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In last month's Ides I talked about downloading Firefox 3 on Firefox 3 Download Day.  If you've done so, you might find the Field Guide to Firefox 3 useful. 

Here’s a list of the features covered; just click on each link to go right to that section of the Guide:

• Add-on manager
• Bookmarks
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
• Color profile support
• Download manager
• Font and text rendering
• Full page zoom
• History
• HTML Canvas
• Location bar UTF-8 support
• Malware protection
• Microformats API
• Offline web application support
• Password manager
• Performance improvements
• Phishing protection
• Plugins
• Site Identification button
• Smart Location Bar
• Tabs
• Themes
• Video and audio feeds
• Vista parental controls support
• Web application protocol handlers
• Conclusion

P.S.  Yep, Mozilla set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help, they reached 8,002,530 downloads on Firefox 3 Download Day!

When you receive an email message that has information about a meeting or a training session, you can easily add it to your Outlook Calendar by simply dragging & dropping it.  From the view of the folder where the message is (most likely your Inbox), click on the little envelope icon, and drag it to the Calendar icon.

Outlook will create a new appointment for you -- you'll need to enter the time and date information, but the note field of the appointment form will contain the text of the email, which is convenient if the message contains details about the appointment, such as the address and travel directions, or link & login information for an online meeting.

You'll probably want to change the subject line of the appointment, so it shows up as something like "Selection Committee Meeting", instead of "Doodle poll to set the date of our next meeting".

An easy way to put common symbols into a Microsoft Word document is to let its AutoCorrect feature do it for you.

Here are some handy examples:

Type (c) to create this symbol: ©

Type (r) to create this symbol: ®

Type (tm) to create this symbol: ™ 

Type -> to create this symbol: →

Type <- to create this symbol: ←

Note: If text isn't replaced with a symbol, you may need to turn on Word's AutoCorrect
feature.  You can do that by following these steps:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button (in the upper left-hand corner of the ribbon).
2. Click the "Word Options" button.
3. In the left-hand menu column, click "Proofing".
4. Under AutoCorrect options, click the "AutoCorrect Options" button, and then click the AutoCorrect tab.
5. Click the checkbox next to "Replace text as you type".
6. Click the "OK" buttons to exit out of the Options menu.

If you want to discontinue being reminded to clean off unused icons or shortcuts you've put on your Windows XP desktop, follow the easy steps at the How-To Geek's web site.

 

To make it easier for you to find tips in The Ides, I've begun tagging posts with keywords -- and you can use the blog's Tag Cloud to quickly go to tips about a topic.

You can also find the 10 most recent posts in the Recent Blog Posts block.

And as always, you can still find all the tips on the blog's 5 general subject areas (e-mail, internet, Windows, Office, and fun) by clicking on the tabs that are located above the Search box.

How often do you get to part of a team who's setting a Guinness World Record? Now's your chance!

On Tuesday June 17th Mozilla will release Firefox 3, and today you can pledge to download your copy on Firefox 3 Download Day 2008. Mozilla wants your help to set the record fo most software downloads in 24 hours. What a deal -- get the updated version of a great web browser, and be part of a world-wide community effort to set a Gunness World Record!

Pledge now at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord.

Update: Firefox 3 will be available at Noon CST on June 17th; download yours at getfirefox.com or http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/?p=downloadday.

New features in Firefox 3 include:

• One-click bookmarking
• Smarter address bar: just start typing in the Location Bar to search your bookmarks and history; it adapts and learns as you use it.
  
• Phishing and malware protection
• Pause and resume downloads, and search through your download history by file or web site name using the new Download Manager
• Firefox 3 is 2-3 times faster handling complex web apps like Gmail and Google Docs

And if you download your copy from Download Day Headquarters, you'll received a customized certificate of thanks.

If been using the pre-release beta version of Firefox 3, and can attest to how fast it handles Gmail -- it's great!

Source: Mozilla Developer Center http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2008/06/11/coming-tuesday-june-17th-firefox-3/

Last week I asked someone to send me files as email attachments, and the 4 Publisher files turned a small 3KB message into 12MB.

Since large email attachments inflate the size of Outlook .pst files and can cause problems (as well as generating email quota warnings), I knew I needed to get those email attachments out of my mailbox.

Luckily, there's an easy way to do this -- without deleting the original email message or losing the attachments. You can save attachments to your local drive, and then delete them from the email message.

Here's how:

1. Open the email message in Outlook.

Note: The key to making this work is to open the message, not just read it in the viewing pane.

2. Right-click on the email attachment, and choose "Save As". Choose the local drive & folder in which to store the files.

If there are two or more attachments, in the right-click menu choose "Select All" to save all of them at one time.

3. Right click again and select the "Remove" option this time.

4. After you've removed the attachments and close the email message, Outlook will pop up a dialog window saying, "The attachments of the message have been changed. Do you want to save changes to this message?"  Click the "yes" button to save the message sans attachments.

Voilà -- the large files are deleted from Outlook, but your email message stays intact!

 

You can easily alphabetize the text of a one-level bulleted or numbered list in MS Word 2007.

Here's how to do it:

1. Select the items in a bulleted or numbered list.
2. On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the AZ button to choose Sort.
3. In the "Sort Text" dialog box under "Sort by" click Paragraphs, and for "Type" click text, and then click either Ascending (A to Z) or Descending (Z to A).

 

Watch the 5 winners of the 2008 InfoTubey Awards at www.infotubey.com.

And don't forget to tell your patrons they can create an original video that depicts the AskAway chat service to enter the "I Love AskAway" YouTube video contest; details & entry form are at http://askaway.pbwiki.com/YouTube+Contest+Entry+Page.

Here's my favorite: "Now Your Library is Open Late Night, Too!"

When you want to keep track of a project -- like who you communicated with, and what you talked about & decided -- but not all of your transactions on the project are email messages, you can use Outlook's Journal funtion to collect the info in one place. The Journal is an often-overlook feature of Outlook. It can create a timeline of transactions (phone calls, conversations, meetings, etc.) that can be linked to one of your contacts.

For details on how this might work for you, read more at this Productivity Portfolio 5-minute Tip.

[As mentioned in LifeHacker, via Jeff Gilderson-Duwe]