Windows Mail. Windows 7 does not supply an email application but instead Microsoft now provides a suite of software called Windows Live Essentials which includes Windows Live Mail.

Our recommended email software is Mozilla Thunderbird. You may notice that it is made by the same people as Firefox. It is open source software and is free for everyone to use.

Making life easier

It can be quite inconvenient and time consuming to install all of this software. Fortunately there is a handy tool that can download and install a lot of this software for you. It is called Ninite, and it too is free for personal use. You simply visit the website, tick the boxes to indicate which software that you require, then click ‘Get Software’ and go a get a cup of tea while it does it’s stuff. When you return all that software will be ready to go.

This is our recommended list of software for any new computer. This whole list is available via Ninite.

Firefox
iTunes
VLC
Picasa
OpenOffice
Adobe Reader
Avast
Flash, Flash (IE)
Java
Silverlight
7-Zip

Software download links

Ninite http://ninite.com/
AVG http://free.avg.com/
Avast http://www.avast.com/
Microsoft Security Essentials http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/
Google Docs https://docs.google.com/#all
Serif PagePlus http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
Scribus http://www.scribus.net/
VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
iTunes http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/
Spotifyhttp://www.spotify.com/uk/
Google Picasa http://picasa.google.com/
Paint.net http://www.getpaint.net/
Serif PhotoPlus http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
Windows Live Essentials http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials
VT Cash Book http://www.vtsoftware.co.uk/
TAS Basics http://www.tassoftware.co.uk/site/tas_accounts_software/basics
Quickbooks Simplestart Free http://quickbooks.intuit.co.uk/small-business-accounting/quickbooks-simplestart-free.jsp
Brightbook http://www.brightbook.co.uk/
Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/
Google Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome
Apple Safari http://www.apple.com/uk/safari/
Opera http://www.opera.com/
Mozilla Thunderbird http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-GB/thunderbird/

Excel 2007 – The Basics

Alex Walters — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 16:12:39 +0000

Please read Microsoft Excel – The Basics before reading this article.

Starting A New Spreadsheet

Starting a new spreadsheet in Excel 2007 is very easy. All you need to do is open the software and it will load itself into a blank spreadsheet ready for you to edit.

If you have an Excel window open it’s easy. All you need to do is click the round circle with the windows logo in the top left corner of the software (circled below). This will give you access to the file menu.

In the menu that’s displayed choose the first option in the left column – New.

This will bring up the new workbook screen (shown below) allowing you to choose from a standard blank spreadsheet, any spreadsheet templates that are installed on your system, a copy of a spreadsheet you have already created, or a Template provided by Microsoft through their website.

On the right hand side of the screen there will be a preview of the spreadsheet that you are about to create to give you an idea of what the finished product will look like. The catergories to left-hand side are broken down as follows.

-          Blank and recent – this gives you the option of a blank workbook which is an empty spreadsheet for you to work on, or any templates that you have used recently. This functions almost like a collection of your favourite different types of spreadsheets.
-          Installed Templates – this will give you a selection of templates installed on your computer and allow you to use one of these for creating your spreadsheet
-          My Templates – allows you to select specific templates and to use this menu as a shortcut for loading them.
-          New from existing… – will allow you to create a spreadsheet which is a copy of a spreadsheet you’ve already created
-          Microsoft Office Online – Microsoft provides a range of templates in different categories. These are spreadsheets already setup to specific designs that only require you to fill in the relevant data.   These spreadsheets all come from the Microsoft website so may not be available to you if you don’t have a internet connection.

Saving a Spreadsheet

After you have been working on a spreadsheet you will want to save your work so you can return to it at a later point. There’s two ways you can do this, if you haven’t edited the quick launch icons in Microsoft Excel you can click on the Save button (circled below). If the spreadsheet is one that you’ve used before this will save any changes you’ve made, otherwise the Save As dialog will appear allowing you to choose where you would like to save your file and what you would like to call it. The default location that Excel (or any of the Microsoft Office applications) will choose to save is a folder called My Documents; if you’re unsure about what you’re doing this is a good place to save as it is also the first place the Microsoft Excel will look for files when you come to open them.

Top Tip – We’d always recommend calling the file something that’s descriptive of the contents so you’re able to find it again easily.

Save will save your spreadsheet in exactly the same way as the Save button I described above – if it’s a spreadsheet you’ve already created it will just save any changes you’ve made, otherwise it will display the file name dialog box asking you to choose when and where you would like to save your spreadsheet. As we mentioned above the default location that Excel (or any of the Microsoft Office applications) will choose to save is a folder called My Documents.

Assuming that you’ve already saved the spreadsheet once Save As is used to create a copy of the spreadsheet that you are working on. If you click on this Excel will bring up the File name dialog box and ask you to choose where you would like to save the file, and what you would like to call it. This won’t change the original file that you opened but will save any changes you have made to the spreadsheet.

Save As will expand out into a range of different options as shown in the Screenshot below:

The different options do the following:

-          Excel Workbook – this allows you to save your spreadsheet as a standard Excel Spreadsheet. You should be able to open this on any computer which has Microsoft Excel 2007 or later installed. If you try and open this file type of a computer with an older version of the software installed it may not open if the correct convertors haven’t been installed.
-          Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook – This will save the workbook in a similar style to the Excel Workbook save options. The only difference is that it will also include any macros that have been included with the workbook. We’ll come back to this when we talk about Macros at a later point
-          Excel Binary Workbook – this saves your workbook into a very simple format which can be used to transfer it between systems, or for importing the data into another piece of software. We will cover what this is and how it works in a later guide.
-          Excel 97-2003 Workbook – This gives you the option to save the spreadsheet as though it was created in Microsoft Excel 2003. This may lose some of the newer features, but should allow you to open the spreadsheet on an older computer without encountering any problems.
-          Open Document Format – this is a format where the coding it uses is freely available on the internet. This means that different pieces of software can read the file without needing the specialised de-coders that Microsoft provides. You are unlikely to need to use this format as most pieces of software can read Excel spreadsheets without a problem.
-          PDF or XPS – this will export you document into a PDF or XPS document. A PDF document is a fairly universal document that can be read as long as you have a free piece of software called Adobe Reader. The advantage of this format is that the spreadsheet is guaranteed to look the same, no matter which computer it is opened on, and it is also very hard to edit a PDF report. If you are submitting a spreadsheet digitally for a report or presentation that it is normally recommended to convert it to PDF first. The XPS file format is very similar to the PDF format except that this has been created by Microsoft. XPS files need a special viewer that is not always installed on Windows XP computers, but should be included with the operating system on Windows Vista or Windows 7 computers. While these both offer similar options PDF tends to be used more because it is more easily accessible.
-          Other formats – this allows you to save your document into all the other formats that Excel can support saving into. You are unlikely to need to use these given that the common save formats are all covered above.

Opening A Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

Well you’ve setup your new spreadsheet, spent some time putting information into it, turned off the computer for the night, it’s the next morning and you want to add some more information how do you access your spreadsheet to be able to do this? Well once again it’s very easy and there’s a couple of ways of doing it.

You can click on the open button (circled in red) and this will then open the “File Open” dialog box. In this screen you can navigate to the file you wish to open and click the Open button, your spreadsheet should then load. The window will automatically start looking for files in the My Documents folder but don’t worry if you saved your spreadsheet elsewhere as you can navigate through your computer in the same manner as you would when use Windows Explorer.

Excel will also keep a record of all the files that you’ve worked on recently (circled green in the screenshot). This will show the last ten spreadsheets that you’ve opened, as well as any spreadsheets that you open regularly. If you want to open a spreadsheet from here you just have to move the mouse over it so the name highlighted in a yellow box, and click – the spreadsheet should open.

Top Tip – when you are working on a spreadsheet it’s a good idea to save at regular intervals so you don’t lose any work.

Closing A Spreadsheet

When you have finished working with your spreadsheet it is always important to close it properly. When you have finished with your spreadsheet if you go into the file menu which is accessed by clicking the circle with the Windows Logo in the top left corner of the software, there is an option saying Close (circled below).

If you have made any changes to the spreadsheet Excel will bring up a message asking if you wish to save your spreadsheet.

Be careful, if you click No any changes you’ve made to the spreadsheet will be lost and you’ll have to re-do them if you want to keep them. If you click Yes, any changes you’ve made will be saved and the Spreadsheet will be closed. Finally if you click Cancel you will be returned to your spreadsheet and nothing else will happen.

That’s the end of this guide – click here for the same functions in Excel 2003 and stay tuned for more guides coming soon.