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THIS WEEK'S TIP (8-27-01)

SAVING YOUR WORK

    How do I save my work so that all of that effort isn't wasted?  Saving your work usually means storing it -- either on your hard drive inside your computer--- or on  one of those square plastic things called a floppy disk.   There are other means to save your work but let's deal with these two for now.  Most of the windows programs  and windows compatible programs make it nearly impossible to  escape the choice of whether or not to save your work.   Usually as you try to close the program you are working in, a separate little popup screen will  ... well pop up... and ask you very politely if you want to save your work .  You are of course free not to.

	The box will look like this one.
	The window wants you to select a name for this file. You can remove what is in there by highlighting the " *.txt" (yours may be different depending upon the program you are using) and then press the backspace key.  Type in a new name that you will recognize.  Don't worry if you don't type in the ".xxx"  Your program will save it under its normal  extension.
	You will notice that there is a window to the right  displaying the contents of the desktop.  go to "my documents" or  whichever other folder you want to store this file to and then left click on the "Save" button.
	If you want to save this file to a floppy disk - now is the time to do it.  Double click the "My Computer" option in the window pane.  Select Drive A or whichever drive letter is your floppy drive. Insert a disk and type in a name as above and click "Save".

There are a couple of other things you can do.  You can use the mouse and Left click on the "File" selection on the menu bar at the top of the screen.  Then find and left click "Save" or "Save as" and you will find yourself at the box you see above. 

• Sometimes you may want to save a different version of something you are working on  but still keep the original intact. You can use "Save as" for that too.  Just type in a similar but slightly different name  and save it as above.   I like to use 1, 2 , 3 or a, b, c to help remind me of  which is the  earlier versions.  For example: I might have made a list of employees for special projects and called it "project.txt".   Later versions might be called "project1.txt"  and "project2.txt".   That way I can review additions and changes anytime I wish.

• If you get a window that tells you something like "A filename cannot contain any of the following characters...." you have  put something in the name that Windows doesn't like, things like slashes, question marks things like that.  Just remove anything weird looking and replace it with   normal numbers and letters.  Then save it again.

Of course you can do the whole thing with  just your keyboard. Press and release "Alt".  Press and release "F", then press "S" you will see the same boxes we just discovered with our mouse.

That's it for now...... see you later!

Chris

For more hints and tips you can do with  your keyboard check out "KEYBOARD MAGIC" from the Newbie Club Academy.

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Looking for more great tips and tricks to get your computer to behave? Visit the Newbie Club for great links, free lessons, and more --- all in down to earth no nonsense language.