FAQ 13: Windows Tips

This FAQ presents some random ideas about using Windows. These apply primarily to Win95, though many of these work for Win 3.1. A few will even work for Macs, though the instructions are somewhat different.

Several sections deal with keyboard shortcuts...you can do many things without the mouse, and often it is faster that way.

Many of the tips here may seem obvious to some of you, but I assure you that everything here is because some people who are new to computers don't fully know about them.

Each section is rated by stars depending on how useful I think it is. The most essential things like copying and pasting, for example, are obviously quite useful (even though most people would take them for granted).

Most modern programs for Windows (3.1 and 95) work the following way.

To copy, first highlight what you want to copy using either the keyboard or the mouse. Then press the CTRL+C key combination.

• To highlight with the mouse, hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse to a destination.
• To highlight with the keyboard, hold down SHIFT and then either use the keyboard to move the cursor or the mouse to click on where you want to highlight to.

To paste, place the cursor where you want to paste and then press CTRL+V.

• if you highlight text and then use paste, the paste will replace what you highlighted

To cut, start the same way as copy, but use the CTRL+X key combination instead.

• the difference between this and copy is that cut eliminates the original, while copy duplicates it

On very old programs, the standard was to use CTRL+INSERT to copy and SHIFT+INSERT to paste.

The fastest way to shift between windows is to press ALT+TAB (be sure to press and hold down ALT first). This works on Win 3.1 and Win95.

If you don't want your boss to see you playing Solitaire, just press ALT+TAB to place the next window on top (make sure the next window is large enough to cover solitaire). On Win95, if you press ALT+TAB and only let go of the TAB button while still holding down the ALT, a list of available windows will appear with their icons. To cycle through them, just keep tapping the TAB button and let go of ALT when you've made your choice. If you just press ALT+TAB and then let go, the default is to jump to the most recent window you were at (aside from the one on top at the moment)

Keep in mind that this only works if you have more than one window open.

Highlighting a lot of text is much faster when you're using the keyboard and the mouse at the same time (and often even faster with the keyboard alone).

Place the cursor where you want to start. Hold down SHIFT and click where you want the highlight to end. Sometimes for more exact control, you might want to use keyboard alone. Just hold down SHIFT and use the up/down/left/right arrows as well as the PageUp/PageDown/Home/End keys.

If you want to highlight all one hundred pages of text that is 100 pages long, first place the cursor where you want to start, hold down SHIFT, and then press the CTRL+End key combination. The CTRL+End makes you highlight everything until the very end of the page. Another way is to use a keyboard and mouse combination. Start out by using the SHIFT, only this time use the mouse to drag the scrollbar (at the very right of the window) all the way down to the last page. Once you see the very last page, use the mouse to click at the end, and assuming you've held down SHIFT all this time, everything will be highlighted.

Note that this doesn't just work for text. It works for a long list of files, and often even on items in a menu like the headers menu for SBNews.

The previous section mentioned the scrollbar briefly.

Scrollbars appear often when there is more material than can fit on one screen (word processing is a common example). The scrollbar usually appears at the very right (though there's sometimes scrollbars on the bottom for left and right movement).

There are two common ways to move the scrollbar. The first is to drag the block where you want by using the mouse. By "block", I mean the darker gray rectangle that sits on the scrollbar and tells you where you are. The second method is to click above or below the block, which will typically cause the block to jump one page up or down. This is very convenient when you have hundreds of pages (or even thousands), and you only want to go down a page (without having to press PageDown for one reason or another, which does occur). You can also hold down the mouse button above or below the block, which has the same effect as holding down either the PageUp or PageDown key.

On Windows 3.1 and 95, pressing the ALT+F4 combination is the quickest way to close a window/program. For example, if you have 30 windows open and you want to close them fast, this is a good way (sometimes this does happen).

If you have a program like notepad open, click on the icon at the very top left of the program's window. One of the options should say "Close ALT+F4". This is how you're supposed to find out about this shortcut command in the first place. ;)

Try opening notepad. If you press ALT, you'll notice that the menu option "File" is now highlighted. If you now press the "F" key, it will open up the File menu. If instead you pressed the "H" key, it will open up the help menu. Suppose you press "F" and then press "S". It will then save the document. This can be done in a fraction of a second once you get used to it. Just make sure your mouse doesn't get lonely. ;)

Shortcuts Icons are convenient. They are similar to what links are on webpages; shortcuts each link you to another file or directory on your computer. This is so you don't have to manually look for the file or directory yourself; you can just use the shortcut instead.

On Win 3.1, all icons are essentially shortcuts. This way you don't have to run File Manager to run a program. On Win 95, shortcuts look mostly like ordinary files, except that by default they have a tiny little arrow on the bottom left corner of the icon. On Win95, these shortcuts can be placed anywhere, including a folder, your desktop, or even the Start Menus. Just drag and drop them where you want them to be.

To create icons for Win 3.1, go to file and create a new item.

To create icons For Win 95, right click on the file in question and there should be an option that says "create shortcut". You can even make shortcuts to folders. Shortcuts to folders are still treated as files, only when you double click on them, that folder will then open up. When you click on the Start button, all those programs that you are allowed to access are shortcuts, and they are no different than the shortcuts on your desktop. By default, the shortcuts on the Start Menu are located in c:\Windows\Start Menu. If you want to edit them, use Windows Explorer and go to that directory.

ACDSee makes very good use of shortcuts. If you follow my recommended settings, you'll have a shortcut list on the right column when you're in the ACDSee browser. Except for version 2.3, you can add shortcuts to this list by dragging and dropping a folder into that menu (it will make a shortcut copy and leave the original as it is).

The funny thing with version 2.3 is that if you try to make a shortcut by dragging and dropping into the shortcut menu, it won't appear. However, if you go to the parent directory of where you installed ACDSee (by default it is "c:\Program Files\") you'll see a bunch of shortcuts with weird names. Just highlight and cut them (using CTRL+X), then go to the ACDSee directory, then go to the "Shortcuts" subdirectory, and then paste all the shortcuts there. The shortcuts will now appear on the ACDSee directory. You can actually do this with any shortcuts (without having to use ACDSee to create the shortcuts).

By the way, renaming a shortcut is just like renaming a file. Either right click on them and use the option provided or click once on the text area of the name and wait for Windows to let you edit the name.

Shortcut Keys are also very convenient. They allow you to run any program just by pressing a combination of three buttons simultaneously. All I have to do is press the three buttons CTRL, SHIFT, and F12 simultaneously to open up ACDSee right away (it takes only a second on average). Another example is if I press CTRL, ALT, and F8, my computer might then run Windows Explorer (usually less than a second). This is very useful once you get the hang of it.

To make such a shortcut key, first make a shortcut icon for the program you want to make the shortcut key for (see the previous section for instructions on how to do this).

On Win 3.1, edit the file properties of the icon. It will then bring up a menu where you can enter the shortcut. You just have to press the shortcut; you don't have to type it in.

For Win95, right-click on the shortcut and choose "properties". In properties, go to the "shortcut" submenu. There will be a box for the shortcut key. Simply press the three keys you want (you don't have to spell it out). The first key has to be CTRL. The second key has to be either SHIFT or ALT. The third key can be almost anything. Using this, I can open Windows Explorer in less than a second. On Win95, you can also use shortcut keys to quickly open up the a: drive or anything like that (just about anything you can make a shortcut for you can do this with).

This is for Win95. Right-click on a file. On most computers an option should appear that says "Send to". If you go to that option, it will show you a bunch of folders/programs that you can send the highlighted file to.

You can actually add to the available list. The list itself is located by default in c:\Windows\SendTo. They are all shortcuts. So, just make shortcuts out of programs or folders that you want included and move the shortcuts there. Notepad and Wordpad are two good ones to add (just create a shortcut for notepad and drop it into the folder). That way, you don't have to open up notepad/wordpad and manually search for each file you want to open. Instead, any time you want to open a file using notepad, just right click and use the SendTo to send it to notepad. You can put any type of file into the c:\Windows\SendTo directory, even folder shortcuts. You can also create a folder shortcut for this, so that you can easily send files to the a: drive or any other folder.

This is how the computer knows what program to run when you double-click on a file. For example, .txt files are run by Notepad by default. (at least for me) So, if you double-click on a file called "filename.txt", it will open it up using notepad. File association can be changed through the View Menu using the Options submenu (when in Windows Explorer).

Programs like ACDSee have a menu option that allows you to automatically register for various image filetypes like ".jpg", ".gif", and several others. I recommend setting LviewPro as the default program for images, mainly because if I want to edit a file, I want to be able to double-click on it and start it up on LviewPro. If I just wanted to view a file, I'd run ACDSee and use the shortcut column (that I previously mentioned) to jump to that directory.

If you can't remember where you put a file, you can do a file search. The most common filesearch is by the filename. Open Windows Explorer (or File Manager if you're using Win 3.1) and go to the directory you want to search. If you want to search the entire C drive, for example, go to the C:\ directory. On Windows Explorer, go to "tools" then "find" then "find files and folders". A window will then open up, and you can type in the file you want to search for.

If you want to find "notepad.txt", you can type in "notepad.txt", "notepad", or even "note" and it should find it (along with everything else that has "note" in it). You can also type in "pad" (I think you get the idea).

Note that if you inlcude an extension in your search, you must spell out the entire file. For example, I think that "note.txt" won't work, as well as "pad.txt".
On the other hand, "*pad.txt" and "note*.txt" will work. The star is a wild card, so "note*.txt" tells the computer to look for anything beginning with the letters "note" and ending with ".txt". You can even try "*otepa*.txt", "notepad.tx*" or "n*pa*.*t", etc...

Searching for date modified should be pretty easy to figure out.

Version 2.3 of ACDSee allows you to do a filesearch as well.

Aside from searching for files by name or date modified, you can also search files for a string of text.

For example, suppose you remember saving an article about carpfish but you forgot where it is now. You can go to Search Advanced (from the file search menu) and then type in the word "carpfish" to do the search. This type of search is slower, so there are also other parameters, like maximum and minimum filesizes. For example, you might be pretty sure that the article wasn't bigger than 40 kilobytes, so you can set the maximum to be 50 or so (just to make sure). Usually you should set a maximum instead of a minimum, because with a minimum, Windows will be looking through really large files for the text. The only time you want to use a minimum is if the filesize is rather large (at least roughly a megabyte)

Also, if you know that the file is definitely located in a subdirectory of "C:\windows\", for example, then be sure to go to that directory before starting your search (or manually enter it in at the options). If you started at "C:\", for example, it might take a very long time to do the search because Windows would look through all the other directories as well.

Note that the File Search Advanced options are cumilative with the regular File Search options (you can use them to work together to find a file).

This applies mostly to Win95. If you want to bring up a Dos prompt without actually going to DOS, go to the Start button and then choose run. Type in the word "command" and it will open up a Dos window. This is useful to know for many reasons; for example, if you want to run a program like fzc or the DOS version of pkunzip, you will have to use DOS commands with parameters. Simply double clicking on pkunzip for DOS won't make it do anything useful. One example of a command would be "pkunzip filename.zip".

By the way, if you have Windows Explorer open to a particular directory, then if you use Start -> Run -> "command", your initial directory in dos will be the directory active in Windows Explorer.

While you can do what I describe here with Win 3.1, only Win 95 will allow you to have a DOS window open and still be in Windows simultaneously (you don't have to quit windows at all, and you can even run other window sprograms with Win 95).

If you're playing Solitaire on Windows and your boss is walking towards you, either ALT+F4 or clicking on the top right corner of the window (on the X) will close the window the fastest.

If you don't want to close the window, ALT+TAB will allow you to quickly bring up any other active window (which will cover solitaire provided it is big enough). The other possibilities and applications you'll have to figure out yourself. ;)

Remember: if your computer is using a lot of memory and starts to rely on your hard drive cache (or that cache is fragmented), you may experience slowdown when performing switching windows or closing a program (you'll hear the hard drive in use during a significant delay period).

I advise against playing solitaire when your boss is likely to check up on you, for certainly you will have better opportunities to taste the blessings. ;)

Batch files are files ending in .bat, written as plain text. In them, you can place any DOS commands, as well as some more complex commands that I won't get into. Here is an example of the commands you can put in a batch file:

rename bookmark.htm temp.htm
rename bookmark.bak bookmark.htm
rename temp.htm bookmark.bak

A more practical and common use for batch files was to use them as shortcuts. This practice is not as common now that Win 95 has shortcuts, but batch files are nice in that they can emulate any Dos command and more in a Dos enviroment. For example, you can try the following command:

cd c:\games\quake\
quake.exe
cd c:\

-Ramses

I write these FAQs in hopes it will benefit and educate you, so as always, feel free to correct me and add your own suggestions. You may remain anonymous or allow me to credit you with the suggestion (I will assume the former but definitely feel free to volunteer the use of your nick in the credits of the FAQ)