GLEN COVE COMPUTING NEWS

Welcome to the November 1996 Issue of Glen Cove Computing News. Due to my vacation in Australia this issue will not have a feature article, the Internet Site of the Month, or the Internet Technology of the Month. Those features will return next month. In lieu of these features I have created the Adventures in Oz site which features some fantastic pictures of Sydney, the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Ocean Road, and other sights in Australia. In this issue of Glen Cove Computing News you'll also find:

• GCC Tech Tips
• Cartoon of the Month

• Documents are usually associated with a single application. Normally, when you double-click on a document type, the system tells Windows to open a specific application, then open the document in that application. Expand your options by double-clicking on My Computer. Select View/Options/File Types. Choose the document type you'd like to open in other apps in the Registered File Types list. Click on Edit/New. Type something like "Open in " in the Action field. Click on the Browse button to find the application. Click OK. Now, whenever you right-click on that document type, you'll see the option you typed in.

• If you'd like to take a sneak peek at your messages before you open them (or to decide whether you really need to read them), just select Columns from the View menu, choose Item Text from the list on the left and click on the Add button and then on the OK button. (You can try various alternatives in the Columns dialog box for column width and placement.) This will give you as much of the first line of the message as can fit in the space allocated.

• The Win95 Find utility sports some unique--and undocumented--wild-card capabilities that you can use in the Find dialog's Named box. For example, putting a question mark before a character or string finds the character or string anywhere in the filename (except at the beginning). A question mark after the character or string does the same thing, as long as the character or string is not at the end of the filename. Also, if you type in characters without an accompanying asterisk, question mark or period, Find will search for folders and files that contain those characters in the order you typed them in.

• Batch files in Win95 leave a telltale DOS residue--the open MS-DOS Prompt window. To close it, create a shortcut to the batch file, right-click on the shortcut to bring up the Properties dialog, select the Program tab and click on the Close on Exit item at the bottom.

• DOS veterans know that typing two periods after the Change Directory command (CD ..) brings you to the parent directory of the current directory. The Win95 MS-DOS prompt improves on this by the use of three periods and four periods to bring you to the parent directories once and twice removed, respectively.

Cartoon of the Month

Thanks to Gabe Martin for placing his comic strip in the public domain. See more of Gabe's work at

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