DEMOS have been made available of almost all our macros, during January. Working versions, limited on the scale of the output they will generate, are available for FREE DOWNLOAD. Test-drive our products.

Access to the free content was limited to the newsletter subscribers. Subscribing to the OfficeHelp.Biz newsletter is free and the only requested information from you is an email address. There are no privacy risks, as we know nothing about you. But, even if we did, we wouldn’t share it with anyone else, as our Privacy Policy clearly states. To access the FREE PC Tips, once registered, all you need to do is to enter your email into the first access to a free content. Your login will be remembered on subsequent pages during the same session.

The Articles session title was changed to Tutorials because it better reflects it's content and makes a clear distinction with PC Tips. Tutorials are in-depth articles on how-to do something, step by step. PC Tips are smaller, less detailer tips on how to make the most of your office or home PC, as a regular but non-technical office user.

Update to the Browser Hijackers Tip

Last November we published a PC Tip about "Detecting and Removing Browser Hijackers". There is an important update on this subject. Reinforcing the growing importance of security and privacy issues, Microsoft itself has entered the browser hijacker detection and removal field. They acquired an existing company had published a website dedicated to this subject, including a FREE DOWNLOAD of a beta version of their future Browser Detection and Removal software.

It's worth checking, give it a try at www.microsoft.com/spyware.

Recently added Contents

• MACRO: Office / Home /HotSpot Internet Configuration Switch 

Have a corporate Laptop? Can't use IE (Internet Explorer) at home or on public wireless HotSpots? 

Our first FREE macro. Running on Excel, this macro easily switch IE (Internet Explorer) connection settings between Corporate and Home / Public Hotspot (wireless) network settings. Corporate networks have extra security levels and don’t let their users to directly connect to the Internet. An intermediate server, also known as a Proxy, is usually necessary. But it is only available at the Office, so it will prevent Internet connection from home or a public wireless hotspot.

While you can swap the settings manually, this is tiresome. The settings are well hidden (I bet Microsoft doesn't want regular users like you messing with it!) and you will need a lot of clicks before you can even access it. With this macro, all you need to do is to press a button to swap between office / home network settings.
  

• PC TIP: How to save the workspace (all open files) at once in Excel  

  Microsoft(r) Excel is one of the most widely used software's in the world. It is true that most of its users only use it for small calculations and to draw tables, but many use it intensively for advanced calculations and complex projects. These advanced users usually open more than one file at the same time, many times interlinked. 

  If that's your case, start saving time and trouble by saving projects and context instead of just files.

    

• PC TIP: How to create PDF files from office documents  

PDF is a generic document format created by Adobe that become increasing popular with the internet, in the mid-90's. It is nowadays, by far, the dominant format for complex document publishing on the Internet. While HTML is used to create pages, PDF is used to publish "printed" or "for print" documents. It is the usual format for internet publication of corporate accounts reports, brochures, e-Books and all other multi-page documents.

It's popularity lies on the fact that it can preserve all formatting from the original documents, regardless of what software was used to make the original, and that it's reader (Adobe Acrobat Reader) is free and available for most computer platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). So, a PDF document will be freely readable by almost everyone, while retaining all original formatting. Try that with any other document format!

But while reading someone else published PDF's is easy, making them is another story. The free reader is only that, a reader. You can't make PDF files with it. But making PDF files can be as easy as printing, and for Free.

Find out how to convert your existing and future documents to PDF, for FREE.

New Contents to be published during February 2005

The following contents is intended for publication¹ during February, in time for the March Newsletter:

• MACRO: Internet Explorer Privacy Manager, in Excel – Every time you use your browser, it will register information about the pages you visited. This can be annoying and even misused. You can manually clear most of this information, but it is a time consuming process. There are commercial software around to clean it, but they are expensive and cannot be used on corporate PCs, where software installation is usually locked to end-users. Want to easily and fast clean all the records IE makes about your browsing? This macro is an excel file and will run on any computer with Excel just by pressing one button. Clean your navigation trail.
    
• PC TIP: Copy text formats in MS Word – Recognize the problem? You're typing a word document and the text is in a different format from another document or even part of the same document. You need to harmonize. So you need to check the format of the source document and manually apply each format to the new text, right? WRONG. It is possible to copy formats between blocks of text, from the same or different documents, as easily as copy/paste. Save time and trouble formatting professional looking word documents.
    
• PC TIP: Insert footnotes in MS Word – Ever read a professional document with numbered footnotes on the bottom of each page? Would like to replicate them on your Word documents? It is really easy, Word will even take care of the numbering for you. Learn how on this useful 5-minute tip. Make more professional looking documents with this trick.
    
• TUTORIAL: Making Outlook email backups – Do you use Outlook to store your email? Do you have email archives that include almost all your professional life from the last few years? If you're anything like most regular users, losing your email archives would be a professional catastrophe. While corporate IT departments usually backup all email stored on the server, local archives on your own hard drive are at risk, both at home and the office. Learn how to backup the email archive files on this tutorial. Save yourself from this impending catastrophe. 

^{1 This list is a forecast and doesn't guarantee publication of the listed contents}