As I mentioned previously, Notepad does no formatting. In fact, it doesn't even wrap lines of text to fill the window unless you tell it to. Notepad can't properly render or print formatted documents created with WordPad, Microsoft Word for Windows, WordPerfect, or any other fancy word processor (unless you saved files you create with those programs as ASCII or ANSI text files). You can open these document types, but they look like gibberish. Also, it doesn't have any fancy pagination options, though it does print with headers and footers via the Page Setup dialog box. Although you can change the font in Notepad 5, font information isn't stored in the file. Font choice is a personal preference for viewing and printing, and applies to all files you open in Notepad.

Notepad files used to be limited in size to about 50KB. That's no longer the case. Even very large files can be loaded into Notepad 5.1.

To run Notepad, click Start, More Programs (or just Programs, depending on how you have your taskbar settings), Accessories, Notepad. Notepad then appears on your screen (see Figure 5.1). When it does, you can just type away.

Figure 5.1. You can use Notepad to edit simple text. I've entered some text already.

Of course, you can choose File, New to start a new file at any time. If you've made changes in the current file and haven't saved them, Notepad asks if you want to save it before creating the new file. You use the standard File, Open and File, Save As commands. You can only have one document open at a time in Notepad.

You should turn on word wrap when you enter text unless you're entering program code that is line oriented. When you do, by choosing Format, Word Wrap, the text wraps within the constraints of the window. If you resize the window, the text rewraps to fit the available space. Note that the word wrap setting doesn't affect the text file itself. That is, Notepad doesn't insert line feeds or carriage returns at the points where the lines wrap.

As with most Windows text programs, the keys shown in Table 5.1 have the effects shown here.

Note

Despite the paucity of formatting options for onscreen display, you can format printed output to some degree. Use the File, Page Setup command to establish headers and footers. Enter your desired footing and heading text. Margin changes and header and footer settings aren't visible onscreen but do print. You can also include the special codes shown in Table 5.2 in the header and footer fields. You can enter these codes alone or within a text string.

Here are a couple examples to help you take advantage of these formatting codes. To print the time and filename at the top of each page, add this to the header field in the Page Setup menu as shown in Figure 5.2:

Printed at &t  Filename is &f

Figure 5.2. Adding Header and Footer codes to identify printouts from Notepad.

If the time the document was printed was 10:30 a.m. and the filename was README.TXT, the header will appear like this when the document is printed:

Printed at 10:30 Filename is Readme.txt

By default, &p (page number) is used in the footer field as shown in Figure 5.2, so the page number will print at the bottom of each page unless you add or remove footer codes.

When you print a document, Notepad lets you choose the page range, the number of copies, and the printer to which the job is sent. See Chapter 6, “Printing and Faxing,” for more details.

WordPad can save and open files in several formats:

WordPad also can open the following document types (although it must save changes to these files as .RTF, Text, or Unicode documents):

WordPad correctly opens even incorrectly named (wrong extension) RTF and Word 6 files if you select the All Documents option in the Files of Type area in the Open dialog box or type the document's full name. If WordPad doesn't detect a file's format, it opens it as a text-only file. Note that if a document contains formatting information created by another application it will likely appear as garbage characters mixed with the document's normal text.

To run WordPad, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, WordPad. The WordPad window then comes up. Figure 5.3 shows an example of a Notepad file which has been edited with WordPad.

Figure 5.3. WordPad includes moderately sophisticated word processing features. Use the View menu to activate the toolbar and ruler bar shown here.

As with most Windows programs these days, you don't have to memorize what each button on the toolbar does. Just position the mouse pointer over the button and a pop-up screen tip will appear on the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

When you're doing lots of editing and formatting in WordPad, check the View menu. You can turn on as many of the toolbars as you need to quickly change formatting, tab locations, and so on. A check mark next to a bar's name means it's on. They are toggle settings.

You can drag and drop or “tear off” the various toolbars. Just position the mouse pointer over the far left edge of any bar (don't click a button); then drag the bar where you want it.

Editing is simple in this program and complies with Windows standards and then adds a few rules of its own. I'll outline them very quickly. Just enter your text as usual. Lines of text occur automatically and are readjusted if you resize the window, change the margins, or change the font size. You can move the cursor around with a click of the mouse or by using the control codes listed for Notepad in Table 5.1.

You can double-click a word to select the whole word. To select the entire document quickly (select all), move the cursor to the left edge of the document until the arrow changes direction, and then Ctrl+click. To select an arbitrary area, click and drag the pointer over the text. Release when the text is highlighted. You can also select areas of text by pressing Shift and using the arrow keys. The spot where you first click (beginning of the selection) is called the anchor point. You can triple-click to select a paragraph. After text is selected, you can format it with the toolbars and format menu commands.

To move blocks of text, either select the text and use Cut, Copy, and Paste from the Edit menu, or drag it with the mouse to the new location and drop it.

WordPad handles each paragraph as a separate entity, each with its own formatting information, such as tab stops. To apply changes to multiple paragraphs, select them first.

To undo the last command, choose Edit, Undo; click the Undo button (the curving arrow) on the toolbar; or press Ctrl+Z.

Undo can undo the following errors: block deletions, anything removed by pressing Del or Backspace (as a unit), blocks replaced by typing, new text typed (back to the last time you issued a command), and character and paragraph formatting changes (if you select the Undo command immediately after making the change).

You can insert a graphic—and other OLE objects—into a WordPad document in one of three ways: by pasting the graphic from the clipboard, by creating the object from scratch as you insert it, or by inserting an existing object stored in a disk file. The basic steps required are similar for either method, but they vary slightly in detail.

After you've pasted the graphic, you have only crude control over positioning it where you want it in the document. You can't move a graphic around with the mouse, and no menu command is available for this purpose. Instead, you must push the picture around in your document with ordinary typing, the Backspace key, or the Tab key, or you can cut and paste it into a new location.

A few WordPad preferences affect viewing of files. You can check the View, Options dialog box to see them. All the tab pages except General Options in the Options dialog box pertain to the various types of documents that WordPad can open: Text Only, Rich Text Format, Word for Windows, Windows Write, and Embedded. Each of these pages offers identical choices. These settings affect display only; none of these choices affect the way your document prints.

Note

To bring up Paint, choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, Paint. When the Paint window appears, maximize it. Figure 5.4 shows the Paint window and its component parts. I've loaded a BMP-file photograph into the program by double-clicking on a BMP file I found using the Search tool. (See Chapter 4 and Chapter 9 for discussion of the Search tool.)

Figure 5.4. The Paint window.

You create the drawing in the central area (or work area). Down the left side, the Toolbox holds a set of tool buttons for painting, drawing, coloring, and selecting. You choose colors from the Color Box at the bottom of the window. The status bar offers help messages on menu choices and displays the coordinates of the mouse pointer.

The object is to choose a tool and start fiddling around. You'll soon learn which tool does what. Hovering your mouse pointer over a tool displays some pop-up text with the tool's name. Some of the tools are a little difficult to figure out, but if you open Help and look up the tool, you can find descriptions there for each of them.

When you start a new picture, you must attend to a few details; then you can get on with painting.

You can alter the size of the overall canvas when you're painting, so don't lose any sleep over perfecting it before you start. An image prints smaller on paper than it appears onscreen because the printer's resolution is much higher (each dot is smaller). So if you're aiming to print out your creation, you might want to do a little experimentation.

Setting the printed size of your image is easy. You used to have to calculate it based on the resolution of your printer and the pixel size of the image. Now you can just choose Image, Attributes and set the size in inches (or cm, or pixels, if you wish). You can check that the size looks about right at any time, by choosing File, Print Preview. Remember, though, that if your picture is wider than it is tall, and if it's printed width is more than about 8 inches, you need to change the page orientation for printing from Portrait to Landscape. To do so, just choose File, Page Setup, and select the appropriate button.

The maximum picture size is limited by available memory and color setting. Black-and-white pictures use far less memory than color pictures do, so they can be much larger. Paint lets you know if you set a picture size that's too large to fit in memory. A black-and-white image is not the same as a grayscale image, in which you can paint with 16 or more separate shades of gray. Black and white has only two colors—black and white. Duh. To create a grayscale image, you must place the desired shades of gray on the palette.

Before beginning to use a tool, you set the color to paint with. You need to set two colors: background and foreground. One of the most fundamental techniques to learn is selecting a color to paint with. In Paint, you control both foreground and background colors independently.

The foreground or drawing color is the main color you paint with. For example, when you add strokes with Paint's paintbrush, draw lines or shapes, or even when you type text, these items appear in the currently selected foreground color. The term background color is somewhat different. Many of the tools (such as the Brush, Pencil, and the Shape tools) let you paint with the so-called background color just as you would with the foreground color. All you have to do is hold down the right mouse button instead of the left one as you paint. The background color also determines the fill color for circles, squares, and other enclosed shapes; the fill color inside text frames; and the color with which you erase existing parts of the picture. If you select a section of the picture and drag it to another location, the resulting “hole” is filled with the background color. You can change the background color as many times as you like.

An alternative technique for selecting colors is using the Eyedropper tool, which lets you “suck up” a color that already appears in the picture. That color becomes the new foreground or background color for use with any of the painting tools.

After you have the colors selected, you can use the tools to draw:

Some tools (for example, the polygon tool) require multiple clicks. When some of the tools are selected, the area below the grid of buttons provides options for the selected tool. The options are different for each tool.

Every addition you make to an image eventually melds into the picture and can't be undone. However, the program does keep track of the three most recent additions, allowing you some small degree of rethinking. Each time you make a new change, Paint “forgets” the fourth most recent change, and it becomes permanent.

To undo a change, press the fairly universal Undo command key, Ctrl+Z, or choose Edit, Undo. You can undo an undo by choosing Edit, Repeat.

You might often use Paint simply as a viewer of BMP files. Web browsers do not open BMP files for display, so when you double-click a BMP, it runs Paint (unless the system association for BMP files has been set to another program) and opens the file.

To see the maximum image amount at once, choose View, View Bitmap. All the other screen elements, including the title bar, menu bar, and scrollbars, disappear. Clicking anywhere on the screen or pressing any key returns you to the working screen.

Note

One of the best features of Paint is pixel editing. You can zoom in closely to edit a picture, dot by dot, and can choose from five magnification levels: normal, 2x, 4x, 6x, and 8x(800). Figure 5.5 shows a detail of a full-face portrait, showing only the person's eye. This is at highest magnification, 8x(800). In Paint, you can use any of the standard painting tools at any magnification level. Use the Pencil tool to best change the color of one dot at a time. This feature is most useful when you have a little touchup to do (such as photo retouching), but you can't seem to control the mouse well enough to do it in normal view.

Figure 5.5. An image magnified for pixel editing.

You can choose several BMP formats for saving Paint files; the variations pertain to the number of colors stored in the file. Normally, you can just let Paint choose the correct format for you, but sometimes knowing which format to use comes in handy.

The following are the available BMP formats and their descriptions:

Use the lowest possible setting, based on the number of colors with which you have been painting. The more colors you save, the larger the file. However, saving a picture with a format that has fewer colors might ruin it, causing it to lose detail. You can also save in a variety of other formats, as mentioned earlier. As a rule, save your image in a format that in which your target audience (or program) uses to view it. For example, if you intend to send an image to someone in email or put it on a Web page, stick with GIF, JPG, or PNG. These are the most universal image formats.

You can prepare a complex equation in a text editor such as Notepad and then copy it to the Calculator for execution. For example, you can enter the following in Notepad:

((2+8)+16)/14=

or

(2+(8+16))/14=

Mind your parentheses, and make sure to include the equal sign, or click = on the calculator after you paste in the equation; otherwise, the result will not appear. You can omit the parentheses if you use extra equal signs, like this:

2+8=+16=/14=

Some special characters can be included in your equations to activate various Calculator functions, as shown in Table 5.5.

If you're really into calculators, you might want to download the Power Calculator, which is free from Microsoft. It's part of the Windows XP PowerToys. You can download it from

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/default.mspx

With this PowerToy, you can graph and evaluate functions as well as perform many different types of conversions such as length, mass, time, velocity, and temperature. Figure 5.7 shows the calculator.

Figure 5.7. Power Calculator is a tool in the Windows XP Power Toys, a free download.

To run Character Map, follow these steps:

A useful feature of Character Map lets you choose a subrange from the Unicode. Unicode was designed intelligently with characters grouped in sets. You can choose a subset of a font's characters to help you locate a specific symbol. To check out this feature, open the Group By list, and choose Unicode Subrange. When you choose this option, a box like the one in Figure 5.9 pops up.

Figure 5.9. Choosing a subset of a font from which to select a character.

Click the subgroup that you think will contain the character you're looking for. Good examples are currency or arrows. Make sure to open the Group By list again, and choose All when you want to see all the characters again.

At the bottom right side of the Character Map dialog box is a line that reads

Keystroke:

For nonkeyboard keys (typically, in English, anything past the ~ character), clicking a character reveals a code on this line—for example, Alt+1060. This line tells you the code you can enter from the keyboard to quickly pop this character into a document. Of course, you must be using the font in question. For example, say you want to enter the registered trademark symbol (®) into a Windows application document. Note that with a standard text font such as Arial or Times New Roman selected in Character Map, the program lists the keystrokes for this symbol as Alt+0174. Here's how to enter the character from the keyboard:

Windows XP maintains time-honored Windows standards (most of them date all the way back to Windows 2.0) for selecting, cutting, copying, and pasting information. This section offers a brief review of the techniques you need. In summary, four steps are required to transfer data from one place to another via the Clipboard:

Note

If the pasted data doesn't look like you expected, see “Pasted Data Doesn't Look Right” in the “Troubleshooting” section at the end of the chapter.

Now for something a little more complicated. Suppose I wanted to find any files that I've modified in the last week, are related to this book, and also contain the word “Passport” in them. This is a real need for me, since I'm working on the Passport topic, and don't want to repeat myself in the chapter I'm writing now. Can the Search Companion help me? Yup. Here's how:

If you're looking more generally for files or folders (that are not documents or multimedia files), choose the All Files and Folders option from the first page of the Search Companion. He'll now look through more of your folders. This will result in a more exhaustive search, because every file and folder will be examined, not just those that are popular document types.

Just as with the Find box in Windows 9x and NT, you have to be a bit crafty when filtering the search. If you enter a long filename with spaces between the words, the search will likely end up becoming too broad. For example, if you entered

Annual Report 2

in the Search For area, the result would be any file with the word Annual, Report, or 2 in any part of its name. This is annoying. Also, using quotes around the string, as when conducting a Web search, doesn't help either, unfortunately. I was trying to find a folder called Ch 3 and the only way to exactly find it was to enter Ch*3 as the criterion. So keep in mind that you should use DOS-style wildcards when searching for items that contains spaces in their names.

Experiment with other aspects of the Search box, such as searching the Internet or turning on the Indexing Service. The Indexing Service was introduced in Windows 2000 Professional. This tool scans files and folders on your hard disk and builds a database of the words it finds in those documents. This database helps speed up file and directory searches when you're looking for words within files or keywords in file descriptions. The database also helps the Internet Information Services Web server perform Web site searches. To turn it on, do this:

The Indexing Service can index the following types of documents in several languages:

The Indexing Service is designed to run continuously and requires little maintenance. After it's set up, all operations are automatic, including index creation, index updating, and crash recovery if there's a power failure.

I can't see all the text in a Notepad window. Where did it go?

You must manually turn on word wrap to get the text in a file to wrap around within the window. By default, word wrap is turned off, which can be annoying. The good news is that word wrap is now a persistent setting. After you turn it on and then close Notepad, it should be on the next time you run it. If you need to edit program code, make sure to turn it off, or your program lines will wrap, making editing and analysis of code more confusing.

If you still can't see enough text, remember that Notepad 5.1 now supports font changing for display. Change the display font from the Format menu. Choosing a monospaced font (for example, Courier) might help you line up columns. Choosing a smaller font and/or a proportional font (for example, Times) crams more text into the window.

Inserting and adjusting tab stops in WordPad is a pain. Is there an easy way?

You can easily insert and adjust tabs in WordPad by clicking in the ruler area. Choose View, Ruler to turn on the ruler. Then click in the ruler area where you want to insert a tab stop. You can drag the cursor left and right to see a vertical rule to align the stop. To kill a tab stop, drag it out of the ruler area into the document.

I've opened a photo in Paint, and it looks terrible. Why?

You probably have your display set to too few colors. When too few colors are available to the video display, it “bands” the colors, making photos look like a topographic map. Each sharp delineation between similar colors in the picture is called a band, for obvious reasons. Normally, the colors would blend together evenly. But if the video display's driver is set to 16, or even 256 colors, this is too few to render most photographic images properly.

Typically, photos have well over 256 colors. You need thousands (or millions) of colors to display an attractive photograph. As I said earlier, to edit photos in any professional manner, you should use a program designed for photographic retouching. Still, you can cut and paste, do some pixel editing, add text and so forth, with Paint. First, however, check your display settings by right-clicking the desktop, choosing Properties, and then Settings. Make sure you have your system set to run in 16-bit color or higher.

I'm adjusting the volume control from the system tray icon, but I just don't get any sound.

Total loss of sound can be caused by myriad goofs, settings, hardware conflicts, or program malfunctions. Troubleshooting your sound system isn't always easy as a result. One tip is in order here: If you're using a laptop computer, ask yourself whether the sound stopped working after you hibernated or suspended the system. I've noticed this problem on several laptops, and this bug might not have been worked out of Windows XP Professional for your sound chip set. Try rebooting the computer, and see whether the sound comes back to life. Another thing to look for is a manual volume control on the computer. Many laptops have a control you can turn or push, that's often found along the right- or left-hand side of the computer itself. Such settings override any settings within Windows. If you have a set of powered speakers attached to your computer, make sure they are plugged into power, and are turned on. I often forget to do this, and then wonder why I have no sound. You should consult other chapters in this book that deal with the Control Panel and the Device Manager for serious problems. If none of the above remedies work, then you might have a bad sound card, or it might need a new device driver.

I'm sure I placed information on the Clipboard but the Paste command won't work.

The problem is that the destination document doesn't recognize the format of your Clipboard data. You may be able to work around this obstacle by first pasting the data into another application that does accept the information and then copying and pasting from this way-station app into the intended destination document. Alternatively, try saving the selected information to disk in a file format that the destination app can import.

My pasted data sometimes looks quite different in the destination document than it did in the original.

You might be able to get better results by pasting the data in another format, if the destination application allows this. Look for a command in the destination app such as Edit, Paste Special that lets you select from all the Clipboard formats the application recognizes. Try each format in turn to see which gives the best results.