Archive for December 2012

Landscape. No, portrait. D’oh! I mean landscape !

December 29, 2012 Word Processors No comments

I use a word processor in several very different environments. One of these involves flipping back and forth between landscape and portrait page orientations and is a trivial task in MS Word. But where is it in LibreOffice Writer ?

Answer : Select menu [Insert] -> [Manual Break] and in the dialog that pops up tick the [Page Break] radio button AND, in the “Style” box below it, select “Landscape” (which is towards the bottom of the list).Switching back to portrait is the same method except you set the style to “Default”.

If you use MS Word for a while – as we do at work – then its easy to forget how so I’ve made a note here.

 

 

XP Command Prompt From Explorer

December 22, 2012 Windows No comments

We may need a command prompt less and less these days, but we do still need it and there is nothing more infuriating than having the directory visible in explorer only to have to then manually navigate to it when you open a command prompt. What we want is a short cut on explorer’s right mouse click:

 

dospromptregedit2

Well, just run up good old regedit, locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Folder\shell, create a key with the name that will be displayed in the menu – I chose “DOS Prompt …” (OK, so it’s not really DOS, but DOS gives me a warm cosy feeling),create another key within it called “Command” and set it’s string value to “cmd.exe” %L :-

dospromptregedit

As an aside, with Vista Microsoft realised this feature was missing so added it ; yes, just open explorer, right click in the right hand panel whilst holding the [shift] key WHILST NOTHING IS SELECTED, oh, and outside of all files and columns (hope you have a big screen!). Muppets!