Firefox 29 for security - but fix 29's terrible interface

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Update your Firefox to version 29 to address a lot of security issues. It also seems to be faster and using less memory, at least on my Windows 7 computer.

But, but - v29 has a horrible 'new look' interface which is hard on my ageing eyes, especially with multi-row tabs, and the rounded edges take up more space so I have more rows of tabs than I did, plus they took away the status bar that previous versions removed but which I got back as an add-on bar with Status4Evar.

So thank goodness for the Classic Theme Restorer add-on (via this article)! Install it, that's the best tip you'll get this month.

Steps to make Firefox 29 usable(ish) again:

1. Update Firefox
2. Install Classic Theme Restorer (how to install Firefox extensions) and change its settings as you need (see later)
3. Restart Firefox
4. Rightclick in the empty area beyond the last tab and choose Customise, then
   1. move icons back down to the status bar as necessary eg NoScript, Status Text (which is the status bar text displayed to show progress when visiting a webpage, the URL when you hover over a link etc)
   2. click on Title Bar at the bottom left if you want your title bar back
   3. click Exit Customise.

(Alternatively, use Firefox ESR so that you can get the security updates without the abysmal new interface.)

There seem to be more tweaking tips but I didn't need them. Installing Classic Theme Restorer gave me back clean sharp edges and my status bar! The Class Theme Restorer options I used (accessible from the Tools menu or the Add-ons page in the usual way - Ctrl shift a is how I usually get to it):

1. Classic Toolbar Buttons, bottom left
2. under Tabs I picked 'Squared tabs (classic)' - just tinker with the options… 

I didn't need to do anything else except check and change the width of tabs in TMP, and move icons or boxes back to the status bar at the bottom. Do donate to the developer, who very well deserves it.

Rant time. I still prefer Firefox to Chrome because of the lack of MRU tab switching in Chrome (TabMixPlus is THE best Firefox extension ever ever, I donate regularly). But in recent years Mozilla have been making the Firefox interface more and more unusable, it seems without thinking or caring about accessibility or usability or indeed bothering to listen to users. Prettifying it with rounded edges is not always best, particularly at the expense of accessibility. I like minimal but I like clean sharp edges more, and hiding too many things is a pain as users need information beyond the minimal (so a status bar is indispensable for a start). Someone on Slashdot put it well, it's just UX as 'an excuse for taking control from the user'.

There's also a cognitive and informational cost, beyond the learning curve associated with a changed interface - the new rounded tabs take up more rows as well as horizontal space tan the old interface (ugh smudgy kiddie look), and overlap so that I can't see what pages some tabs represent. (With version 28 I used TMP with short tab widths so I could cram more tabs onto one line but see what they are from the favicons.) It's ridiculous that, to get back workable interfaces, long-term Firefox users have to resort to third party add ons (which may break with new versions, like Status4Evar did before installing Restorer). What *&!@#£ came up with putting 'the icons/buttons you want to see all the time on the top toolbar'? Most of us have stuff we want all the time, AND separately stuff we need to see only occasionally. There's just no space on the top toolbar to put both, and I refuse to scroll horizontally, so I have to have a status bar! (That's why I still use a Quick Launch bar, in Windows 7 and Windows 8 - all my most used programs are there at glance, and the start menu, which takes one more step to access, is for the second-most used set.)

Changing aesthetics for the sake of it is fine, but not when it affects usability and productivity and takes away user choice. And why make users choose between security and usability? I resent having  an abominable unworkable accessibility-unfriendly interface forced upon me just in order to keep my browser secure. If Chrome had MRU switching and all the extensions I need (particularly Zotero and security ones like NoScript), I would seriously consider switching despite the privacy concerns and some security issues.

Mozilla, please get your act together and give users back their control. Though I doubt they'd listen to me when they don't listen to countless other users rather than 'UX designers' who may not use Firefox as much as us real users who need Firefox to do real work.

Open Word or Excel document read-only - add context menu item

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If you'd like to right-click on a Word or Excel document in Windows Explorer to open it as read-only, supposedly you should be able to hold down the Shift key, rightclick on the filename, and there should be an option to "Open as Read-Only".

However, choosing this Shift-rightclick option doesn't actually open the document as read-only. This seems to be a known bug in Office 2003 and Office 2007, and also in Office 2010 and Excel 2010.

There's one workaround and one fix.

Open in protected view

The workaround is that, if you Shift-rightclick on a Word or Excel .xls file in Windows Explorer, there's also an option to "Open in Protected View".

Choose that, and it works pretty much as read-only: you can't change anything, you can't save, but you can copy/paste from that document. This works for Excel as well as Word.

Rightclick context menu item

What solves the problem completely in Word, which I used myself, is to edit things to add a new rightclick Open Read-only context menu option that actually works to open Word documents as read-only. I based this solution on a combo of this post (which wasn't actually on opening read only) and this page (about opening read-only, but for XP only, not later versions of Windows).

Here's how to add a right-click context menu item to open Word files as read only, properly - works for me using Windows 7 and Word 2010:

First, download FileTypesMan (free, but donate if you can, the man certainly deserves it!) - you have to scroll quite a way down for the "Download FileTypesMan" link (I used "Download FileTypesMan for x64" as my computer is Windows 7 Pro 64-bit).

Next, unzip/extract the files (rightclick on the zip fiule downloaded and Extract all to create a new unzipped folder) and open the new folder, then run FileTypesMan.exe.

On the left, scroll down till you find and highlight .docx (or use menu Edit > Find and and type docx to find it, make sure you then highlight that line):

Now in the menu choose Actions > New Action (or press Ctrl-n).

In the box that pops up, fill it in like this (and see diagram just above the list):

• Action name - I used  "Open read-only" without the quotes, you could just use "Read only" etc as you prefer
• Menu Caption - I used "Open read-only" again
• Command-Line - you can click Browse to find your Winword.exe under Program Files or Program Files (x86) (you will have to drill down to find Microsoft Office, Office14 or Office11 etc depending on your version), or Select from Running Programs if Word is already running, which is the easiest. You could alternatively enter the full path to Winword.exe, with quotes around it, as shown below, but it's easiest to Select from Running Programs (you can launch Word just before you click Select and it should work, just scroll down to find it in the "Select Process" list, possibly to the end):

After you've used Browse or Select, it will fill in the Command-Line box for you with something like this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\WINWORD.EXE" "%1"

Now, you have to edit what's in the Command-Line box, by inserting after the "%1" the following (which you can copy/paste from the next line) - just after the 1 but before the close double quotes, and make sure there's a space between the 1 and the first /:
/h /n /dde

In my case, the Command-Line box ended up reading like this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\WINWORD.EXE" "%1 /h /n /dde"

Next, in the DDE section in the Message box, you should enter  the following, which again you can copy/paste:
[AppShow][REM _DDE_ReadWriteOnSave][FileOpen .Name="%1",.Revert=0,.ReadOnly=1]

(In the Application box you can enter Word if you like, but it will still work even if you don't.)

Finally, click OK. This adds a new Action to the bottom half of the FileTypesMan window, which you can doubleclick to edit in future.

Now, when you rightclick (no need to hold down the Shift key) a docx document in Windows Explorer, you will have a working "Open read-only" menu option (or whatever title you gave it in the "Menu caption" box above).

Furthermore, in FileTypesMan you can select (in the lefthand column) the type .doc for old-style Word documents, and rinse and repeat the steps above, if you wish.

Excel protected view - rightclick only

For Excel spreadsheets, unfortunately the above fix doesn't work, so you have to open them in protected view.

But to make life easier for yourself, you can use FileTypesMan to change things so that you don't have to Shift-rightclick to get the "Open in Protected View" menu option. Here's how to get that option to display just on a simple rightclick:

In FileTypesMan, find and highlight.xls on the left (scroll or search, as with docx above).

Now in the bottom half of the window, find and doubleclick "ViewProtected" (outlined in red above).

In the box that pops up, UNtick "Extended", and OK:

Now a simple rightclick, as opposed to Shift-rightclick, will call up the "Open in Protected View" option.

Powerpoint 2010 too slow to update slides? Fix

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Here's how to fix very slow display of text and pics on Powerpoint 2010 / 2007 slides on the screen, whenever you change or even edit slides? A big annoyance - it affects productivity, as sometimes Powerpoint becomes unresponsive and won't refresh, redraw or update the screen at all unless you change slides away and back (only a workaround, and slows things down).

Below is a step by step 'howto' solution to solve this problem of the slow graphics rendering in Powerpoint (others have solved it by changing to the Windows 7 Basic theme, this suggestion has the same effect, on my system at least, and changes the theme for you when you use the shortcut icon concerned to launch Powerpoint):

1. Rightclick the shortcut icon that you use to start Powerpoint
2. Choose "Properties" from the menu
3. Now click the "Compatibility" tab (outlined in red below)
   
   
4. Make sure "Disable desktop composition" is ticked as shown (also outlined in red, above).
5. Then click "OK".

That's it. Worked for me on a Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit desktop, Powerpoint is a zillion times faster now. I hope it works for you too.

Thanks qwerty15!

Background - after a recent Windows update I started getting this problem of Powerpoint is displaying slides too slowly (and it seems a common problem) when moving between or editing slides.

Stop spam event invites displaying in Google Calendar

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Have you had events appear in your Google Calendar from people that you don't know? Anything from fraudulent requests for money to other stuff like pron. They appear without your accepting the invite, taking up space in your calendar, and you can't delete them without hitting "Decline". A real annoyance.

I recently helped a friend troubleshoot to prevent such spam event invitations showing up in her Google Calendar.

Others have already produced howtos, so I'm posting links to some pages providing the solution to stopping spam invites from appearing in your Google Calendar - the main fix being to set "Automatically add invitations to my calendar" to "No":

• with screenshot - the best one, as it has a screenshot that also mentions disabling "Show events you have declined" (ie set that to "No"), which may help
• similar advice

This way you'll still get emails of invitations, which you can choose to accept or decline (or 'maybe'), but the events won't automatically get added to your diary even before you'd chosen to take any of those actions.

But I'd add one more comment. Some people have suggested hitting "Decline" on the invites in question, to stop them from displaying in your Google Calendar, ie get rid of the spam events completely from your calendar.

My reservation about that is that it may send an email back to the spammer, so that they know that your Gmail address is active, and can keep on sending you spam calendar invitations or spam email!

When I set "Automatically add invitations…" to "No" for my friend, doing that immediately stopped the spam event from showing in her Google Calendar. And it didn't send the spammer anything to prompt them to keep pushing spam calendar invites to her!

So I'd recommend trying to disable "Automatically add.." first, before you start hitting "Decline" or "Reject" or the like on the spam event. And only if it doesn't work, consider doing that.

Stop Word from reducing all windows!

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Too many times, when I want to close the current window in Word, I accidentally hit Alt-F5 (instead of Alt-F4) which means it then 'restores', ie reduces the size of all my open Word documents. Every single one of them. I then have to maximise them one by one, individually going to each window first. This is a big annoyance as there is no single command to 'Maximize all windows' in Word, as far as I can find. What a pain.

My solution or workaround, short of finding a way to maximise all Word document windows together at once in one go, is this fix: simply disable the Alt F5 hotkey! Then it does nothing if you hit that combo inadvertently, instead of reducing all your Word windows to tiny unusable ones.

Here's how to disable that hotkey.

1. In Word, rightclick an empty spot in the toolbar and choose "Customize the Ribbon".
2. Towards the bottom against "Keyboard shortcuts", click the "Customize" button (outlined in red below):
3. Now on the left under Categories, scroll down to highlight "All commands":
4. Then click in "Commands" at the top right, and scroll down to find and highlight "App Restore".
5. Under "Current keys" (outlined in red above) it should now show "Alt+F5".
6. Click on the line that says "Alt+F5", then click the button (also outlined in red, above) saying "Remove".
7. Then click the "Close" button.
8. Then "OK".
9. That should be it, you should be rid of this nuisance!

Get rid of Word pop up on selecting text

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After you select text in Word 2007 or Word 2010, a rectangle pops up with options for font type, font size, bold etc etc:

This is meant to provide helpful "quick access to formatting tools". In reality, it's always getting in the way of editing, for me and many others.This annoyance that pops up on selecting text drove a friend crazy for years, as she didn't realise that you can turn it off! But if you don't know what that box of formatting menu options is called, you can hardly search for help on the internet to figure out how to disable it…

Well, it's called the 'mini toolbar'. And you can stop it from popping up all the time like a maddening 'son of Clippy'. Here's how.

Word 2010

Go to menu File > Options.

In the General section, under "User Interface Options", UNtick "Show Mini Toolbar on selection".

Then click OK, and that's it!

Word 2007

Go to Word Options (which you get to via the Office symbol top left).

In the Popular section, under "Top options for working with Word", UNtick "Show Mini Toolbar on selection" and click OK. And that's it!

Firefox loads blank pages in tabs on startup? Solution

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This post is on how to make Firefox load and display all webpages in all tabs automatically when you first open Firefox. Lately it just loads pages in a few tabs (3 max), but pages in all other tabs are blank with no content visible, and the status bar (visible if you use the indispensable Status4Evar add-on) shows "Stopped" at the bottom left.

Other tabs won't display anything but blank until you actually click on the tab for the page. It's very tedious to have to click for each page individually. I save webpages in tabs because I want to use them, and I can't use them if they're invisible!

The quick answer: try Firefox options, then Tab Mix Plus Options, then Session Manager options (if you use either of those extensions), and if all else fails, install the Load Tabs Progressively add-on and change its options, which is what finally worked for me.

Scroll down for full explanations and screenshots.

Background

Many people only want saved startup tabs in Firefox to load when you click on tab, so that Firefox starts up faster. But, like this blogger and others, I want the opposite.

I have a reasonably fast computer with decent amounts of memory. As I use zillions of tabs, it's too time-consuming to have to click on one tab, wait, click on the next tab, etc. I always set my Windows computer to start all my main applications and documents automatically, so I can switch on my computer, go have breakfast or at least coffee, and when I get back to my computer it's all up and ready for me. I want browsers to do this too: I want all tabs to load and display on launching Firefox while I go do something else, and I agree that not allowing this is plain bad usability (though taking away individual users' choice of which option they want is worse).

I wasted too much time trying to troubleshoot and fiddling round with about:config till I found this page explaining that this annoyance is in fact a 'feature' which was introduced in recent versions of Firefox (13 onwards I think).

The current default setting is a pain when you have lots of tabs and have to click each one separately. The point of setting Firefox to launch with a set of tabs is because you want to use them all.

As a workaround, I'd been using 'Reload all tabs' to make all the webpages visible (rightclick on a tab heading for the menu that allows that, if you have TabMixPlus).

General setting

The suggested solution, to force all pages in all tabs load and display when Firefox opens, was to UNtick the 'Don't load tabs until selected' box and OK.

In my version of Firefox (Firefox 15) it's in the Tabs tab of Options (menu Tools, then Options, then Tabs), in others it might be in the General tab.

Like so:

However, that didn't work for me even after restarting Firefox. There are other options which may need to be set, so try those too.

If you use TabMixPlus

The same link suggested that if you use Tab Mix Plus (TMP) (also an essential extension, in my view), you need to go to TMP Options > Session > Restore and check the "Reload all tabs" checkbox.

If you use Session Manager

As I use Session Manager (which manages loads of sessions with finer control than TMP's session manager), I had no such option, so I went to Session Manager options.

Under General > Saving & Restoring, I UNticked "Restore tabs on demand" (and OK or Apply), to try to get tabs to load automatically without having to "demand" each one individually.

If all else fails

Unfortunately, none of the above worked for me - UNticking "Don't load tabs until selected" and the like did not change anything. Only 3 tabs ever loaded automatically when I started Firefox.

Therefore, I had to install an extra extension - Load Tabs Progressively. This works, but I'd recommend some tweaks.

Once you've installed it and restarted Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons and find Load Tabs Progressively. Click its Options. Change "Maximum number of concurrent loading tabs" to 0 and "Maximum number of loaded tabs" to -1. Then OK.

Otherwise, it will load only up to a maximum number of tabs, and only a certain number at a time. If like me you have tons of tabs and just want them all to load while you do something else, you'd want it to load however many tabs you have, ideally all in one go (in my case!).

This excellent extension, as the name suggests, opens each of your saved session tabs progressively, one by one, and the settings I've recommended will get it to open all your saved session tabs no matter how many, and whether using TabMixPlus or SessionManager.

Nexus 7 - disable "No more room on this Home screen" message

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When you add a new app to your Nexus 7 from the Google Play store, you may get the message "No more room on this Home screen" - even though there's actually lots of room for new icons on your Nexus 7's home screen! And, it still adds a shortcut icon for the new app to your home screen anyway(though you may have to swipe sideways to find the home screen that contains it).

This seems to be an issue with Google Play. Unfortunately I can't find an ideal solution. There are 2 workarounds:

1. Live with it! Keep ignoring the message. (Which is what I've ended up doing). Or,
2. You can get rid of the message, but this means that when you install a new app from Google Play, it won't add an icon for it to your home screen. Which might be OK for some…
   Here's how to stop "No more room on this home screen" from appearing when you add apps:
1. Open Google Play by tapping its icon (outlined in red below)
   
   
2. Open its menu (3 vertical dots, top right).
3. Choose Settings.
4. Finally, UNtick "Auto-add widgets", like so:
   
   

Someone has posted that after they unticked that setting and then re-ticked it, it prevented the "No more room on this home screen" message from recurring. However, that didn't work for me - after re-enabling that again, the irritating message reappeared. So I'm just living with it.

If anyone knows a permanent solution to this annoyance, please do share!

Why I'll stop using Google's Chrome browser - problems with Chrome

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For a while I've been trying Google's free Chrome browser, but I'm now about to give up up. As someone who uses tons of tabs, and has them reopen on each bootup, Chrome's just not manageable.

Here's why - a litany of problems and issues which, unfortunately, I just can't waste any more time trying to fix.

1. No "most recently-used" tab switching (or MRU) as standard. It's the only way to implement switching, in my view, especially for "power users" who have lots of tabs open. Yes, there's MRU Tabs and Recent Tabs, but, especially when I've got lots of tabs open, they're nowhere near as powerful as TabMixPlus, which is my single most essential add-on for Firefox (and I regularly donate). And I want to use Ctrl-Tab for switching, not Ctrl-q! This is the biggest, biggest bugbear for me.

2. Crashing or freezing my entire Windows 7 system when trying to open locations or, especially, when close Chrome, often because of the Flash plug-in "not responding". Yes, I've tried disabling Google's own Flash player plug-in, then disabling Adobe's plug-in, but neither worked. I ended up disabling both to stop Chrome making my PC unusable whenever I tried to shut down. And if I need Flash for a particular webpage, I just view it in Firefox, IE or Opera. (I haven't tried reinstalling Chrome, as I didn't want to waste any more time on this.) Even without Flash, Chrome often still takes ages to open a webpage.

Tip: if you disable all versions of Flash in Chrome, it may come back whenever you update Flash generally, which you ought to do for security reasons. So after updating Flash, go back into Chrome plugins and disable Flash again.

3. Sometimes blanking out my webpages after I've gone offline. If I've disabled my internet connection, and yes I do that if I'm leaving the computer for a while, or if I've put the computer in sleep mode then wake it up, often my Chrome pages are completely blank. Firefox and IE etc don't do that, they display the same pages as before perfectly well, why Chrome does I don't know. Yes I have the Reload All Tabs extension, but sometimes it doesn't work and I don't have time to reload every page individually (which does work). "Waiting for cache" is another fun way to blank out my webpages and test the patience.

4. Here's another way Chrome often goes Nyah and refuses to show me many or indeed sometimes any webpages:

"The server at tech.slashdot.org can't be found because the DNS look-up failed."

(That happens even when Firefox, IE and Thunderbird are working fine, so it's obviously not my internet connection or my ISP's DNS servers that were up the spout.)

5. Using up way too much memory on my Windows 7 64-bit computer with 8 GB RAM. I'm talking up to 196 MB per tab in some cases! Firefox 12 uses far less memory, with many more tabs.

So yes, I'm exporting my Chrome sessions and history so I can access my important recent webpages in Firefox, and giving up on Chrome now.

Chrome tabs - how to export session using Session Buddy extension

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In my view it's not at all obvious how you export sessions (ie sets of tabs) from Google's Chrome browser that you've previously saved using the excellent Session Buddy add-on.

How to export a session from Session Buddy? It's the rather unobtrusive down arrow on the right, underneath the cog icon - I've outlined it in red below. Apparently it's known as the "Action" button, but it certainly isn't labelled as such!

So, first click on the session you want to export (on the left), then click that arrow I've outlined above, and you'll see Export at the bottom of the menu.

Click Export. Then you can choose whether to export URLs only or titles too, and whether to group by window (if you had more than one window saved to that session), as well as whether to export to CSV or a text file (or just copy the chosen content to your clipboard, then paste it elsewhere).

Took me too long to figure out that it was the little arrow, so I hope this saves someone else some frustration!

Internet Explorer 9 - how to open History, Favorites, Feeds on the left

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When opening your History (Ctrl-h) in Internet Explorer 9, it opens the pane (or should I say "Explorer bar") on the right hand side. That's the way they made it - and it's a big annoyance.

To open the History bar on the left, you have to use another keyboard shortcut instead - Ctrl-Shift-h (ie hold down both the Ctrl and Shift keys, tap h, release them all).

And it's Ctrl-Shift-i to open Favorites on the left, Ctrl-Shift-g for the Feeds.

If you used the old hotkeys and it opens on the right, you can click the green arrow (top left of the pane) or use the Ctrl-Shift-h combo to move it over to the left. But if you close the Explorer bar, Ctrl-h will open it on the right, all over again. So it's best just to learn the "new" shortcut keys.

Prime example of if it ain't broke why fix it…?!!

Word 2010, Word 2007 – how to paste plain text without formatting

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This blog post shows how to change the default settings in Word 2010 or Word 2007 so that whenever you use Ctrl v to paste text into Word from a Webpage, PDF file or other source, it automatically pastes it without the original formatting as unformatted text, getting rid of all the font styles, bold etc formatting from the original source.

Paste Special is what I've always used when pasting text into a Word document. But in Word 2003, it took too many steps to go to menu, Edit, Paste Special, which has always been an annoyance for me.

In Word 2010 and Word 2007, there are two ways to paste text in unformatted form much more easily.

I'll cover both, but I'd recommend the quick way, which I cover first.

The quicker way

Here's how to get to the best way to paste unformatted text in Word 2010 and Word 2007. This way sets your defaults, so that whenever you use the Ctrl v keyboard shortcut to paste text into Word, it automatically pastes it as plain unformatted text.

Apart from the "Set Default Paste" button mentioned above, you can get to the correct settings window by going to the menu File, Options in Word 2010 (in Word 2010, it's the Word graphic at the top left, then Word Options button at the bottom). Now click "Advanced" in the list on the left.

Now go to the "Cut, copy and paste" section, and use the down arrows against the various itmes to set "Keep Text Only". I retain "Keep Source Formatting" when it's pasting within the same document (though I may change that to Keep Text Only as it can be a pain when moving text to footnotes from the main body).

Then OK, and that's it.

In future, Ctrl v will automatically paste without the original font style, size etc. You may still have to edit the spacing etc, but it's a lot less annoying, for me.

How to get rid of paste options popup too

While you're at the Advanced options, if like me you hate with a vengeance the "Paste Options" popup that appears as default in Word whenever you paste anything, and gets in the way by blocking what you're viewing.

You can also get rid of that and stop it popping up all the time.

The slower way

In Word, once you've copied text to clipboard, you can press Ctrl Alt V – then arrow up or down (or keep pressing u) to choose "Unformatted text" or "Unformatted unicode text".

Or in Word 2010, for mouse users, in the Home menu, click the down arrow under the Paste icon on the left of the ribbon.

This gets you to the same box as Ctrl Alt v above. However, there's a better solution here. Once you click the down arrow under Paste, you can click the "A" button show outlined in red below, to paste just the text.

Or, if you rightclick in the body of the document, you get the same Paste Options where you can click the A button.

But better still, click "Set Default Paste". This gets to a window that lets you set options permanently. I'll cover below another way to get to that window, and what to set in it.

For Word 2007, it's similar, but you only get a Paste Special option (which brings up the box where you choose Unformatted text), there's no A button.

How to do this - in the "Show Paste Options button when context is pasted" line also outlined in red above, just UNtick the box and OK.

The slower way

In Word, once you've copied text to clipboard, you can press Ctrl Alt V – then arrow up or down (or keep pressing u) to choose "Unformatted text" or "Unformatted unicode text".

Or in Word 2010, for mouse users, in the Home menu, click the down arrow under the Paste icon on the left of the ribbon.

This gets you to the same box as Ctrl Alt v above. However, there's a better solution here. Once you click the down arrow under Paste, you can click the "A" button show outlined in red below, to paste just the text.

Or, if you rightclick in the body of the document, you get the same Paste Options where you can click the A button.

But better still, click "Set Default Paste". This gets to a window that lets you set options permanently. I'll cover below another way to get to that window, and what to set in it.

For Word 2007, it's similar, but you only get a Paste Special option (which brings up the box where you choose Unformatted text), there's no A button.

iPhone 4 Contacts: how to get to the search box faster

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It can be hard to find a contact on the iPhone 4 if you previously viewed a contact, and then later went back to Contacts, because then it shows the screen positioned against the contact you previously viewed, instead of going the top of the Contacts list. Frustratingly, there's no Search box visible at all. Like this:

So you then have to scroll, sometimes for a very long time, to get to the top of the Contacts list, before you can use the search box to search your Contacts.

Well here's a tip on a simple workaround for this usability annoyance. At least. it works for my Gmail contacts.

1. In Contacts, even if you're in the middle of the Contacts list, the Groups button should still be visible at the top left of the screen. It's outlined in red in the pic above. So just tap Groups.
   
   
2. Then, in the next screen tap Contacts:






3. And now you'll be back in your Contacts list, but this time with the search box immediately visible at the top.

   

4. This is the trick I use, but if someone knows anything better, like getting the Search box to show permanently at the top of Contacts, please let me know!
   

Tags: contacts, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience

Thunderbird: draft message "lost", or saved in or sent from a different email account ("from" address)? - possible fix

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If you use the free Thunderbird email software, you may have found that a previously-saved draft email gets saved into a different account when you edit it, ie under the wrong "From" email address (so you can't find the saved draft at first, because it's in the wrong place).

Worse still, a draft email may even get sent to recipients "from" the wrong email address.

This annoyance (and possibly embarrassment, if work email gets sent from your personal email address) happens because:

• you've set up several different email accounts on Thunderbird, eg one for personal email, one for work email
• you open a draft email you'd previously saved into one of your accounts
• meanwhile you selected a different account on the left, eg clicked on the Inbox for a different account than the one for the draft you just opened, to check emails for that different account
• later on, you go back to the opened draft email and then you edit it and save it as a draft or else you send it - and it gets saved or sent under the currently selected email address, not the original one you composed the email under!

One fix that has been suggested is to add all your identities to all your email accounts in Thunderbird (here's how, see under "How to add another identity"), but if you have lots of accounts it's a bit tedious.

In my view, the easiest solution to this problem (noted briefly on the same page as the previous link) is the following tip or trick. Below I include a step by step for non-techies.

This fix should hopefully ensure that a draft email you're editing gets re-saved or sent from the original email address you created it under, and not some random email account that happens to have been highlighted on the left when you eventually save or send the draft.

1. In Thunderbird go to the menu Tools, select Options, then click the Advanced button (with the cogwheel) at the top.
   
   
2. Under Advanced click the General sub-tab if it's not already on that page, then click the Config Editor button
   
   
   
3. In the about:config box that comes up, type or paste (without the quotes) in the Filter box "mailnews.reply_to_self_check_all_ident".
   
   
4. It should now look like this - it will say "false" under "Value" in the "mailnews.reply_to_self_check_all_ident" preference (if it was set to "true", you shouldn't be having this issue!)
   
   
   
5. What you need to do is to set it to "true". The easiest way to do that is just to doubleclick on the * line, and check that it now reads "true":
   
   

You can now close out of that box. Hit OK if you want in the Options window, but from what I can see it seems to save even if you hit Cancel.

From now on, Thunderbird should check when you save an edited draft email or send a draft email, and hopefully save or send it under the original email address! If it still glitches, raise it with Mozilla…

Tags: annoyance, tip, trick, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience

Gmail: "Loading", can't reply or compose email, chat not working in Firefox? - possible solution

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Is your Gmail stuck or hanging on "Loading…" in Firefox? Gmail chat not working either? The issue of Gmail freezing in Firefox seems fairly easy to find the solution to online, but given its huge annoyance factor here's step by step answers to help non-technical users to fix the problem.

The Firefox browser and Gmail don't always work well together. I've had previous experiences of Gmail being unusable for a while on Firefox after an upgrade to either, until the other caught up.

This particular problem seemed to persist however. (I used Internet Explorer or other browsers for Gmail, in the meantime.)

If you started getting this problem after upgrading Firefox recently (probably to version 3.6.12), one possible tip to solve the issue is this (it certainly worked for me!):

1. In Firefox, go to the address bar and type "about:config" without the quote marks and hit Enter.
   
   
2. You'll get the warning below, just click "I'll be careful.."
   
   
3. Now you'll get a window that looks something like this:
   
   
   
4. In the Filter box, type (again without the quotes) "dom.storage" and you'll see something like this; note the dom.storage enabled line which I've outlined in red:
   
   
   
5. Now doubleclick on the "dom.storage.enabled" line, outlined in red above, so that under the "Value" column it now reads "true", like so:
   
   
   
6. You can now close out of that tab, and try Gmail again.

If it still doesn't work I'm afraid the problem is something else and you'll have to try more troubleshooting. But it might well work - it has for lots of people.

Clearly Google are now using DOM storage for Gmail in Firefox - and you have no choice but to enable it if you want your Gmail to work properly. A stage on the way to full HTML 5, I suspect.

Tags: tip, trick, annoyance, problem, problems, troubleshooting, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience

Firefox / Thunderbird: forced to enter master password multiple times?

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If "Please enter the master password for the Software Security Device" is driving you mad because you have to enter your master password several times whenever you launch Mozilla's free Firefox browser or Thunderbird email software, the easiest solution to the "too many master password boxes" problem (or annoyance!) is the following tip.

Simply install the StartupMaster add-on / extension for Firefox and, separately (if you use Thunderbird) also the StartupMaster extension for Thunderbird (if necessary see how to install a Thunderbird extension - you don't just click on the link unlike in Firefox).

Restart Firefox or Thunderbird (whichever you need to sort out), and thereafter you shouldn't have to enter your master password more than once for Firefox and once for Thunderbird.

Background - you may have to type the master password several times in Firefox or Thunderbird if you've set a master password (which is a good idea for security reasons) and you've also set Firefox's home page to open in tabs more than one web page with login for which you've stored passwords - or if you've set up Thunderbird for more than one email account.

You'll get one password box, which you have to fill in and OK, for each Firefox tab with saved password or each email account you've set up in Thunderbird.

You may also have to keep clicking Retry (after entering the password in every single popup box) if you didn't enter the master password very shortly after Thunderbird opened, eg you left the computer for a few minutes then came back to it.

In some earlier versions of Firefox you didn't have to tediously enter the same master password many times in this situation, but sadly you do now. Unless you get the add-on I suggested.

Thunderbird: search one folder only, stop constant indexing slowing down computer

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I hate the recent "upgrades" to Thunderbird email search. The search box in the toolbar now searches all my accounts by default. And, possibly because I've disabled the dreaded Gloda indexing, it's wrong, it doesn't include more recent emails in the search at all, so it's useless as well as slow. And I hate that I can't size the two halves of the search results tab, so the left half takes up way too much space. I hate the font. I hate everything about it! It's a major problem and big annoyance, to me.

So here's a tip: the workaround to get proper search back is to rightclick on the folder you want to search, then choose Search:

This enables you to search just one folder of one account e.g. the Inbox. Which is much faster than the toolbar search box, and oddly enough it does search everything properly. The two types of searches must be using different indexes, somehow.

Unfortunately I still can't figure out how to search all the folders of a single account only, i.e. the way the old Thunderbird search box used to work.

A not very satisfactory workaround is, in the new search window that comes up with the right click, to then choose another folder in the "Search for messages in" dropdown. And so on. Which mean you lose the previous search results, of course.

If anyone knows how to get Thunderbird to search all folders of just one account, please tell me. My "desperation" solution now when I need do do that is simply to login to the account in Gmail in my web browser and use the standard Gmail search there!

The big Thunderbird update before this one killed my computer by indexing everything constantly by default. To stop that, go to Tools, Options, Advanced, General, under Advanced Configuration UNtick "Enable Global Search and Indexer", and OK).

Google Calendar: set day start and end time slots with Thunderbird & Lightning

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In Google Calendar you can't set which time slot (e.g. 8 am) you want as your "start of day" time slot - the one displayed at the top of the window - it just defaults to whatever start time it feels like, in my case (at the moment) 1.30pm, though it used to be 3 am; the start time just seems to change inexplicably and randomly according to the whim of Google. A similar annoyance with Google Calendar is that you can't set your preferred end of day time slot either, e.g. 10 pm.

But I really want my calendar to show events from 8 am to 10 pm so I can see my appointments for the day on one screen, without having to do any scrolling. Most decent calendar or scheduling software lets you set the preferred duration or length for your standard working day i.e. start and end times, and then zooms the view accordingly so that you can see the whole day in one window - but inexplicably not Google Calendar, despite lots and lots of user requests for it (those were just some from 2009 alone).

I don't consider Google Calendar properly usable as an enterprise app without this fundamental feature (I'd much rather have the ability to set start of the day than "Week starts on"), although clearly Google Apps has been taken on by many organisations, presumably because it's cheaper than Outlook / Exchange etc.

The workaround? My tip is to use Thunderbird, the free open source email software, with the free Lightning extension, to access your Google Calendar. (This only works on computers where you can instal Thunderbird, of course.) Upgrading to Thunderbird 3 was painful but it seems to be behaving now.

1. Download Thunderbird and install it
2. Install Lightning (the calendaring extension)
3. Install Provider for Google Calendar (this plugin makes Thunderbird & Lightning work with Google Calendar)
4. You can then view your calendar through the View menu, and in the latest version of Thunderbird it opens in a separate tab
   
5. Add your Google Calendar to Thunderbird (rightclick on XML or ICAL and save the link to paste when adding the calendar address; if you choose one of the Private Address links you shouldn't have to enter username/password)
6. In Thunderbird go to menu Tools > Options, click the Lightning icon at the top of the popup, then the Views sub-tab:
   
   
   
7. Here you can set day start and day end times (and number of hours to show at a time too), then OK to save it. In the General sub tab you can set the Default event length - just look through the sub tabs to see what you can set. Much better than Google Calendar in a browser!
8. Another tip - Ctrl-Tab works to switch tabs in Thunderbird (from email to calendar) as in Firefox etc; also Ctrl-1 takes you to the first tab, Ctrl-2 to the second, and so on.
   

Tags: Google Calendar, Thunderbird, Lightning, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience