Office 2010: Paste Options button not displaying

I have a new computer and I’ve installed Office 2010 on it. I was setting up a template for a client over the Easter weekend when I noticed that the hovering Paste Options button in Word 2010 never displayed and all I could get on the Paste icon on the ribbon was ‘paste as unformatted text’. That’s not usually a big deal as I often want to ‘paste as text’, but not always.

I compared my Word 2010 settings on my new Windows 7 PC with my Word 2010 settings on my Vista laptop (which did have the Paste Options hover button); the settings were EXACTLY the same, so something else was at play here.

Off to my friend Google, and after a few fruitless hits, I found the solution… and it’s not what you’d expect! In fact, it’s so far removed from what you’d expect that I’m surprised the person who found the answer even twigged that a small setting in Program A might be affecting a small setting in Program B (Word 2010 in my case, but all the Office 2010 products too).

And what’s the solution? A Skype add-on to all browsers that makes a phone number clickable to make a Skype call! Who knew??

So here’s what I did to get my Paste Options button back:

1. Closed Word 2010.
2. Opened Skype, went to Tools > Advanced > Advanced Settings and cleared the check box for Use Skype to call callto: links on the web. (I’m not 100% sure that this did anything, but I figured I should turn it off anyway.)
3. Opened Firefox and went to the Add-ons Manager and disabled the Skype Click to Call add-in. Restarted Firefox when asked to do so.
4. Opened Internet Explorer, clicked the settings icon (cog in top right of screen in IE9), selected Manage add-ons, selected Skype Click to Call and then clicked Disable. I didn’t have to restart IE9.
5. Opened Word 2010 and tried pasting some text from another source. It worked! I had my Paste Options button back!

Please note: You have to disable this add-on in ALL browsers on your computer, including IE, even if you don’t use IE. I initially only disabled it on Firefox but I still couldn’t get the Paste Options button to display. I had to disable it on IE9 as well. Then it worked.

I found the solution to this issue here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-excel/solved-excel-2010-word-2010-powerpoint-2010-paste/f293995c-c52c-458a-86d6-da41e81d507f

I sincerely thank Martin who somehow figured out that a Skype browser add-on was affecting a setting in Office 2010. That was a moment of pure serendipitous genius.

Clever!

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Firefox: Organize bookmarks

In Firefox 5.x, the Organize Bookmarks option has gone — it’s been replaced with Show All Bookmarks.

To see the complete list of your bookmarks so that you can arrange them into folders, import/export them etc., go to Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks.

I’m not sure why they changed the name – Organize Bookmarks worked well for me. My first thought on seeing Show All Bookmarks was that everything I had bookmarked would open in new tabs!

Firefox: Get back your list of recent pages

It seems that in Firefox 4.x and later, Mozilla got rid of the little drop-down icon that was next to the Forward and Back buttons that showed you the path of web pages you viewed to get to the current page.This is NOT the same as your History.

This was a really handy and useful feature and one I used often. My husband used it often too, so when we upgraded his Firefox to version 5.x, he complained about its removal.

So, I went looking to see what had happened to it and whether I could get it back. Well, there are some Firefox add-ons that return it to your browser interface, but to be honest, the quickest and easiest way to see your path to the current page is one of these two methods:

• right-click on the Back button

OR

• hold down the primary mouse button as you click on the Back button.

It’s a slight change in behavior, but one that will show your path to the current page.

I still don’t know why they got rid of the icon.

Show the page path by right-clicking the Back button or holding down the mouse as you click it

Firefox 4: Practice what you preach

I downloaded Firefox 4 the other day. And I watched the video of the new features, as well as the interactive display. One of Firefox 4′s new security features is the ability to verify a site’s identity by clicking on its favicon.

Unfortunately, when I clicked on the favicon for Mozilla (the makers of Firefox), I got this:

It would be nice if they practiced what they preached.

(I checked several other popular websites too — Google, my bank, White Pages, WordPress, etc. — and all of them have this same message. So, how do web developers make sure their site is listed as legitimate? I looked in the Firefox options, but could see nothing there. Anyone know?)

Update: For more information about this website identification, see http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Site%20Identity%20Button. Seems it’s OK for there to be no ID information for many sites (and they will have a light gray tinge around the favicon), but that’s not how I initially read the summary information about this new website security feature — I had to go hunting to find it. That said, when I logged into my bank, I still got the gray shading around the favicon, not blue or green as described in that article.

How to use the Download Flash and Video add-on for Firefox

I wanted to download some quilting videos from YouTube so that I always had them available whenever I needed to remind myself how to do a particular technique. Searching on YouTube in the hope of finding something I viewed 3 months ago was getting painful — I was tired of trying to remember a video’s name or presenter, even if I knew in general what the content was about. It was time to find some software that would allow me to download a YouTube video and save it to my computer.

The problem was, when I did a Google search, there were many applications out there that profess to do just that. But what was a good one? Off to Twitter, where I asked my followers for a recommendation. Within minutes @mikestarrwriter got back to me recommending ‘Download Flash and Video’ add-on for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-flash-and-video/). I checked out the reviews, then decided to install it.

It works well, BUT there’s NO documentation. Nothing to tell you how it works and what to do when it doesn’t work (as happens occasionally). So here’s the ‘missing manual’ for the Download Flash and Video add-on for Firefox.

1. After you’ve installed the add-on and restarted Firefox, you’ll see a small blue down arrow icon in the bottom right of Firefox’s status bar.
2. Go to YouTube and find a video you want to download.
3. Start playing the video.
4. Watch the icons in the bottom right corner of the status bar:
   • Blue arrow icon: Normal state on any web page; nothing downloaded. If you continue to get this after some 30 seconds into the video, nothing is happening, so refresh the browser window.
   • Blue arrow icon with movie ‘clapperboard’ icon (typically appears 1 to 10 seconds after starting the video): File is ready to download. It’s only at this point that you can download the actual video.
   • Gray icon:  As far as I can tell, this is only seen when you refresh the browser window and the video is loading up again. It should change to the blue arrow with clapperboard icon a few seconds after refreshing.
5. Optional: As soon as you see the blue arrow icon with the clapperboard, pause the video if you don’t want to watch it now (it will still download/buffer in the background).
6. Click the blue arrow/clapperboard icon in the status bar to see the options (it doesn’t matter which one you click).
7. Select the video format (typically a *.flv file) from the drop-down list. Yes, there’s a typo in the list! (Typo fixed in the version suitable for Firefox 6.x.)
   
8. The video will now download to the folder where your Firefox downloads are saved (as set in the Firefox Tools > Options > General tab).
9. If you don’t have any application that will play an *.flv file, you’ll need to convert it to something else (such as an *.avi file).

[Link last checked September 2011]

Doing a synonym search in Google

Here’s a Google search tip:  To find a word and its synonyms, add a tilde (~) in front of the word.

For example, to find synonyms of inexpensive (e.g. cheap, budget, affordable, discount), type ~inexpensive then the search term/phrase — such as ~inexpensive hotels seattle.

Firefox: Save your bookmarks

My husband’s computer had to be reinstalled with Windows last week (don’t ask…). We had time to copy all his data files to an external backup drive, but as usual, there’s always something you forget to copy. In his case, we forgot to copy his Microsoft Word Templates folder — and his Firefox Bookmarks. We probably forgot other stuff too, but these are the ones we noticed immediately. (I’m using the royal ‘we’ here — as the resident geek, it was MY job to do all this copying and remembering…)

The Templates folder was easy to solve — the PC Guru guys had made an image of the hard drive, so they were able to copy it back from his old profile.

But as he hadn’t backed up his Firefox Bookmarks — ever — they seemed to be gone forever. However, the PC Guru guys performed a miracle and found them after a bit of searching under various user names.

BTW, Firefox does save your bookmarks in a JSON file hidden deep in your user profile (e.g. on Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<some weird name>\bookmarkbackups)

Of course, this little episode reminded me to save my extensive list of bookmarks to another location immediately. I’ve now set myself an Outlook reminder to back up our bookmarks once a month. I don’t think this is a scheduled task you can set via Windows, so we’ll have to do it manually. And we’ll be saving that file to an external, cloud backup, or networked drive, NOT our main PCs.

Here’s how to save your Firefox bookmarks:

1. From the Firefox menu, select Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks.
2. Click Import and Backup.
3. You have two choices — you can either select Backup (saves the file as a JSON file), or Export HTML (saves the file as an HTML file). See below for the differences.
   
4. Navigate to where you want to save the file, give it a meaningful file name (e.g. include the date you made the backup if you chose the Export HTML option).
5. Click Save.

What’s the difference: My understanding of the differences between a Backup (JSON) file and an exported HTML file is that if you need to restore your bookmarks later, the JSON file option will overwrite all current bookmarks on Restore. The HTML option will append (not overwrite) bookmarks not already in the existing list to the existing list on Import HTML. (See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Lost_bookmarks for details.)

Bottom line:

• Backup your bookmarks regularly — set yourself a reminder to do so.
• Make a copy of your backed up bookmarks to an external or network drive, or back them up to ‘cloud’ storage.

[Links last checked September 2010]

New Google image search

Google’s rolled out a new way to display image search results — and a lot of people don’t like it, especially as up to 1000 image thumbnails display per page now and all the old information like where the image was from, its dimensions and its file size are now only available by hovering over the image and seeing the details in a pop-up window.

You can reset your image results display back to the old view by scrolling to the bottom of the search results, then clicking Switch to basic version. However, as at the date of writing this post (25 July 2010), this setting only holds for the current session and doesn’t ‘stick’.

I can imagine an awful lot of people still on dial-up or slow links or limited download plans (and yes, that’s a LOT of the world, Google!) will NOT be happy with this change as the amount of data transferred to display 1000 images could well blow out their slow connections or download limits.

#fail Google. At least allow users to set the type of display they want in their search Preferences… and don’t assume that Google users throughout the world have high-speed, always-on, unlimited download access like many in the US do. We don’t.

(By the way, I don’t see the new search results display yet in Firefox or IE — but my husband has been getting them for a day or so. We’re on the same static IP address, so I have no idea why he sees them and I don’t as there’s nothing different in our settings.)

Welcome to 2010, Australian Tax Office!

I needed to see if I could change my business details online at the Australian Tax Office (ATO) — Australia’s version of the IRS. Here’s what I got:

Hello??? It’s 2010, ATO. IE 5 has been dead for a long time, and Netscape? When did anyone last speak of Netscape???

And I can ‘update my browser’ from Firefox 3.6.x to IE 5 or Netscape 6? I don’t think so…

It was all too hard so I emailed my accountant to ask her to do it. I won’t call them — the last time I called the ATO, I was on hold for 3 hours, and then the call got dropped.

ATO #fail!