Ricky Says

Setting up a mail merge using Word and Excel is fairly easy and can save you a lot of money at the print shop by doing it yourself.

Kinko's charges a $45 setup fee per mail merge and they use a proprietary 33-per page label format that doesn't work with Microsoft Office's built-in label templates that only print 30 labels per page.

If you follow the steps in this article or video, you'll learn how to create a custom mail merge template that works with Kinko's proprietary 33 labels per page format. You also won't have to pay Kinko's $45 setup fee since you'll be handing them a completed mail merge file in Adobe PDF format that's ready for printing!

To get started you'll need to create an Excel spreadsheet containing addresses for each mailing address. You can use any column labels that you like, but make sure they're in the first row of your table. These labels will be used later when we create the mail merge in Word.

Open Word and select "Mailings" from the toolbar ribbon. Click "Start Mail Merge" and select "Labels" from the popup menu.

Choose the 30 per page Microsoft label template to use as a starting point and click "New Label" to create a new template.

For some reason the Snipping Tool in Windows Vista tends to frequently lock up, resulting in the familiar error message "The Snipping Tool is not working on your computer right now". In fact, it just happened to me so I thought I'd jot down the steps I took to fix the problem.

Microsoft's error messages are not always very helpful, and this is no exception. Restart your computer? Really?

It turns out you can quickly reset this handy screen capture utility without restarting your computer, just by killing the SnippingTool.exe process in your control panel.

Don't let that line of techno-speak scare you away either - it's actually super easy if you follow the steps below:

1. Open your Task Manager by giving your computer the 3-fingered salute (press Ctrl+Alt+Del keys at the same time). Select "Start Task Manager" from the list of options that are displayed.

2. Click the "Processes" tab in the popup dialog, and click on the SnippingTool.exe process.

3. Click the "End Process" button and confirm that you want to kill this service.

4. Start up the Snipping Tool again, which you can find in your Start -- All Programs -- Accessories menu.

A few clicks is all it takes to restart the Snipping Tool and get back to taking screen shots in Windows Vista.

Videos are one of the most powerful ways to communicate with viewers, and many times the best way to explain something on your computer is to show it in action.

You can make your videos incredibly effective by adding zoom, pan, and tilt features that focus viewer's attention to specific parts of the video.

I've even taken a single powerpoint slide covering the technical architecture of a complex software application, and used zoom and tilt techniques to keep viewers engaged and attentive for the duration of a 5 minute video of that single slide.

Here's how you can add zoom, pan, and tilt to your videos:

You'll need a copy of Camtasia Studio 6.0 or later, and they have a 30-day trial you can download that's fully-featured.

Open Camtasia and click the option to Record the Screen in the Welcome screen. Open your favorite software program and walk through a feature you'd like to demonstrate.

Save the video and then advance to the section in the video where you'd like to add a zoom or tilt effect. I find that any section that I'm verbally describing for more than 5 to 10 seconds makes a good candidate for a zoom and tilt effect.

Click "Zoom-n-Pan" from the Edit menu and shrink the green viewing rectangle to a smaller area of the preview screen. This will create a zoom and pan effect and you can preview it before saving your changes.

Question: I ran defrag on my Windows XP box to hopefully speed things up, but it still left quite a few files that are fragmented. What gives?

Answer: Defragging your hard drive should be like giving your car an oil change and dropping a can of octane booster into your gas tank. It should speed things up and make your system run smoother.

What gives is that the built-in Windows defrag program completely sucks. It's slow and doesn't do a very thorough job, as you've seen first hand.

The story gets worse with Vista, and the built-in defrag utility doesn't even show the graph anymore, so you can't even see how many files are still fragmented. I guess Microsoft decided it would be better to not even show people how ineffective the defragmentation program is!

You'll get much better results from a third party defrag program like Diskeeper, and better system performance too.

Diskeeper just released their 2009 version, and you can download a free 30-day trial to see what a fully defragmented hard drive really feels like. I ran it on my 160GB hard drive that's half full, and it took less than 30 minutes to defrag it - much faster than the hours it can take for Window's defrag utility to run.

I like that you can see a graph of the files on your system, so you can visualize the defragmentation of your hard drive. Here's a screen shot of my hard drive after running Diskeeper 2009, showing blue for files that have been defragmented and red for files that are still fragmented (you'll have to look hard for any red lines):

Wondering what file fragmentation means, and if it can affect your system's performance?

Ever notice how Windows Explorer opens up to your Documents folder on Windows Vista, or the My Documents folder on XP?

That's not usually where I want to start looking for files - I usually want Windows Explorer to open at the root of my C: drive.

If you have a specific folder that you'd like Windows Explorer to always open to by default, then here's an easy change to make that happen.

First, find the menu or shortcut that you typically use for opening Windows Explorer. For most people that's going to be on the Start -- All Programs -- Accessories -- Windows Explorer menu.

To make it easier to get to, you can copy that menu to your Windows taskbar by right-clicking the Windows explorer menu, selecting Copy, and then right-clicking on the taskbar next to the Start button and selecting Paste.

Once you find the Windows Explorer menu or shortcut, right-click it and select Properties

You'll be prompted with a Windows Explorer Properties dialog. In the Target field, enter the desired startup folder in double-quotes after explorer.exe. Be sure to leave a space between the folder location and explorer.exe, like this:

For Vista:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe "C:\"

For XP:

%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,"C:\"

Click OK, and the next time you select that menu or shortcut, Windows will open Explorer in that folder by default.