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What do those letters mean?

May 112010

You may have noticed that every computer filename ends with a period and three or four letters. Those letters actually have a purpose. They tell your computer how to open the file, ie. which application to use.

If you’re having trouble opening a file, sometimes it helps to know what app the file is looking for. I’ve included a quick list below. If I haven’t included an extension you’re curious about, simply enter that extension and the word extension ( .doc extension) into your favorite Internet search engine and you’ll most likely get your answer.

.doc	Microsoft Word 2003 or earlier
.docx	Microsoft Word 2007 or later
.xls	Microsoft Excel 2003 or earlier
.xlsx	Microsoft Excel 2007 or later
.ppt	Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 or earlier
.pptx	Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or later
.pub	Microsoft Publisher, any version
.pdf	portable document file (Adobe Acrobat Reader)
.htm or .html	web page
.mpg	movie
.mp3	music
.jpg or .jpeg	image
.png	image with transparent background
.gif	animated or web image
.eps	encapsulated PostScript vector image

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“Tech Tuesday” is published every Tuesday. To reach Tracy with comments or questions, email her here.

Printing Secrets, Part II

Tech Tuesday

Apr 272010

Last week we talked about using Print Preview to conserve paper. This week, we’ll talk about a huge paper-waster…Microsoft Excel. I wonder how many trees have given their noble lives for the 2,000 attempts to get a spreadsheet all on one page.

There’s no need for the print-and-see approach, however, because Microsoft Excel has a very cool feature called ‘Print Area.’ To use this feature, simply select all of your data, then select File>Print Area>Set Print Area.

With that set, then choose Page Setup from the File Menu. At this point, you want to set the page Scaling to fit your data either on one page (1 page wide by 1 page tall) or if you know you’ll have too much data to fit 1 page tall, you could leave that box blank and Excel will confine your print to 1 page wide, but use as many pages as necessary to accommodate your data.

The key to remember when using this feature is that Excel will shrink your data in order to fill your request. This is where allowing multiple pages would be used since forcing it to fit onto only 1 page may cause the text to appear too small to read.

[Versions and Platforms could make this sequence slightly different. If you have trouble finding this feature, simply enter ‘MS Excel’ with your version number along with ‘Print Area’ into your favorite search engine for specific instructions.]

Have fun trying out this new feature. And remember, more trees = cleaner air.

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“Tech Tuesday” is published every Tuesday. To reach Tracy with comments or questions, email her here.

Are you having trouble with MS Office files?

Tech Tuesday

Oct 132009

I’ve received a lot of questions lately about Microsoft Office files. Most of these questions point back to the same answer so I’m going to discuss it here today.

How do you know what type of file you have? Every computer filename has two parts separated by a period. The first part is the file’s name and it comes before the period. The second part, following the period, is the file extension. This file extension, usually 3-4 characters in length, will identify what type of file it is. For example, Microsoft Word files often end in .doc, whereas Excel and PowerPoint files end in .xls or .ppt respectively. These extensions tell your computer how to open the file, or which application to use to read the data it holds.

Did you catch that I said ‘often’ above in regards to the Word file extension? The reason I said ‘often’ is because the newest versions of the Microsoft Office suite have actually added an ‘x’ to its file extensions, both Windows and Mac versions. This is where the questions are generated.

If you try to open a Word file with the .docx extension using an earlier version of MS Word (2003), you may run in to trouble. The same is true with the other office applications, as well. There is a way to resolve this problem, however, and it does not require an upgrade purchase!

Microsoft has created a Compatibility Pack available for free download on their site. This download will enable users to open these new files in older versions of Office with no trouble. Note: Some features of the new applications may be lost even when using the Compatibility Pack.

For those of you that blamed these troubles on the Windows/Mac conversion, that has nothing to do with it! So, if you’ve had trouble with these files and couldn’t figure out why, try the download and see if that takes care of it.

Click here to learn more about the Compatibility Pack and to find the download link.

“Tech Tuesday” is published every Tuesday. To reach Tracy with comments or questions, email her here.