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Thanks, 3 Star Lounger. I may try Picasa, but I (so far) have figured that having a database of photos is more trouble than it’s worth — I’ve just tried to use sensible folder naming.

Picasa doesn’t ask you to replace anything that you are doing, but it sits on top and produces a database of your folders; right clicking on any image will give you the option to ‘locate in folder’ that will open Explorer with the file replaced.

However, should you wish, you can also use it for basic edits and adjustments, loading to the internet et cetera.

As for your original problem; I suggest you change your Windows folder options to show hidden files and system files, and then you should be able to simply delete the file marked thumbs.db . Windows should then rebuild it.

Or you could filter on the default characters ‘abc’ and clear the contents of those cells

Or you could filter on the default characters ‘abc’ and clear the contents of those cells

Or you could filter on the default characters and clear the contents of those cells

Yup I am talking about a leading 0. Thanks RG!

You can set a custom format for the cell Ctrl+1, Select “Custom” for the category. and put 000 in the Type

or you can use =TEXT(A1,”000″) if you want to change the format that way.

Re: “Digital signatures can replace a John Hancock” – Short of a DocuSign-like system, which is really designed and marketed for business, I’d like to see an easy way (an app?) to create my own signature to drop into Word docs and PDFs for emailing, and have it such that when the doc is printed doesn’t leave the signature print quality looking second or third generation compared to the rest of the doc; i.e., a signature feature designed for personal use.

Write your signature on a white piece of paper.
Take a photograph of it using flash
Open the picture in a photo editor, crop and set the background colour to transparent.
Save as a GIF file.

Another useful saving is to use a service such as pdfescape.com if you are ever asked to ‘print, sign, scan and return’ a pdf document. This allows you to upload a pdf, which you can then edit by adding blocks of text, or graphics images (like your signature). The edited pdf can then be saved and downloaded back to your machine.

Hey, I was so impressed by Mailwasher I paid for it!

Worth every penny

I’d recommend using MailWasherto allow you to scan your mail well before it gets to your machine.

This downloads just the headers and plain text from the mail server and allows you to identify spam and unexpected attachments. Once the bad stuff has been detected you can delete those emails directly from the server and open your usual mail program to download the rest.

Follow it up with Avast – which seems to be highly recommended and (as mentioned above) will scan incoming mail

It’s just got to be uneditable.

For any image, all someone needs to do is Print Screen then paste into MS Paint, and the image can be edited. Tell your boss.

You can mess about with backgrounds so that any simple edits are obvious, but there’s no absolute way of preventing edits.

As others have said, the position of the $ determines whether it’s the row or column that has an Absolute reference.

If you are entering a formula, you can use the F4 key to cycle between the options. It took me years to discover this very useful feature thus: C5 -> $C$5 -> C$5 -> $C5 -> C5 etc

In addition to the other suggestions, you could use the camera to show an image of the calculation block in a stretched Row 1
(as per here)

In Open Office 3, Conditional Formatting works in the same way as in Excel 2003 – so you can have 3 special formats that apply in addition to the default format.
What you need to do is select columns A and B, then bring up the Conditional Formatting dialog

Select the 3 tick boxes, and use the “Formula is” dropdown.
What you then do is write the following formulae against each rule
=$E1=1 calling Style 1
=$E1=2 calling Style 2
=$E1=3 calling Style 3

You need the dollar sign because you want both columns A and B to have the same style set depending on what’s in column E.

I would attach a demo file, but I’m getting an ‘Invalid File’ message when I try.

It’s worth noting that if you click on the ‘fx’ or ‘=’ icon just to the left of the formula edit bar it’ll give you a breakdown of what the formula does. Then, if you click on each of the functions within the formula it’ll tell you what’s happening with each
.27573-Function

Cell F3 contains “40542 YTD”, so using MID(F3,7,2) to give the Month value of your first date, results in “YT”.
Similarly, I3 contains “40544 YTD”, so you’re getting “YT” as the Month part for the second date in your IF statement.

Since this never happens on my laptop (using the same router), I have ruled out an isp or router problem.

Herb Reed

I assume you’re using wifi, so my first suggestion would be to change the channel your wifi is transmitting on. I had a similar problem (though mine was failing to connect initially, rather than losing the connection). It only affected the desktop, not the laptop, and was very intermittent – occurring once or twice a week.

Changing the wi-fi channel to 1 or 13 (can’t remember which) solved the problem totally.