Your Computer Minute with Peter Kay

Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

How do you get your electronic news today? I’ll bet you do it by subscribing to newsletters and also by visiting news sites, right? I used to do that until I got the hang of a new technology that everyone’s using called “News Feeds” or “RSS Feeds”. RSS feeds change the paradigm because instead of news being sent to you, your “Newsreader” software goes out, plucks the news you asked for, and puts it on your desktop for whenever you’re ready.

It’s important to stay current/ahead of what’s new, especially professionally. Using Newsreaders lets you get news from hundreds of sources, scan them quickly, and just pull out what you’re interested in. You just can’t do that with email newsletters.

This month’s demonstration shows you how this all works using a great piece of free software called “Pluck” (www.pluck.com) which installs as part of your Explorer Browser. Pluck lets you read news from any number of sources. But Pluck also adds some other killer features that I love, especially the one that lets you keep your work and home browser favorites synchronized. If you keep one set of favorites at home, another at work, and would like to have both of them synchronized, Pluck is the answer.

If you like reading news but are tired getting lots of newsletters in your inbox, you definitely want to get into this new way of retrieving your news and you DEFINITELY should check out Pluck.

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Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

The next time you’re looking up a contact in Outlook, click somewhere on the right hand side window where your contacts are listed and slowly type the last name of the person you want find. Outlook will quickly start flipping through the contacts to match the letters you’re typing. This is the fastest way to search. Try it!

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Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

How many clicks does it take to launch your daily applications? Tell me you don’t go through Start, Programs, etc. Please! How about your favorite Web pages? Don’t DARE say you type in the URL each time.

Many of us have bookmarked some Web sites in the Favorites menu and that’s a good start, but did you know that you can launch your daily applications and access your top Web pages with the Link Bar that’s included with Internet Explorer? Fire up Internet explorer and search the online help for “Links Bar” for complete details and you’ll find that you can drag and drop both Web pages and applications to the Link Bar. Once you’ve set it up just right you’ll love the convenience of a single click to execute those sites and apps you run 90% of the time.

The vast majority of your Web surfing only goes to a handful of sites and you really only use a few applications most of the time. Why waste time clicking through menus to get what you want when you can make them all accessible by a single button push. At my home computer, I have quick links for TV listings, Movie showtimes, yellow pages, and my favorite game sites. At the office, I have links to the Yellow Pages, News, our corporate customer support site, and of course, the surf report (hey, I gotta know when it’s time to leave early to catch a sweet swell).

If you haven’t already, setup Internet Explorer with a tailored Link Bar and you’ll love the productivity boost.

Subscribe to the Podcast and automatically download new video and audio tips as they come!

Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

Most Web sites publish their forms as Adobe Acrobat documents and that’s really cool. All you have to do is download the form, send it to your printer, fill it out, sign, and then fax it in. What could be simpler? Well, how about the Peter Kay Paperless Method (PKPM) of just filling the form on screen, giving it your digital signature, and then emailing it in? Yeah baby!

In order to do PKPM, you need to do 1 or 2 things: First, assuming that you have Adobe Acrobat (not just the Reader; you need the full version with the ability to create Acrobat documents), use the online help in Acrobat to setup your digital signature. Once you’ve got this setup you’ll be able to digitally sign any Acrobat document. Say buh-bye to printing and signing paper.

Second, for the given form you want to fill out, try clicking on the fields and see if a cursor shows up. Some forward-thinking organizations have made their forms fillable, like that advanced, cash-collecting organization called the IRS. If the Acrobat form is NOT fillable, then you can decide to turn it into one. While I don’t suggest this process if you’re only going to fill out the form only once, it becomes very efficient if the form will be used many times.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of digital signatures and Adobe forms, I guarantee you’ll love it because you’ll never have to print, fill, sign, and fax another document again.

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Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

Did you ever create a spreadsheet that got just a little too big and you had to scroll all over the place to see the numbers you needed? I suggest you learn about Excel’s “Outlining” feature. With it, you can select a collection of columns or rows that you’d like to be able to collapse (perhaps because they have a lot of detail that you might not want to see all the time) and then “outline” them. Once outlined, you can collapse or expand the rows or columns you’ve selected.

Outlining gives you the ability to setup your spreadsheet so that you can collapse it all down to show the big picture while giving you the ability to expand any specific parts you may want to zoom in to. It makes even the largest spreadsheets very, very manageable.

Now what’s really, really cool is that if you setup your spreadsheet properly in the first place, using functions like SUM and SUBTOTAL, you can automagically apply outlines by just clicking on the DATA menu, then Group and Outline, then choose Auto Outline. Download my demonstration spreadsheet and try it.

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