[ November 2006 ]

thanksgiving turkey

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. This is the time of year that we all pause and give thanks and enjoy our families. I am thankful that I have a close family and many friends. I am also thankful that I can send this newsletter and my best wishes out to all of you. May you have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

Carol's Signature

Table of Contents

Line Up Your Numbered Lists - Even with double digits your lists will be aligned properly

Delete Bad Addresses in MS Outlook - A little known secret!

Easily Create Date-Based Folder Names in Windows XP - Daily Files.

Line up Your Numbered Lists

If you have worked with numbered ists in MS Word, you may have noticed that once you have more than nine items in a list, the numbers do not line up properly. Normally we would align numbers based on the decimal place. This is not the case with numbered lists in Word though.

If you don't like the way that Word aligns numbered lists by default, you can change it by following the steps below:

  1. Select the entire numbered list.
  2. From the Format menu, click Bullets and Numbering.
  3. Verify that the Numbered tab is selected.
  4. Click the Customize button.
  5. Use the drop down arrow under Number Position and change the value to Right.
  6. Click OK.
  7. Click OK to close the Bullets and Numbering dialog box.

numbering dialog box

See how nicely the numbers line up for you? I know you're going to put this tip to good use!

lined up list

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Delete Bad Addresses in MS Outlook

Microsoft Outlook tries to be very helpful and keeps track of the people that you correspond with. There are pros and cons to this behavior however. On the plus side, Outlook remembers addresses you've used in the past, even if you have never stored them as Contacts and you can retrieve them by typing only the first few letters.

The cons however, go on for a bit. The worst is that as you update your contacts, the autocomplete name cache file remains static. So even though you have changed Aunt Mary's address several times in the last year, the one Outlook suggests when you start typing Mary in the To field will be the wrong one.

These phantom e-mail addresses can drive you nuts after a while and as is typical of Microsoft, there is no way to edit the file where these names are stored since it isn't written in plain text.

Outlook stores up to 1000 entries in this hidden name cache and the entire cache is loaded into memory each time you launch Outlook. According to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, the lookup feature slows noticeably when the cache reaches 1000 names. The company notes in another article that if the name cache file becomes corrupted, Outlook may start sending mail to another autocomplete entry's address. So what do you do??

There is no easy solution to this case conundrum - the "feature" was just designed incorrectly. Nevertheless, you can delete entries from the file one at a time in certain instances. To accomplish this:

  1. Click the New button to open a new message.
  2. Type the first three characters of the cached name into the field to trigger the autocomplete feature.
  3. Press the Down Arrow key to highlight the offending cached name.
  4. Press Delete to remove it.

Unfortunately, this only works if more than one cached name begins with the first three letters, triggering the drop-down list.

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Easily Create Date-Based Folders in Windows XP

If you create files on your hard drive on a daily basis, you can consider using date-based folder names to help you keep your data organized. While manually creating folders with the current date as the name really isn't much of a hassle, wouldn't it be cool if you could automate the procedure? Well you can by changing the short date format and adding a special command to Window's XP's context menu.

  1. Open the Control Panel and double-click Regional And Language Options and access the Regional And Language dialog box.
  2. In the Regional And Language Options dialog box, click the Customize button on the Regional Options tab.
  3. In the Customize Regional Options dialog box, select the Date tab.
  4. In the Short Date panel, take note of the current Short Date Format setting in case you want to change it back.
  5. Select the Date Separator drop-down field and select a dash ( - ) because Windows doesn't allow slashes in the file and folder names.
  6. Click the Apply button
  7. Click OK twice to close both the Customize Regional Options and Regional And Language Options dialog boxes.

You can actually use any of the settings on the Short Date format drop-down menu or a custom format as long as you use a dash as the separator. Keep in mind that any change you make to the Short Date Format setting will affect the way the date is displayed througout the entire operating system.

The steps below will show you how to create the special command on the context menu.

  1. Launch Windows Explorer and Select Tools | Folder Options.
  2. In the Folder Options dialog box, select the File Types tab.
  3. In the Registered File Type list, select Folder, and click the Advanced button.
  4. In the Edit File Type dialog box, click the New button.
  5. In the New Action dialog box, type New Date-Based Folder in the Action text box and CMD.EXE/C MD "1%%DATE%%" in the Application Used to Perform Action text box.
  6. Click OK twice.
  7. Click Close to close the three dialog boxes.

Now, whenever you want to create a new date-based folder name in Windows Explorer, simply right-click on the folder in which you want to create the folder and select the New Date-Based Folder command from the context menu. Keep in mind that on any given day you won't be able to create two identical date-based folder names within the same folder.

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