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HALIFAX AREA PERSONAL COMPUTER CLUB


In The March Newsletter

Feature Presentation for the March general meeting

Bill Marchant - Scraps, a tip and printing the screen display

General Information

A word of thanks to guest speakers

Newsletter Information

Meeting Schedule for the year


Feature Presentation

The introduction topics will be Bill Marchant on an item of interest on Windows and Rob MacCara who will look after the Q&A secession

The featured presentation by David Potter, will be on the Internet.

The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The next general meeting will be Mar 28th meeting time 7:00 - 9:00pm. For this month Only we have official approval to use the classroom facilities at CFB Halifax (Stad) for our regular meetings. New Place! Building S-37 room B18.
Go in the main gates of Stad on Gottigen street and either stop and ask the fellow in the gate house for directions or: Proceed straight through the gates and down the little hill and keep going straight till you come to a stop sign. Go past the stop sign and down the little hill and turn right at the bottom of the hill. The long building facing the soccer field is Numbered S-37 and the sign out front says that it is the home of the Naval Engineering School. You've reached the right place. Find a parking spot and go in the first doors you come to (North doors where the sign is. Go Straight in the building and down the stairs to the next level and turn left. The classroom we'll be using is B18 and it's right down at the end on the left hand side of the corridor. Notice that you'll be passing a washroom on your right as you look for B18. The new facilities boast a room with 25 computers as well as a projection system that we can use. See you all there on the 28th!

In this issue


Scraps, a tip and printing the screen display

Here is a little known but possibly useful technique. Selected pieces of text from WordPad and WordPerfect, and possibly other word processors (MS Word?) can be placed on the Desktop with the title 'Wordpad Document Scrap' or just 'Document scrap'.

These scraps can be used like data sent to the Clipboard, with the advantages that:

(1) They survive the shutdown/reboot processes of your computer
and
(2) Making a new scrap does not kill the old one, as with Clipboard. You can create, save and recover as many scraps as you want.

To make a scrap, highlight the text, and then with the left mouse button down, drag it to the desktop. That’s all! To recover the scrap of text, you may drag it back into your word processor, or right-click the desired scrap and select OPEN. This latter procedure will replace the scrap in the application which created it.

You can also with some limits, place scraps created with one application, into another application. Since I do not use Microsoft Word, I have no information on it, but I assume Microsoft would have made scraps a part of it's capability. My experiments with scraps showed the following results:

Wordpad makes scraps, Accepts scraps originating with Wordpad Accepts scraps originating with WordPerfect. Notepad cannot make scraps. If you put a scrap from WordPad or WordPerfect into Notepad, you get all the control codes that go with it. It looks and is very messy. WordPerfect makes scraps, Accepts Wordpad scraps Accepts WordPerfect scraps. Quickview and Quickview Plus cannot accept scraps.

You could use scraps to leave notes to yourself or other users of your computer. You might make a folder for scraps, to avoid cluttering the Desktop, but on the other hand, you might like to leave the scrap icon on the desktop so it does not get forgotten.
There is probably more to this than I have discovered. It may be a fruitful area for more exploration by anyone so motivated.

Printing the Display Screen

Some of you have no doubt been tempted to spend money to get a program which will permit you to print the content of your computer screen. There are share-ware programs and there are commercial programs to do this.

Until you have tried the method I am about to describe, SAVE YOUR DOWNLOAD TIME AND YOUR MONEY. If, after you have used this, you feel you need another product, you are still free to obtain one.

1. To save and print all the data on your display:

a. Press the PRINTSCREEN key. Nothing visible will happen! But in fact, the data goes into your clip board.
b. Now open Wordpad, or your word processor. And press Ctrl - V, to paste the display into it.
c. When the screen picture appears in your WordPad or Word processor, send it to the printer in the normal manner.


2. To save and print a window:

b. Make sure the window you want is the active window, by clicking on it.
c. Press Alt - PRINTSCREEN.
d. Proceed as in 1.b and 1.c above.

Note 1:    I found that Word Perfect was better than Wordpad, because you had more control over the size of the picture. I expect MS Word would also give better control than Wordpad. When I printed a Wordpad image it did not always print the whole picture.

Note 2:    The Word Perfect page shown in this document was done with method 2. I narrowed it with the mouse to make it fit better within the page margins. The saved file takes less than 100 Kbytes on the disk.

That’s all.

In this issue

General Information

Executive:

Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen

and the following members who assist in planning our monthly meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.

A message from the Vice Chairman

The HAPCC has two kinds of meetings. Firstly the regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend regularly, secondly the monthly (approximately)planning meeting which organizes the business of the Club, including what happens on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday, a week after the regular meeting in which all members of the Club are urged to attend. At the planning meeting,we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings, finances, membership, training, and other computer related subjects.

....Bill Marchant

In this issue

A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web suites.

Our guest speaker at the March meeting was Mr. David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the MpoweredPc service. His multi-media presentation showed us how far the service has come, and in which direction it is heading. MpoweredPc was being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it promises to be a serious contender in the high-speed internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here: Mpowered. Once again,Thank you to MT&T and David Baxter.

Our guest speaker in February, 1998 was Sgt. Bill Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when the police department started using the Internet. They were the first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt. Cowper is continually receiving calls from all over the world looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the department and the officers in the patrol cars are versed on getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to check-out their web site the address is: Halifax Regional Police Service gives an idea of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.

In this issue

News Letter Information

Newsletter Articles.... We are almost always in need of good articles. If anyone has something that they feel would make a good article, an interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass it on. Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.

The newsletter is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within the past three months. Yearly membership dues are $15.00.

Club Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.

In this issue

Future meeting dates

We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming year at the last planning meeting of the season. The dates for these are listed below. As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early part of January due to Christmas Eve being near the fourth Sunday of the month.

The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8days) after the general meeting. They are currently held at a members home and the address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning meeting. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or events.

Meeting dates for the 1999 season:

Mar-28  Apr-25   May-24    June-27

Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.



Forward to: April 1999 Newsletter

Back to: February 1999 Newsletter

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