Chapter 6: Running the Built-In Desktop Applications

In This Chapter

Writing with Notepad and WordPad for free

Mapping characters

Calculating and painting

Creating sticky notes

The tiled “Windows 8” Metro apps are coming, but it isn’t yet clear if any of them can top what you already have for free on the desktop — or what you can get for free on the Internet.

In this chapter, I introduce you to a handful of useful programs that you’ve already paid for. They aren’t the greatest, but they’re more than adequate in many situations — and when better, free alternatives exist, I tell you about them, too.

Even if they do come from a Microsoft competitor.

Keep your eyes open for new Windows Store, Metro tiled applications that can match some of the functions in these free built-in Windows programs. As time goes by, the Metro apps will get better — although it’s going to be a little difficult to beat the price on these guys.

Getting Free Word Processing

If you commonly work with complicated documents, I hate to tell you, but you don’t have much choice besides dishing out the money to buy Microsoft Office. If you edit other people’s Word documents, you need Word, too.

Sorry.

But if you don’t need the absolutely best (and most temperamental and confusing) word processor — if fairly straightforward formatting is good enough — you have a host of choices, including

Notepad: For just plain text, use Notepad or its beefed-up (free) brother, Notepad++. I talk about Notepad in this chapter and Notepad++ in Book X, Chapter 5.

WordPad: If you need just a little bit of formatting, use WordPad. I talk about WordPad in this chapter.

LibreOffice: If you need moderate-to-heavy duty editing and formatting, check out LibreOffice — formerly known as OpenOffice at www.libreoffice.org/download. Some Word documents don't survive the trip to LibreOffice Writer and back: LibreOffice can lop off massive amounts of formatting sometimes. But for basic documents (and spreadsheets, presentations, and a draw program), LibreOffice works great. And it's free. 100-percent free. All the time.

Google Apps, er, Google Docs: If you're connected to the Internet all the time, look at Google Apps, also known as Google Docs, www.docs.google.com. Google Docs/Google Apps (the distinction is largely semantic) delivers a word processor over the Internet, so you can use it where you can connect online and store your documents online, too. Google Docs won't replace Word for fancy documents or editing existing Word documents, but Google's Write app works well in any browser on any platform. Yes, that includes the Mac and iPad. An offline option gives you rudimentary document viewing capabilities even when you aren't connected to the Internet. Docs includes a word processing, spreadsheet and presentation program. I talk about getting started with Google Docs and its over-arching brother Google Drive in Book X, Chapter 3.

I’m gradually migrating over to Google Apps for my day-to-day work and to iWorks when I’m plunking on an iPad. iWorks isn’t just an iPad product — you can use it through a web browser or on a phone. Unfortunately, I still need to use Word quite a bit because I need to produce complicated documents (like this book!) that will be used by other people. I also need to use Excel from time to time for some fairly complex investment spreadsheets.

I’ve been swearing at Office for more than a decade — my first four books were about it. But even I would admit that it’s overkill for a lot of people in a lot of situations. The newer, smaller writing apps — Pages on the iPad or Documents from Google, for example — don’t have the depth of Word (not by a long shot!), but they’re phenomenally easy to use and much less intimidating.

Microsoft offers a free online version of Word as part of its Office Web Apps package. I hesitate to call it a “version of Word” because it doesn’t really have even a small fraction of Word features, but it is free. Its one saving grace is that it doesn’t seem to mangle existing Word documents as badly as Google Docs. Docs is notorious for opening an Office doc and turning it into a wobbling mass of undifferentiated jelly.

If you're interested in either Google Docs or Office Web Apps, consider investing in the paid version of Google Apps or Microsoft Office 365. Both offer a lot of additional features, and the price isn't bad at all — Google charges $5 or so per person, per month. And Microsoft charges $10. You can find a detailed analysis of the first versions of both at www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/office-365-vs-google-apps-the-infoworld-review-447.

Running Notepad

Reaching back into the primordial WinOoze, Notepad was conceived, designed, and developed by programmers, for programmers — and it shows. Although Notepad has been vastly improved over the years, many of the old limitations pertain. Still, if you want a fast, no-nonsense text editor (certainly nobody would have the temerity to call Notepad a word processor), Notepad’s a decent choice.

Notepad understands only plain, simple, unformatted text — basically the stuff you see on your keyboard. It wouldn’t understand formatting, such as bold, or an embedded picture if you shook it by the shoulders, and heaven help ya if you want it to come up with links to web pages.

On the other hand, Notepad’s shortcomings are, in many ways, its saving graces. You can trust Notepad to show you exactly what’s in a file — characters are characters, old chap, and there’s none of this froufrou formatting stuff to mess up things. Notepad saves only plain, simple, unformatted text; if you need a plain, simple, unformatted text document, Notepad’s your tool of choice. To top it off, Notepad is fast and reliable. Of all the Windows programs I ever met, Notepad is the only one I can think of that has never crashed on me.

The following tidbits of advice are all you’ll likely ever need to successfully get in and around Notepad:

To start Notepad, flip over to the Start screen, type Notepad, and choose Notepad. You can also double-click any text (.txt) file in File Explorer. You see something like the file shown in Figure 6-1.

Notepad can handle files up to about 48MB in size. (That’s not quite the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it’s close.) If you try to open a file that’s larger, a dialog box suggests that you open the file with a different editor.

You can change the font, sorta. When you first start Notepad, it displays a file’s contents in the 10-point Lucida Console font. That font was chosen by Notepad’s designers because it’s relatively easy to see on most computer monitors.

Figure 6-1: Notepad rocks in a geriatric sort of way.

Just because the text you see in Notepad is in a specific font, don’t assume for a moment that the characters in the file itself are formatted. They aren’t. The font you see on the screen is just the one Notepad uses to show the data. The stuff inside the file is plain-Jane, unformatted everyday text.

To change the font that’s displayed onscreen, choose Format⇒Font and pick from the offered list. You don’t need to select any text before you choose the font because the font you choose is applied to all text onscreen, and it doesn’t affect the contents of the file. The default Notepad font is monospaced — all the characters are the same width. If you change the font, text files that are designed for a fixed-width world can look very odd.

You can wrap text, too. Usually text extends way off the right side of the screen. That’s intentional. Notepad, ever true to the file it’s attached to, skips to a new line only when it encounters a line break — usually that means a carriage return (or when someone presses Enter), which typically occurs at the end of every paragraph.

Notepad allows you to wrap text onscreen, if you insist, so that you don’t have to scroll all the way to the right to read every single paragraph. To have Notepad automatically break lines so that they appear onscreen, choose Format⇒Word Wrap.

Notepad has one little geeky timestamp trick that you may find amusing — and possibly worthwhile. If you type .LOG as the first line in a file, Notepad sticks a time and date stamp at the end of the file each time it’s opened.

Many, many alternatives to Notepad exist: Programmers need text editors, and many of them take up the mantle to build their own. Over the years, I’ve used a lot of them. Right now, I use Notepad++ — and, yes, I do type text quite a bit. Native HTML. But that’s another story.

Check out Notepad++ at www.notepad-plus-plus.org/. It's free and works very well.

Writing with WordPad

If you really want and need formatting — and you’re too cheap to buy Microsoft Word or too lazy to download LibreOffice, or you don’t trust working online — Windows WordPad will do. If you’ve been locked out of Word by the nefarious Microsoft Office (De)Activation Wizard, you’ll no doubt rely on WordPad to keep limping along until Microsoft can reactivate you.

If you find yourself reading these words because Office has slipped into Reduced Functionality mode (gawd, I love that phrase!), take heart but be forewarned: If you aren’t careful, you can clobber your Word files by saving them with WordPad.

WordPad plays nice (at least, reasonably so), with DOCX format documents — the kind that are generated automatically in Word version 2007 and later. But if you have to edit a Word DOC or DOCX file with WordPad, whether it’s from Word 97, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007, or 2010, follow these steps:

1. Make a copy of the Word document and open the copy in WordPad.

Do not edit original Word doc files with WordPad. You’ll break them as soon as you save them. Do not open Word docs in WordPad, thinking that you’ll use the Save As command and save with a different name. You’ll forget.

2. When you get Word back, open the original document, choose Tools⇒Compare and Merge Documents (in Word 2007 and later, on the Review Ribbon, choose Compare⇒Combine), pick the WordPad version of the document and click the Merge button.

The resulting merged document probably looks like a mess, but it’s a start.

3. Use the Revisions toolbar (which is available in Word 2003 and earlier) or the Review tab (in Word 2007 and later) to march through your original document and apply the changes you made with WordPad.

This is the only reliable way to ensure that WordPad doesn’t accidentally swallow any of your formatting.

WordPad works much the same as any other word processor, only less so. Its feature set reflects its price: You can’t expect much from a free word processor — at least not from Microsoft. That said, WordPad isn’t encumbered with many of the confusing doodads that make Word so difficult for the first-time e-typist, and it may be a decent way to start figuring out how simple word processors work.

To get WordPad going, go to the Start screen, type wordpad and choose WordPad (see Figure 6-2).

Figure 6-2: WordPad includes rudimentary formatting capabilities and the ability to embed images for free.

Some people like the Ribbon interface across the top of the WordPad window. I find it familiar (like Word 2007) but annoying (like, uh, Word 2007).

WordPad lets you save documents in any of the following formats:

Rich Text Format (RTF) is an ancient, circa-1987 format developed by Microsoft and the legendary Charles Simonyi (yes, the space tourist) to make it easier to preserve some formatting when you change word processors. RTF documents can have some simple formatting but nothing nearly as complex as Word 97, for example. Many word processing programs from many manufacturers can read and write RTF files, so RTF is a good choice if you need to create a file that can be moved to a lot of places.

OOXML Text Document (DOCX) is the new Microsoft document standard file format, introduced in Word 2007. If you’re going to use the document in Word, this is the format to choose.

Note that WordPad can read and write DOCX files. Unfortunately, WordPad takes some, uh, liberties with the finer formatting features in Word: If you open a Word-generated DOCX file in WordPad, don’t expect to see all the formatting. If you subsequently save that DOCX file from WordPad, expect it to clobber much of the original Word formatting.

ODF Text Document (ODT), the OpenDocument format, is the native format for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

Text Document (TXT) strips out all pictures and formatting and saves the document in a Notepad-style, regular old text format. The two alternatives — MS-DOS format and Unicode — control the way WordPad handles non-Roman characters in the document.

If you’re just starting out with word processing, keep these facts in mind:

To format text, select the text you want to format; then choose the formatting you want from the Font part of the Home Ribbon. For example, to change the font, click the down arrow next to the font name (it’s Calibri in Figure 6-2) and choose the font you like.

To format a paragraph, simply click once inside the paragraph and choose the formatting from the Paragraph group in the Ribbon.

General page layout is controlled by settings in the Page Setup dialog box. General page layout includes things like margins and whether the page is printed vertically or horizontally, for example. To open the dialog box, choose File⇒Page Setup.

Tabs are complicated. Every paragraph starts with tab stops set every half inch. You set additional tab stops by clicking in the middle of the ruler. (You can also set them by clicking the tiny side arrow to the right of the word Paragraph and then clicking the Tabs button.) The tab stops that you set up work only in individual paragraphs: Select one paragraph and set a tab stop, and it works only in the selected paragraph; select three paragraphs and set the stop, and it works in all three.

WordPad treats tabs like any other character: A tab can be copied, moved, and deleted, sometimes with unexpected results. Keep your eyes peeled when using tabs and tab stops. If something goes wrong, click the Undo icon (to the right of the diskette-like Save icon) or press Ctrl+Z immediately and try again.

WordPad has a few features worthy of the term feature: bullets and numbered lists; paragraph justification; line spacing; super and subscript; and indent. WordPad lacks many of the features that you may have come to expect from other word processors: You can’t even insert a page break, much less a table. If you spend any time at all writing anything but the most straightforward documents, you’ll outgrow WordPad quickly.

May be time to start typing with your iPad — or log on to Google Apps (Book X, Chapter 3) to take Write for a spin.

Taming the Character Map

Windows includes the Character Map utility, which may prove a lifesaver if you need to find characters that go beyond the standard keyboard. Using the Character Map, you can ferret odd characters out of any font, copy them, and then paste them into whatever word processor you may be using (including WordPad).

Windows ships with many fonts — collections of characters — and several of those fonts include many interesting characters that you may want to use. To open the Character Map, on the Start screen, type cha and choose Character Map. You see the screen shown in Figure 6-3.

Figure 6-3: Need a character from a different language? Use the desktop Character Map. Klingon, anyone?

You can use many characters as pictures — arrows, check marks, boxes, and so on — in the various Wingdings and Webding fonts. Copy them into your documents and increase the font size as you like.

Calculating — Free

Windows includes a capable calculator. Actually, Windows contains four capable calculators with several options in each one. Before you run out and spend 20 bucks on a scientific calculator, check out the two you already own!

To run the old-fashioned desktop Calculator, go to the Start screen, type calc, and choose Calculator. You probably see the standard Calculator or one of its gussied-up forms, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Figure 6-4: The standard Calculator, showing its Unit Conversion option.

If you get the wrong version of Calculator — the Metro full-screen version — Windows will flip over and serve up a full-screen Calculator. I can’t think of anything more useless than a full-screen Calculator.

To use the Calculator, just type whatever you like on your keyboard or tap the keys, and then press Enter when you want to carry out the calculation. For example, to calculate 123 times 456, you type or tap 123 * 456 and then press Enter.

The Calculator comes in four modes: Standard, Scientific (which adds sin and tan, and x to the y, and the like), Programmer (hex, octal, Mod, Xor), and Statistics (averages and summations). You can also choose three options, which appear as a separate slide-out Calculator to the right of the “real” Calculator. The Unit Conversion option appears in Figure 6-4. Date Calculation makes you choose dates from built-in calendars. The Templates option gives you a quick way to calculate gas mileage, lease payments, and simple mortgage amortization.

Personally, I use Google for all the options. You can type 32 C in F in Google and get the answer back immediately. (Google can calculate 1.2 euro per liter in dollars per gallon, in one step — way beyond Windows Calculator.) Do a Google search for mileage, lease payment, or amortization and you can find hundreds of sites with far more capable calculators.

A few Calculator tricks:

Nope, an X on the keyboard doesn’t translate into the times sign. I don’t know why, but computer people have had a hang-up about this for decades. If you want to say “times,” you have to tap the asterisk on the Calculator, or press the asterisk key (*) or Shift+8.

You can use the number pad, if your keyboard has one, but to make it work, you have to get Num Lock going. Try typing a few numbers on your number pad. If the Calculator sits there and doesn’t realize that you’re trying to type into it, press the Num Lock key. The Calculator should take the hint.

Painting

The Windows Paint program has taken a lot of hard knocks for a lot of years, but it can actually do a few things that you may need. It's a just-barely-good-enough application for manipulating existing pictures, and it helps you convert among the various picture file formats (JPEG or GIF, for example). But it's certainly no competition for a real drawing tool like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, or even a free graphics editor like IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) or www.paint.net (see Book X, Chapter 5). And, if you want to correct red-eye or adjust for a bad exposure, Windows Live Photo Gallery or Picasa (or iPhoto on the iPad) has the tools that you need (see Book VI, Chapter 5).

That said, you can have a lot of fun with Windows Paint. To bring it to life, bring up the Start screen, type paint, and choose Paint. You see a screen like the one shown in Figure 6-5.

Figure 6-5: Paint offers a handful of useful features.

Opening, saving, and closing pictures in Paint is a snap; it works just like any other Windows program, once you figure out that you have to tap or click the File tab.

Scanning pictures into Paint goes like a breeze: Choose File⇒From Scanner or Camera. To draw one of the prebuilt shapes, just tap or click the shape, and then tap/click and drag on the drawing paper to adjust the size. Crop, resize, or rotate by choosing the corresponding icon in the Image group of the Ribbon. Easy.

Where you’re bound to get in the most trouble is in free-form drawing, which can be mighty inscrutable until you understand the following points:

You select a line color (used by all the painting tools as their primary color) by tapping or clicking the Color 1 icon and then choosing the color in the Colors group on the Ribbon.

You select a fill color (used to fill the inside of the solid shapes, such as the rectangle and oval) by tapping or clicking the Color 2 icon and then choosing a color in the Colors group on the Ribbon.

Many painting tools let you choose the thickness of the lines they use — in the case of the spray can, you can choose the heaviness of the spray — in the Size drop-down list on the Ribbon.

General rules for editing are a lot like what you see in the rest of Windows — select, copy, paste, delete, and so on. The only odd editing procedure I’ve found is for the Free-form Selection tool, which hides behind the Select icon on the Image group on the Ribbon. If you tap or click this tool and draw an area on the picture, Paint responds by selecting the smallest rectangle that encloses the entire line you drew. It’s . . . different.

Sticking Sticky Notes

Do you really like little yellow sticky notes on your screen? Really? I guess the electronic ones are better than the meatspace version — at least they won’t get your screen gummy.

Anyway, if you really want one, here’s how to make a yellow sticky note to yourself:

1. On the Start screen, type stick and choose Sticky Notes.

2. Start typing.

Really. That’s all there is to it.

Your new sticky note appears, as shown in Figure 6-6.

Figure 6-6: Sticky notes are cool, but the margin is too small for the proof.

After you have a sticky note, you can create a new one by tapping or clicking the + sign in the upper-left corner.

You can change the color to something other than that eyestrain-inducing cadmium yellow by right-clicking the note (or tap and hold) and choosing a new color.

Sticky notes live on your desktop. You can drag and move them like any other denizen of the desktop. They’re easy to resize. You can alternately show or hide all sticky notes on your desktop by tapping or clicking the Sticky Notes icon on the toolbar.

Hate the sticky note font? I don’t blame you. If you open any program that’ll format text — Word, or even WordPad, for example — type the text you want, format it the way you like it, then copy and paste the text into a sticky note, and the formatting stays. That’s how I created Fermat’s Last Theorem in Figure 6-6.

And you thought sticky notes didn’t have any hidden secrets . . .