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
Q: How can I stop my computer adding strange dates when I dont want it to? I was typing 12
October 2003 at the start of a letter, and
needed to press Enter to move onto the next line. However,
my computer added -10-13 which I had to go back and delete.
A: These automatic little boxes popping up with
suggested entries are known as AutoComplete suggestions and can be useful or irritating,
depending on the activities you are performing. To
turn them off in the situation you describe, all you need to do when they appear is press
the Escape key (Esc) which can be found in the top, left-hand corner of your keyboard.
If you hate them appearing at all, you need to cancel
AutoComplete entirely. Go to Tools AutoCorrect (in Windows XP AutoCorrect Options) and click the AutoText tab. Take off the tick in the Show AutoComplete tip (in Windows XP AutoComplete Suggestions) box and they wont
appear again.
Q: Can you provide a simple guide to attaching files to e-mails using Outlook Express? Mine never seem to work properly.
A: There are three different methods for doing this,
depending on where you are in your computer:
If
you have started typing a new message, click the paperclip icon (labelled Attach) or go to Insert File Attachment. This will open up your computer filing system and you can
search for the file in the normal way - just as you do when opening new files. Select the file you want to attach with one mouse
click and press Enter or click the Insert button. This
will take you back to your message and you will see the file in a new attachment window. (For Outlook users, the file will appear in the body of
your message text.) Now complete and send your message as normal.
If
you are viewing your files in My Documents, you can right-click any file and select Send to Mail recipient from the
short menu that will appear. This will open a blank message window to which your
file is attached. Complete the message and send it
now or later.
Finally,
if you finish a file using Word, Excel or some other programs you can open the File menu and select Send to Mail (as attachment). As above, this will open a new message window
that you can complete. However, you need to keep the
file open until the message has been
sent.
Q: How can I make my spreadsheets more manageable? Sometimes my headings stretch across several screens,
even though the columns only contain a few numbers in each cell, and different sections
arent clearly differentiated?
A: There are three simple techniques for keeping
spreadsheets neat and clear:
Wrapping Text:
For any long entry e.g. a column heading, first type all
the text into one cell, and dont be
tempted to set it out over two or more rows. Then
select the cell and go to Format Cell
Alignment and click the Wrap Text checkbox
in the Text control section. When you return to the
spreadsheet, you may need to drag the bottom boundary of the cell down, but all the text
should now appear on several lines within the single cell.
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