Apparently Some Of You Can Do Some Things Better Than Me February 17th, 1999 Responses to last week's column on helpful hints has been so positive that I will cover more this week. Several readers have sent in their hints and it is my pleasure to pass them on. I really like this suggestion from Martin Carrero-Schmidt who is an MIS Manager. Martin suggests that you create several aliases of your trash can and put them in all the corners of your desktop or even in key folders in your hard drive. That way the trash can is readily available in several spots. Martin also suggested that when creating an alias you can hold down the option and command keys and drag the item to where you want the alias to appear. For example, open your hard drive, then your System Folder, and while holding the option and command keys, drag whatever you want into your Apple Menu Items folder (inside the System Folder). It will instantly be there and the word alias will not be attached. Martin likes this method because it is quicker. Here is an interesting hint that came from several people. Don't look now, but I think this is a "guy" thing, kinda like having the most new toys on the block. I say that because only men wrote about this issue and they all felt really strongly about it, while it doesn't seem that important to me or any of the women I checked with. In last week's column I suggested that you can make sure something you frequently use is listed first on your Apple Menu by putting a space in front of the name. For specific directions please see "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better.. I Can Do Anything Better Than You...". This works great, but it means that all of the Apple Menu Items are not lined up on the left. I suspect that this is perceived as indicating that one is not quite "up to snuff" with their Mac abilities. So in the interest of all the folks who took the time to write and anyone who wants to have the ultimate skills, the following technique may be used to control what goes on top in your Apple Menu without showing any spaces. These directions are a direct quote from Ed Otten, but they parrot what several others suggested. "Open up Notepad and find a blank sheet. Put the cursor at the beginning of a line. Press return. Using your mouse, select the first line, which is blank. Select copy in the edit menu. Now click once on the file that you want to force to the top. When the gray box appears press the up arrow key to move the cursor to the beginning of the name. Go up to edit and select paste. The name of the file will disappear and the blank space will occupy it. Now click outside of the file (on the desktop. The name of the file should return. Place it in the Apple Menu items folder and it will be at the top, correctly aligned." Thanks to everyone who suggested this skill. You should use a CD-Rom drive cleaner and a floppy drive cleaner periodically to keep those areas of your computer running smoothly. The same thing is true of your mouse. They can get gunked up, especially if you use one of those cute and clever designed mouse pads. You can tell there is a problem because the cursor doesn't go where you want it to go, or you feel a pull when you slide the mouse. They are easy to clean. Open the access panel on the underside of the mouse, take out the roller ball, and use a cotton swab and rubbing alcohol to clean it. If that isn't enough you can gently scrape off build-up with a smooth, plastic implement. Don't use metal and be gentle so that you won't scar the roller ball. A reader reports that you can close all the windows in an application at once by holding down Option when hitting the close box. Here is another hint from a reader that falls under my "this is totally cool" category. If you have frequently used text you can type it into a word processing document, drag it onto the desktop, give it a file name, and then use it over and over again in any application you want. Open a blank page in your word processing program and type the information - such as your name and address. Highlight the typed text and drag it out on the desktop. A different looking arrow will appear. When you drag it out and then release the mouse the items turns into a small document called a text clipping. You can name the text clipping in the same manner you name anything else. You can keep these text clippings on your desktop or create a folder to contain them. I can see all kinds of uses for this trick from creating standard paragraphs for business letters to alerting customers or friends to a change in address. The only place where I couldn't make it work was in an e-mail message. I would like to be able to save e-mail addresses or web addresses for later use without having to open up a word processing page or simple text and saving them. Another reader sent a hint for dealing with SPAM that should be beneficial to many. You can set your e-mail application to automatically trash messages that are not specifically addressed to you. Many SPAM messages are sent to user groups made up of addresses that have been purchased. However, if you belong to any valid mailing lists you need to exclude them from your direct to trash messages. Since there are so many internet providers it would be best if you check with your provider or someone else who is familiar with your particular set up to find out just how to do that. Marcia Oddi from Indianapolis reminded me of something that works great. I think everyone knows that you can stop a print job by hitting the apple key and the period. After all, the computer reminds us of that every time we try to print. However, if you don't stop it soon enough that combination doesn't work. This can be troublesome if you have set a long document to print, or are trying to print graphics which can be very slow. You can interpret a print job at any time in the process by double clicking on the printer icon. When it opens, click on the document icon and move it to the trash can in the top right corner of the dialogue box. It will instantly be trashed. Another hint from Martin Carrero-Schmidt concerns opening graphics files. Martin says that you can open jpeg and other web-related files by simply dragging them either onto the browser's application icon (or alias) or onto an open window in the browser. I tried that and it works like a charm. Be aware though that the file you download will automatically be saved to your browser folder. Try it out. It might be worth it to you because it is such a seamless operation. Has your trash can icon ever disappeared from your desktop? Mine has and it was really frustrating. To get it back I finally rebooted. However, now I know there is an easier way to find it. You can highlight the icon of the file you want to trash and hit Command-Delete. The trash can should come out of hiding again. It is such a pleasure to get letters from readers sharing things they have learned. Thanks to everyone who wrote this week and keep those cards and letters (oops - e-mails) coming. There were some shareware programs that were recommended by readers as well and you can expect to see those discussed in the near future. We will also be looking at options for effectively using sounds - but first I have to figure it out myself. If you have any tips, hints, or thoughts on these topics, make sure you write me so that I can share your thoughts with other readers.