TECH TIPS

Tips

Useful tidbits from PCMag editorial staff, Labs analysts, and readers

IPHONE Sync Your iPhone’s Calendar with Google Calendar

This new sync capability was announced by Google just before we were set to publish this tip roundup. Yes, you can now sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone without resorting to any third-party services, but it won’t happen automatically. First, you need to make sure your iPhone firmware is Version 2.2 or later. Then you visit www.google .com/mobile/apple/sync.html, and take a few proactive steps. Don’t ignore the step of backing up your contacts, as the Google Sync setup will delete them from the device. There are a couple of disadvantages to backing up your contacts to Google Contacts— doing so means you’re no longer syncing with Outlook or MobileMe contacts, if you’d set one of those up. And you’re sharing all your contacts with Google, which may or may not be a problem, depending on your comfort level. Finally, don’t be confused by the fact that you actually set up your Gmail account as a Microsoft Exchange account rather than the Google Mail choice—Google Sync uses an Exchange server to accomplish the syncing.

In the next 13 steps of the process, you’ll enter Google’s server name and choose whether you want Contacts, Calendars, or both synced; and finally pass a couple of scary red warning screens reminding you that you’ll lose the existing contacts and calendar entries on the phone. Thereafter, your contacts and calendar entries will sync with the beta Google services rather than MobileMe or Exchange. If you’ve enabled Push in your iPhone’s Fetch New Data control panel, you won’t have to do anything for the info to update. Otherwise, you can sync every 15 or 30 minutes, or manually when in your Gmail inbox.

WORD 2007 The Word Status Bar

In Word 2003 the status bar displays a number of useful status items that have vanished in Word 2007. Maybe you don’t need an indicator to let you know that macro recording is on, or that extended selection is enabled, but it can be awfully handy to see at a glance that Word is tracking changes or that your keystrokes will overtype existing text.

The Word Options dialog won’t help. You can scan it ’til your eyes cross without find-

STATuS uPDATE Right-click the status bar in Word 2007 to customize it, so that the indicators you enjoyed viewing in Word 2003 return to you.

ing any settings to bring back those handy indicators. What you need to do is rightclick the status bar itself. That brings up a menu of 20 distinct items that can appear on the status bar. Now you can have it your own way.—Neil J. Rubenking

WINDOWS Save Screen Grabs the Right Way

A lot of people know that pressing the PrintScreen/PrtSc key puts an image of the entire desktop into the clipboard, and pressing Alt along with that key takes a screenshot of the active application. But many people don’t know what to do next. They paste the screenshot into a Word document—bad idea! The resulting file is way bigger than it needs to be.

Instead, launch the Paint applet from the Accessories menu and paste the image into Paint. Now save it in a compressed image format to save space. The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format is a great choice because it compresses the image without losing any detail. Next best is JPG, which loses some detail during the compression process. Just don’t save as a BMP file. A BMP screenshot of a 1,280-by-1,024 desktop always takes 3.75MB of disk space. The file size of that same screenshot as a PNG image will vary, but it can be closer to 100KB.—NJR

MuLTIMEDIA IR Not Working? Move the Sensor

Find out where the IR sensor is on your Media Center PC, TV, or other bit of hometheater equipment. If you put the equipment way over to the right or left, and deep in a cabinet (even with an open front), you may not be able to use your remote. Can you move it somewhere more accessible? If not, you might want to look into an RF-to-IR repeater like the ones on Logitech Harmony remotes for these situations. You’ll also be able to control your stereo from another room (with an RF remote) as a fringe benefit.—Joel Santo Domingo