Video Ad!

Enjoy:

Keyboard Shortcuts - Part 2

Here's some more interesting things you can do with your keyboard. Unlike Part 1, these assume that you press two or three keys at the same time:

F4 + Alt shuts down the window you are currently in (don't try it whilst you're in this one)
F6 + Alt switches between multiple windows within the same program (such as a dialog box and the main window).
F10 + Shift is the same as clicking the right mouse button on an item; it opens the context menu.

Not all keyboard options use the Function Keys. Here's a useful set of keys to use if you're editing things:

Ctrl + C copies the selected text and places it in the clipboard.
Ctrl + X cuts the selected text and places it in the clipboard.
Ctrl + V pastes the text currently in the clipboard.
Ctrl + Z is used to undo the last action; useful if you make a mistake.
Ctrl + B makes the current text bold (in Word, Excel etc)
Ctrl + U underlines the current text (again, in Word, Excel, etc)
Ctrl + I puts the current text into italics.

More shortcuts in Part 3.

The Beacon Foundation

The Beacon Foundation is a national non-profit organisation which helps develop and encourage students by encouraging them to engage in education, either through school or further training, and pursue positive pathways into employment.

AB Computer Training has been proud to assist their work in local schools by attending 'speed-careering' sessions, in which we talk to small groups of students about how our choices and education have influenced the career paths we have taken. Obviously most of our training work in IT is with adults, as teenagers tend to be fairly tech-savvy, but it's good to know that we can make a difference in other areas which are relevant to them.

To find out more about The Beacon Foundation, and how you can help them with their work, visit their website (linked above).

Keyboard Shortcuts - Part 1

We often get asked about what various keys on the keyboard do. After all, if you're completely new to computers (as several of our customers are) the keyboard can be a daunting thing.

So we thought it would be a nice idea to show you a few interesting things you can do with those keys. Obviously we could just post a great big list, but who's going to read that in one go? Instead we'll post a few things every week or so. Some of them you may already know, but some of them may be of use. Give them a try; it's amazing what you can get your computer to do.

For now we'll just look at Windows, but Macs will have their day as well.

The commonest thing we get asked about are the Function Keys. These are the ones towards the top of your keyboard which are cryptically marked 'F1', 'F2', 'F3' and so on. There's a lot you can do with these, but we'll start with some simple uses. The tricky thing is that some keys do different things depending on what type of window you're just on your desktop.

F1 gives you access to Help, either for Windows or for whatever window you're currently in.

F2 puts you into rename mode if you have clicked on an icon or an item in one of your folders.

F3 brings up a box allowing you to enter search terms, either for the current window or for files on your computer if you;re on your desktop.

F4 repeats the last action if you are in Word. In Internet Explorer it opens up your address bar, listing the website addresses you've visited. See what we mean about different results depending on where you are?

F5 reloads or refreshes the current window; this works either in Windows Explorer (where it will reload the file list), or your favourite browser (where it will reload the current webpage).

F6 moves the cursor between different parts of your current window.

F7 opens the spell-checker in Word.

F8 is really only used when your computer is starting up to get you into Safe Mode. Best only used if you know what you;re doing.

F9 doesn't do anything in Windows itself, but may have use in certain programs.

F10 activates the Menu Bar ('File', 'Edit' and so on) for the current window. Once an item is selected, press the Down Arrow to display the menu you want.

F11 puts the current window into full-screen mode (no frames of menu bar). Press F11 again to return to a normal window.

F12 doesn't do anything in Windows but, again, may have uses in certain programs.

We hope that this is of some help. We'll be posting more keyboard shortcuts for you soon.

Trivial Pursuits

AB Computer Training has been out and about, wandering the Illawarra and doing our stuff. So much so that we've been neglecting this blog, which is very bad of us.

So here's some pictures to liven things up.

A few weeks ago we took part in a trivia night, organised by the BNI Central chapter. It was to raise money for Angels of Hope; a not for profit community organisation, who in conjunction with Southern Western Sydney Illawarra Area Health Services, support mental health and suicide prevention programs in Illawarra school and community groups.

Being recent migrants we approached the idea of a trivia night with some trepidation; trivia can be very parochial, as we discovered when we had a Swiss couple on our team for a quiz back in the UK. However we acquitted ourselves with honour, and our 'local' knowledge was sufficient for us to be able to say how many stations there are on the London Underground (270, apparently).

We got a hamper for winning one of the rounds, and eher we are posing with it:



(Picture by Ela Photography)

Last week we exhibited at the Shellharbour Small Business Network's annual expo. It's the first time we'd done anything like this, and we found it an entertaining and educational evening.

Here's our stand just after we'd set up:



And here it is later in the evening:



Catherine and, more importantly, our logo, briefly appeared on WIN TV news as well.

So, as you can see, we've been very busy when we're not teaching or preparing lessons.

Helpful Tips #3 - How Much Stuff Can I Put On My Computer?

Something we are regularly asked by customers is how much storage space they have on their computer. This is easy to check; click on Computer (on the Start menu, or maybe on your desktop), right-click on the C:/ drive and then click on 'Properties'. This will give you a display showing how much space your computer has, and how much is currently used.

(Note: These instructions might vary slightly between different versions of Windows.)

But what do the results actually mean? If I am using 50GB of 200GB, and so have 75% of my disk 'free', what else can I put on my computer.

A computer stores data in 'bytes'. In terms of a document, or piece of writing, such as this blog post, a byte is roughly one character - storing this letter 'A' is one byte. However even a simple document is larger, in terms of bytes, than the sum total of the letters in it; the document file also contains information about the document, such as formatting, modification dates and so forth. For example, a Word 2002 document containing the single letter 'A' is still roughly 20,000 bytes in size.

Bytes are abbreviated to 'B', so a 100 byte file will be displayed as 100B. 1024 bytes make up a kilo-byte (KB). So, in the above example, the Word document is roughly 20 kilo-bytes in size (20,000 bytes). Indeed, for most home use purposes it's easier to think of a kilo-byte as being 1000 bytes; the reason for it actually being 1024 is tied up in how the computer actually stores information, and involves maths, binary numbers and more complexity than most people are willing to bother with at this stage.

Anyway, if you see a file is 1.2KB, you know it's roughly 1200 bytes in size. Simple.

A mega-byte (MB) is roughly 1000 kilo-bytes (again, it's actually 1024), which makes it 1,000,000 bytes. So a 3.2MB file is 3200KB, or 3,200,000 bytes.

A giga-byte (GB) is roughly 1000 mega-bytes, or 1,000,000 kilo-bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes. If your computer tells you that you have 150GB of free disk space, then it's roughly equivalent to 150,000MB or 150,000,000KB or 150,000,000,000 bytes. One hundred and fifty thousand million instances of the letter 'A' ...

All files on your are made up of bytes - pictures, music, videos, the various components of Windows itself. How many bytes in size a file is depends on what format it is in; a 3 minute piece of music, for example, may be 3MB if it's in .MP3 format, but 30MB in size if it's a .WAV file. A picture from your digital camera will vary in size depending on the resolution you use (and explaining resolution on cameras is a lesson in itself). So there are no set rules on how many 'songs', pictures, videos or so forth your computer can hold. If you consistently get something from the same source - pictures from the same camera, music from iTunes and so forth - then the size per minute, or per image, will remain fairly constant, which will help you calculate how much of your remaining space they take up.

But let's have a look at what you can hold on your computer, with some approximations. We'll assume that you have 150GB of free space remaining.

If you're storing movies, and each movie is roughly 1GB in size, you have room for 150 such movies on your computer (150GB/1GB).

If you're downloading music, and each piece is roughly 2MB in size for each minute, then you can hold 500 minutes of music per GB, or a total of 75,000 minutes of music. That's over 1000 albums, or 25,000 three-minute songs.

If your photos are about 1MB in size, then you can hold 150,000 of them - 1000 pictures fill 1GB of space, and you have 150GB of space.

In the examples above, a movie is equivalent to 500 minutes of music (about 140 'songs') or 1,000 photos. But, as we have said before, this all depends on your file formats; there's a lot of variation.

Finally, whatever you store on your computer's hard-disk, remember to take back ups, either to CD/DVD or to an external hard-drive. Nobody wants to lose their stuff, after all.

MAY NEWSLETTER

Our May Newsletter is now available on our website at www.abcomputertraining.com.
It includes tips on how to keep your computer clean, shiny and working.