Read-Only Word Documents

From Wordtips:

Sometimes you'll want to circulate a file to other people, but you don't want them to change your words. There are several ways you can make your document read-only. The first, and simplest way, is to use the capabilities of your operating system to make the change. Simply create your document, and then (from outside of Word) change the properties of the document to indicate it is read-only.

The other way to accomplish this is from within Word itself, by following these steps:

Create your document as you normally would.

Choose Save As from the File menu. This displays the Save As dialog box.

Specify the location and name of the file as you want it saved.

Click on the Options button. Beginning with Word 97, the Save tab is displayed in its own Save dialog box. This is the same Save tab that is displayed if you choose Options from the Tools menu and then click on Save. (See Figure 1.) Word 95 displays the Save tab of the Options dialog box. (See Figure 2.)

At the bottom of the dialog box you can specify a password and read-only recommendation for the file.

Click on OK to close the Options dialog box. This again displays the Save As dialog box.

Click on Save to save your file.

The only problem with these approaches to protecting your document is that anyone can still load the file and then use the Save As option from the File menu to save their own copy of the document. The only sure way around this is to save the document in some other application format (such as a graphic image or in Adobe Acrobat) which precludes any use of the information except for reading.

The foregoing will work fine with all versions of Word. If you are using Word 97 or later, there is another option that may fit the bill. This involves saving your document as a Word form, which can be easily protected. To accomplish this, follow these steps:

Choose Protect Document from the Tools menu. This displays the Protect Document dialog box. (See Figure 3.)

Choose the Forms option.

Enter a password at the bottom of the dialog box.

Click on OK.

When prompted, enter your password again.

Save the file as normal.

Now nobody can change your document without knowing the password.

Google Map Your Ancestors

From Lifehacker:

MapYourAncestors.com will turn your family tree into a free Google Map if you email them a completed Excel spreadsheet. The site gives you an example of what the finished map would look like by showing the family tree of George Bush.
Map Your Ancestors

Film Speed Equivalency (ISO Ratings) for Digital Cameras

From Dummies.com

Pick up a box of film, and you should see an ISO number; film geared to the consumer market typically offers ratings of ISO 100, 200, or 400. This number tells you how sensitive the film is to light. The ISO number is also referred to as the film speed. The higher the number, the more sensitive the film, the less light you need to capture a decent image. The advantage of using a faster film is that you can use a faster shutter speed and shoot in dimmer lighting than you can with a low-speed film.

Most digital camera manufacturers also provide an ISO rating for their cameras. This number tells you the equivalent sensitivity of the chips on the image-sensor array. In other words, the value reflects the speed of film you'd be using if you were using a traditional camera rather than a digital camera. Typically, consumer-model digital cameras have an equivalency of ISO 100.

The practical lesson in all of this is to recognize that your digital camera needs plenty of light to produce a decent image. If you were shooting with ISO 100 film, you would need a wide-open aperture or a slow shutter speed to capture an image in low lighting -- assuming that you weren't aiming for the ghostly-shapes-in-a-dimly-lit-cave effect on purpose. The same is true of digital cameras.

A few new, higher-end consumer digital cameras enable you to choose from a few different ISO settings. Unfortunately, raising the ISO setting on most digital cameras doesn't give you the same advantages that you get when selecting faster film in a traditional camera. When you raise the ISO setting on your digital camera, the camera simply boosts the electronic signal that's produced when you snap a picture to increase the camera's reaction to light. Often, the extra signal power results in electronic "noise" that can create specks and other flaws in your image.

Tap vs. Bottled Water

August 1, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/opinion/01standage.html?ex=1280548800&en=1f70bb8df1726693&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

 

Bad to the Last Drop

By TOM STANDAGE

London

IT'S summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?

We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)

The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.

In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?

It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.

What of the idea that drinking bottled water allows you to avoid the chemicals that are sometimes added to tap water? Alas, some bottled waters contain the same chemicals anyway - and they are, in any case, unavoidable.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that showers and dishwashers liberate trace amounts of chemicals from municipal water supplies into the air. Squirting hot water through a nozzle, to produce a fine spray, increases the surface area of water in contact with the air, liberating dissolved substances in a process known as "stripping." So if you want to avoid those chemicals for some reason, drinking bottled water is not enough. You will also have to wear a gas mask in the shower, and when unloading the dishwasher.

Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.

Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option. For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.

Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.

I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.

If you don't believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.

Tom Standage, author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses," is the technology editor of The Economist.

Quickly Formatting Footers in Documents with Many Sections

Source: WordsTips

Summary: If you have a document that includes many, many sections, you may want to change each section so that its headers and footers are the same as the section before it. This tip explains how to do the conversion manually, as well as with a very quick little macro. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, and Word 2003.)

Jake Rashford has a document that is created automatically by a program other than Word. The document has many pages in it, but each page is created as a separate section. Jake is looking for a way to quickly format the document so that the headers and footers are the same, beginning with the second section of the document. (The first page, which is also its own section, contains a cover sheet.)

You can make the necessary changes manually by following these steps:

Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document.

Choose Header and Footer from the View menu so you can see the Header and Footer dialog box. The Header and Footer dialog box should display the header for the first section of your document.

Click the Show Next button. This displays the header for the second section of the document.

Make changes to the header so it looks as you want it to look.

Click the Show Next button. This displays the header for the next (third) section of the document.

Click Link to Previous. You'll see a dialog box asking if you want to delete this header and link to the previous section. Click Yes.

Repeat steps 5 through 6 until you work through all the headers in the document.

Close the Header and Footer dialog box.

This tip also works for changing footers in the document. The only caveat is that you must switch to display the footers either before or after step 3.