Information management and technology assurance

I like to use background color because it enhances my documents. But when I click on the background-color icon on the toolbar, I get a meager choice of 15 colors. I’d like more options. Any ideas? You want more colors? I’ll give you more colors. How about an infinite number

I plan to replace all my office computers when Microsoft comes out with its new Vista operating system and Office suite this year. Do you have any suggestions about how I can get rid of my old computers? In the past I tried selling them, but I only got a

Laptop protection : Although LoJack won’t protect your laptop from being stolen, it can help retrieve it. When you install LoJack software it is programmed to hide in the laptop’s memory. When someone turns on the computer without also entering a code, LoJack silently goes into the detective mode. Then,

Key to Instructions To help readers follow the instructions in this article, we used two different typefaces: Boldface type is used to identify the names of icons, agendas and URLs. Sans serif type shows the names of files and the names of commands and instructions that users should type into

In the December 2005 item “How to Fix a Scrambled Registry,” a reader asked how to repair a Word file that refused to open in Word. Since I assumed a worst-case situation, in which the registry was scrambled and thus all the Word files were similarly afflicted, I offered a

Stanley Zarowin, a former JofA senior editor, is now a contributing editor. His e-mail address is zarowin@mindspring.com . Do you have technology questions for this column? Or, after reading an answer, do you have a better solution? Send them to contributing editor Stanley Zarowin via e-mail at zarowin@mindspring.com or regular

I often receive documents that contain many hyperlinks—links to Web sites and e-mail addresses. I have to go through the entire document and convert the hyperlinks to regular text one at a time. Is there a faster way to do that? For those who aren’t familiar with hyperlink elimination, here’s

I can copy a word or a group of contiguous words and paste it in another location in a document. But is there a way to copy a bunch of words in different parts of the document and then selectively paste them in different places? Say hello to the Office

Here’s a tip sent by reader Mike Hendricks, CPA, cost accounting manager of Yarnell Ice Cream Co., Searcy, Ark.: If you have a range of data you need to keep together—for instance, a lookup table—you can anchor it without using dollar signs, such as in $A$1:$Z$50 . Do this instead:

We have something like 75 different spreadsheets containing various studies and reports circulating in the office at any one time. While it’s usually possible to identify each author because of the subject, I’d like some easy way to label each file without putting the information directly in the worksheet. Any

Should you turn off your computer at day’s end? This question is being hotly debated in my office. The split seems to be between those who drive gas guzzlers and those with economy cars. You are raising a much bigger issue than energy conservation. You surely save electricity by turning

Key to Instructions To help readers follow the instructions in this article, we used two different typefaces: Boldface type is used to identify the names of icons, agendas and URLs. Sans serif type shows the names of files and the names of commands and instructions that users should type into