The Computer Club Newsletter

January  2002

By Ron Uncapher

If you are one of those rare individuals who knows everything there is to know about your PC, then read no further. This article is not for you. I certainly do not know everything about PCs. Regardless, my friends and I will be providing the Village Connection with some news and PC information that we hope will make us all a little more computer literate.

First, many of you may or may not know that there is a forum in the village that is dedicated to educating its members and the community on many aspects of PC operation. The Tellico Village Computer Users Club (TVCUC) meets on the first Tuesday of every month at the Yacht Club. This is not a club of experts. It is an organization of self-help where members with a wide variety of skill levels rely on communication among themselves to help all learn and make their PCs more useful. Someone always knows a little that they can pass on and from there we build on that knowledge to grow our individual and collective expertise.

Often there is a member who has a little more than passing knowledge on a subject and is willing to share it with the group. That was the case this month, when Victor de Groote gave members a presentation on making panoramic photographic pictures out of individual snapshots. He took four successive photographs of the assemblage with his digital camera, uploaded the pictures into his laptop, then showed how an inexpensive program could stitch the photographs together to form one continuous panoramic view of the entire group. I believe many were amazed that something like this could be accomplished so easily. The name of the program was "Pana-Vue", but there are other programs that can also do the job. Victor also demonstrated a program called "Flip Album" that enables one to put together a collection of photographs in the form of an album, and then "burn" the album onto a CD ROM from which anyone can view it.

A regular feature of this article will be to provide tid-bits of PC information that may be helpful to you. There are many hidden shortcuts and enhancements in the Windows operating system that most users will never learn unless they are stumbled upon by accident. One of those is the "F11" key function within Windows Explorer. If you are having trouble viewing all the detail in an Explorer folder, press the F11 key at the top row of your keyboard. Your Explorer folder view will expand to fill practically the whole computer screen in what is called a kiosk view with only the tool bar visible at the top of the screen. The Title Bar at the top of the screen and the Menu Bare at the bottom will be hidden from view. The folder tree panel will also disappear if the mouse pointer is located on the right hand panel. To bring the folder tree back into view, slide the mouse pointer off of the left side of the screen. To bring the Task Bar into view, move the mouse pointer down past the bottom of the screen. The Task Bar will slide into view. Even the tool bar at the top of the screen can be eliminated from view by "right clicking" on the empty part of the bar. When the pop-up menu appears, "left click" on "Auto-Hide". Now you have a maximum view of your folder. Return to the normal Explorer view by again pressing the "F11" key. This function is available in Windows 98, ME. It is also available in Windows 95 if the Internet Explorer 4 upgrade is installed. Another bonus is that this feature also works with Internet Explorer in most versions and with the "SEARCH" panel in Windows ME. Try it. This and other keyboard shortcuts can be found within Windows Help and Internet Explorer Help. To find them, try typing KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS in a help index or search panel.

TVCUC has organized a number of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) that allow smaller groups of members to meet and discuss narrower PC issues in greater detail. I will have more on SIGs in a future article. For more immediate information on club activities and membership call up the TVCUC website at www.TVCUC.org  The next meeting is Feb. 5^th at 7:00 PM.

Until next time, Good luck and Happy Computing.