The Computer Club Newsletter

May 2003

By Ron Uncapher

At the May meeting Pat Bolz presented a great program on how to put together an audiovisual slide show. Pat was both entertaining and informative.

The next general meeting will be Tuesday, June 3, 2003. The featured presentation will be "Transferring Images to Your Computer". The "How To" of importing images from a digital camera, digital "film" or from a 35mm film scanner will be demonstrated. Options for hardware purchases will be summarized.

The meeting will again be conducted in two parts. The first portion, from 6:30 PM until 7:20 PM, will be dedicated to answering questions from the audience. There will be no formal presentation during this period. Bring your questions and topics for discussion.

After a break, the formal part of the meeting will commence at 7:30 PM. There will be a brief business meeting to elect TVCUC officers for the next club year, July 2003 through June 2004. The board will present a slate of officers but nominations from the floor will be in order. The featured presentation will follow.

How often have you been surfing the web and come across an article, recipe, or some such text that you want to save and/or print? The problem, quite often, is that there is a lot of baggage that goes along with the saved text, or you have to print gobs of unwanted graphics or advertisements along with the text. There is an easier way.

First, after you have identified the portion of the web page that you want to print or save, and have determined that there is not a link on the page that says "printer version", go to START-PROGRAMS and open your word processor, for example, MS WORD or MS WORKS WORD PROCESSOR. Be aware that WRITE or WORDPAD will handle most text formatting, but those simple applications may not be able to handle the more complex formatting that comes along with graphics, tables or other complex web pages.

Next, back on the web page, highlight the part of the page that you want to save or print. Highlight by placing the mouse arrow at the beginning of the desired text, left-click and hold, and then drag the mouse pointer down and right to the end of the text. At that point release the mouse button. The selected text will appear in reverse color, that is the background of the text will be black (or some other color, frequently blue) and the printing will be white. You may have to retry a couple of times to highlight exactly what you want. To retry, place the mouse pointer over an area of white space on the page, and left-click. Then repeat the highlight process.

After you have highlighted the desired portion of the page, with the mouse pointer over the highlighted text, momentarily press the right mouse button. On the pop-up menu, left-click on COPY. Now go to the TASK BAR at the bottom of you monitor screen and left-click your word processor button. Left-click on the blank page, then either left-click on the PASTE icon on the TOOL BAR, or right click to get the pop-up menu and left-click on PASTE. Repeat the process until you have copied the all the parts of the web page that you want to save.

Finally, edit the copy until it looks exactly as you want to print. That is, delete parts you find you don’t need, change the font, convert tables to text, or whatever it takes. You may or may not want to include or exclude some of the graphics. For instance, you might want to keep a photo from the page. Highlight the graphic along with the text, it will all copy. This process will also work with email. Either select the text you want to save, or copy the whole message, and edit out the address information from your word processor.

Now you can save the copy, and/or print it just as you would print any document from your word processor. There may be instances where the copy process does not work, probably due to how the web page is coded, but the great percentage of the time, it will work as described. If you have any questions on this or any other process, bring them to the next Computer Club meeting.

Don’t forget to check out the Website for new material; www.TVCUC.org

Finally, have you updated your anti virus program this week?