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the How-To Geek

Computer Help from your Friendly How-To Geek

Create Shortcuts or Hotkeys to Quickly Send Mail to a RecipientYesterday

If you've ever really looked at your sent mail folder, you've probably noticed a trend: You email the same people over and over and over! Since we're big fans of automating repetitive tasks, today we're going to look at how to create shortcuts to automatically email specific recipients.

You can even assign a hotkey to email a specific person this way, or email a list of people if you are so inclined.

Create a Quick Email Shortcut

Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

In the location box, enter in the email address that you would like to create the shortcut for, using the following syntax:

mailto:emailaddress@server.com

This will create a shortcut to send an email using the default mail client. On the next page, you can give the shortcut a name, and I'd suggest using something descriptive like the name of the person.

Now I have a shortcut that I can use to quickly open up a new email to myself, usin

Using the Online Stopwatch as a Desktop ApplicationNovember 26

While doing research for a project that involved benchmarking, I realized I needed a good stopwatch to time the results… which is when I found a website that does exactly that, and does it quite well. To make it even easier, we can launch it as a desktop application.

To get started, you'll need to already have Google's Chrome browser installed, as we'll use the "Create application shortcuts" feature to launch the website in a window all by itself, mimicking a desktop application.

Creating the Application Shortcut

Open up Chrome and browse over to http://www.online-stopwatch.com/large-stopwatch/ and then click on the icon to the right of the address bar, choosing "Create application shortcuts…" from the menu.

You'll get a choice of where you want to place the shortcuts, and then click the OK button to continue.

At this point you'll have an icon for the Online Stopwatch. The icon quality isn't so great at larger sizes, but it looks pretty good in the quick launch bar at least.

Backup and Restore Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites ListNovember 24

If you've used a computer on a corporate network you've likely had to add a website to your trusted sites list because it just wouldn't work otherwise. After a while, you end up with a mess of sites in your Trusted sites list… so how do you transfer those to a new computer without retyping them?

Like most everything else in Windows, there's a quick way you can do so in the registry by backing up a single key, which we'll cover for you today.

What Are We Backing Up Again?

For those of you that don't know what we're talking about, if you go to the Security tab under Internet Options, you'll see a Trusted sites icon in the list.

Selecting that icon and then the Sites button will bring up a dialog which will allow you to add or remove sites from the zone.

For the purposes of this example, I used a clean computer that only had howtogeek.com added to the list, which would be silly to backup via the registry… this should really be used for machines with a long list.

Backing Up Via Regedit

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box and navigate down to the following key:

H

Embed an Excel Worksheet Into PowerPoint or Word 2007November 24

The great thing about the Microsoft Office Suite is the fluid interaction of each application type. By embedding the Excel document into your presentation or document you can use it to make a point more effectively with numbers or even graphs.

First let’s take a look at easily embedding a new blank Excel document.  Open up the PowerPoint presentation (or Word document) to add the Excel worksheet, then Insert \ Object.

  

In the Insert Object dialog box select Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet and click on OK.

Now you can start entering data into the new Excel worksheet.  You will notice that all of the Excel controls will now be shown in the Ribbon.  This can come in very handy when you need to create a new worksheet within presentation quickly.

The other option we can use is to embed an existing worksheet.  For this we just need to go to Insert \ Object again and t

Toggle Flash On or Off in Internet Explorer the Easy WayNovember 20

If you often browse Flash-heavy websites using Internet Explorer and would like to be able to turn Flash off and only enable it when you really want to, there's an easy way to accomplish this with a small application appropriately called Toggle Flash.

Using Toggle Flash

If you don't see the new button on the toolbar after you run through the installation, you'll want to right-click on the buttons and uncheck the "Lock the Toolbars" item.

Then you can drag the dotted line over so you can see more of the buttons, and you'll see the new Toggle Flash icon on the right-hand side of the toolbar.

Of course it's much easier to just look under Customize on the same menu and choose Customize Toolbar, then move the button up in the list so it's further over to the left.

 

Now all you have to do is click the Toggle Flash icon and then reload the page.