SOluTIONS
Tips Useful tidbits from PCMag editorial staff, Labs analysts, and readers MISSING TOOLBAR? If your toolbar in Word 2008 for the Mac goes missing, click on the gray oval box in the right-hand corner.
MICROSOFT OFFICE
Restore a Disappearing Toolbar in Word for Mac Recently my oft-used formatting toolbar in Word 2008 for Mac went missing. One day it simply disappeared, despite the fact that the Formatting box under View | Toolbars remained selected—how to get it back was a frustrating mystery. I trolled every menu option in Word, looking for the box that I could check to recover it. At last I noticed a small, nondescript oval button in the top right-hand corner of my document window: Clicking on it made my toolbar magically reappear. Turns out that this little bubble expands and retracts Word’s toolbars. In fact it appears all over Apple’s OS X, in Finder, browser, and other programs’ windows, and it does the same thing in all of them. Who knew? Thanks, Apple, for making this option so puzzling!—Wendy Sheehan Donnell Align Images in Microsoft Word It’s easy enough to get an image into Word 2007—just copy it to the clipboard and paste it in, or choose Insert | Picture. But once the image is in there, you may find it a balky old thing. You can’t move it around, and you can’t put text alongside it; it’s an albatross! The key to unlocking your pasted image lies in the Text Wrapping setting. By default, it’s set to In Line with Text, which might be handy if your image is an arcane rune not found in any font—then it would flow with the text and stay in just the right place. Most of the time, though, you’ll want to choose a different setting. Right-click the image, choose Text Wrapping from the context menu, and choose Square or Tight (or any of the other wrapping options). Now your pasted image is 48 PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION APRIL 2009
no longer locked in place. You can move it wherever you want, and you can decide how the text should behave around it. You’ll find other helpful options in the Picture ribbon that appears when you select an image.—Neil J. Rubenking Set New Time Increments in Outlook’s Calendar Outlook’s calendar divides days into hours, which are in turn broken up into half-hours, with appointments starting and ending on the hour or half-hour. You’re allowed to type odd times in (down to the minute), but for people whose classes, appointments, or other calendar items regularly start and end at 15 or 45 minutes past the hour, scheduling can become tedious. Having fielded questions from such folk, I scoured Outlook’s calendar options, to no avail. The answer was out there, however, lurking in a context menu—thanks, Microsoft, for putting a random option nowhere near the Options dialog. Here’s how to make Outlook respect your schedule: Right-click somewhere in your calendar (somewhere within a day, not in the left-hand pane) and choose Other Settings.... Then, next to Time Scale, choose another time increment—say, 15 minutes. In addition to seeing your hours divided into four segments instead of the default two, your scheduling drop-down will display times in 15-minute increments. You can’t type in a custom increment, but being able to choose 5-, 6- (6-minute increments? Seriously?), 10-, 15-, 30-, or 60-minute increments is a start.—Sarah Pike NETWORKING
Improve Power-Line Performance If you are getting less-than-stellar performance with your power-line network, it’s
probably because your adapters are connected across two circuit breakers. For best results, make sure the power-line adapters are on the same circuit. Note that networking performance can also degrade if your electric circuit is overloaded, so try not to use the hair dryer, refrigerator, and air conditioner all on the same one. —Mario Morejon Turn Your Cell Phone into a Modem Wishing you could get on the Internet from your laptop without having to find a Wi-Fi hot spot? Don’t want to pay $60 per month for a cellular broadband connection? You can probably use your current cell phone as a modem for your laptop—and at a significant savings compared with implementing a separate PC card, ExpressCard, or USB solution. Head over to Smart Device Central’s Modem Tethering Guide for information on setting up this kind of connection: There are instructions for each carrier using a PC laptop, and one specifically for Mac laptop users.—Jamie Lendino CAMERAS
Calibrate Your Monitor Ever wonder why some of your friends’ pictures look better than yours? Well, maybe it’s not your camera; it could be your monitor. Calibration tools and software can help you optimize your monitor’s contrast and brightness settings so that your pictures can come out looking detailed and accurate. Expensive tools like the Spyder3 can adjust your monitor for you automatically. And software calibration tools like DisplayMate can help you fine-tune your monitor’s picture to your eye. A quick Google search will turn up
