Various tips to expedite info search, create and delete lines

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Well, it has been quite some time since we last talked about some practical tips for increasing productivity with the computer. However, if you have been following this column, you will know that my PC is now connected 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to the Internet through Kabelnet network. This has really been a boon to me.

The connection has not been exactly 24 hours a day, though. Last week, for example, the service was down for a couple of hours. When I called Kabelnet's technical support, I was told that a bulldozer had accidentally cut one of their fiber optic cables. Well, I could still live with that. However, when the electricity went out a couple of days later, I got irritated with our PLN. My experience showed that it would take at least three hours for Kabelnet service to become available again after a blackout. Besides, a blackout can potentially cause more damage to all my electronics and electrical appliances than an interruption in Internet service.

Why am I so happy that I now have the "always-on" connection to the Internet? First, no matter how much I use the service, I will have to pay a flat rate of Rp 250,000 (plus the cable TV service, the cable modem rent and tax). I can select www.britannica.com as my home page, i.e., the Web site that Internet Explorer (IE) will automatically access each time I load it.

Why is this so important to me? As I am not a native speaker of English, from time to time I need to make sure that I am using the right expression. Should I write "advanced team" or "advance team"? Is it "state-of-the-arts" or "state-of-the-art"? Which one is the correct expression, "a highly discipline management" or "a highly disciplined management"? Through Britannica's Web sites, I can quickly access a collection of well-written magazine and other articles that contain these expressions using the site's Search facility, and then I can use IE's Find (Ctrl-F) command to check which of the pairs is the correct one.

We can also download Britannica Dots, a utility that will be available on your screen and will enable you to access any article in Britannica's database as well as the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica. By the way, both the articles and the encyclopedia are free, and so is Britannica.Dots. But, hold on, later on I will also tell you another nifty utility to expedite access to information on the Internet.

Personal Firewall

Incidentally, if you are also a Kabelnet subscriber, or your PC is continuously connected to the Internet through your office network, you should know that you are vulnerable to hackers. They may come sneaking into your PC in the middle of the night when you are fast asleep. Not only can they steal information that you store on your hard disk, they can even plant small programs that will later launch a concerted attack on a particular Web site on the Internet. As you may still remember, this was exactly what happened earlier this year, when major Web sites on the Internet succumbed to the infamous Denial of Service attacks.

To prevent such intrusions, you will need a personal firewall. In my case, I subscribe to McAfee's service (US$29.95 per year), which adds this protection to my PC. So far it has never warned me of any attempt of intrusion, but it does give me a sense of being secure.

Fortunately, good personal firewalls are also available for free. One that has received a lot of accolades from online magazine editors is ZoneAlarm from Zone Labs. ZoneAlarm will allow you to specify which of your own applications can access the Internet and which external programs can access your system. This firewall is free for personal use, but you will have to pay US$20 if you use it on a business computer. You can download ZoneAlarm from www.zonelabs.com. If you want a full-fledged firewall, you can purchase ZoneAlarm Pro for $40.

What is interesting about the company is that one of its investors is John McAfee, the guy who founded McAfee Associates. As you may also know, for some time McAfee antivirus and other security utilities have been the products of Network Associates. Too bad I read about ZoneAlarm after I had paid my subscription to McAfee.

Red characters

When typing in Microsoft Word in a hurry, do you sometimes press a mysterious key combination and suddenly you see red characters appearing on the screen as you keep on pounding on the keyboard? When you try to delete them, they will be crossed out but will not disappear. The more revisions you make, the messier it becomes. Have you got any idea what has happened?

I have received several panic calls from friends asking me what to do to solve this, so I did some digging. Here is what I have found out: If you accidentally press the combination of Ctrl, Shift and E, you will activate the Track Changes mode in Word. Anything you type will be considered a revision and will be displayed in a different format. If you delete a word, it will be marked as deleted but it will remain on the screen. What you need to do is press Ctrl-Shift-E one more time to deactivate it. Or you can click on the Tools menu item and then Track Changes. Click on Highlight changes, and then deactivate Track changes while editing. You will still have to erase all the red characters manually, though.

Now, have you ever typed three dashes in a row and, when you hit Enter, you get a straight horizontal line across the page? Yes, that is the shortcut for creating a horizontal border line. Try also the "`", "#", "*", "-", "=" and the underline symbols, and you will get different styles of border lines. The problem is, you can delete all of these lines using the ordinary Delete or Backspace key except the one that you created using the three dashes. No matter what you do, it will stay there.

To clear it, you have to click on Format, then Borders and Shading. When the Borders and Shading dialog box appears, click on the icon on the left of None. The line will disappear.

Avoiding e-mail addiction

Now, if you still use a dial-up connection to access your mailbox with Outlook Express, do you find yourself pressing the Ctrl-M too often? I did, and I was increasingly worried about it. I was wondering whether I was getting the problem of uncontrolled thirst for e-mail. Then I found the solution. I no longer pressed Ctrl-M or clicked on the Send/Recv button on Outlook Express. I just configured the program to do it automatically for me every 60 minutes. It not only reduced my Internet access charge, it prevented me from becoming a real e-mail addict.

To set it up, just load Outlook Express, click on Tools, and then Options. Activate the option Check for new messages every and specify the time interval. Do not forget to select Connect only when not working offline. That will make OE connect automatically to the Internet and check your mailbox for new messages.

Finally, earlier in this article I promised to show you another option that will enable you to get the definition -- even the German, French, Spanish or Italian equivalent -- of a particular word on any application on the screen. Go to www.atomica.com. Go to Product Showcase, and download Atomica for Windows. It works best with an always-on Internet connection such as Kabelnet. Let me know what you think of it. (zatni@cbn.net.id)