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You can do IT in later life - 30

You can do IT is a regular feature of laterlife.com aimed at trying to help laterlife visitors make the most of Information Technology on or off the web.

Jackie Sherman who runs the You can do IT Question & Answer section is an IT trainer and author. Jackie has spent her career in education and specialises in teaching IT to adults. Her courses for adults include such topics as MS Office, the Internet, e-mail and basic web page authoring.

Jackie has also written the two books shown here - you can find more details about these by clicking on the cover images above. Jackie has also been running a course specifically for over 50s.

Via laterlife.com Jackie aims to particularly help those new to IT and the web to build up knowledge and confidence, so no question is too basic. At the same time she will cover Q&As for the more experienced user.

So if you would like to ask a question of Jackie, why not email her jackie@laterlife.com

or if you have discovered something which may be of interest to others in making the most of the web, then she would love to hear about that too jackie@laterlife.com

So if you would like to ask a question of Jackie, why not email her jackie@laterlife.com

or if you have discovered something which may be of interest to others in making the most of the web, then she would love to hear about that too jackie@laterlife.com

Zipperdy Doo Dah

Have you ever wanted to send a large document or picture by e-mail and been irritated at how long it takes? Or tried to save a large file onto a floppy disk and been told it is too big?

The answer is to zip your files. This is the process by which you compress one or more files into a tiny space - labelled an Archive - and can treat this archive just like a normal file.

You will need to install a zipping program on your computer. One that is available as shareware (software that it is provided free for a short time and won’t cost much to buy eventually) is WinZip. Go to www.winzip.com and download the correct version for your machine.

When you open the program, you can close any tips and will see the following screen.

To create the archive that will hold your files, click New and choose a name and location in the normal way. Click OK and you are ready to add your files.

Browse through your computer and select files you want to compress - hold down a Ctrl key to select several individual files. There are various options you can select, but I tend to leave the default settings. Click Add when you have finished.

You will return to your archive and will now see the compressed files it contains displayed inside the main window. If you made a mistake, click Add to add further files, or select any and delete them using your Delete key.

Close the archive and you can now send or copy the file as normal. It will display the following icon and will have the file extension .zip:

To open an archive, e.g. if sent to you as an e-mail attachment, double click it in the normal way. All the files compressed inside will be displayed. You can either open any of them to view or save using the File - Save As options, or click Extract to save them to a specific location without opening them first. Remember: zipped files that are sent to you may contain viruses, so it is always a good idea to save and virus-check them first, rather than open the archive files directly.