Remove “Metadata” From Your Files Before Sharing Them
Whenever you create, open, or save a file or document, that file will store information — known as metadata — that you had no intention of including or disclosing to others. Taking a conscientious “extra step” can prevent embarrassment, and also make you a bit more secure. Here’s the “how to”.
Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like
You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.
[note: “Metadata is not necessarily “bad”. Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.]
Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums. (If your camera/smartphone has “geotagging”, your location is pinpointed.)
Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.
But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.
This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 16 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.
Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.
2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.
4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.
Today’s yippee yahoo: 450,000 user passwords leaked in Yahoo breach
“A hacker group claims responsibility for attack on a Yahoo service, exposing more than 450,000 plain text login credentials.” Read more..
If anyone should know better than that, it should be IT Pros, working at a place like Yahoo..? Ya’ think?
One more reason not to Yahoo!
Today’s free link: Amazon’s Game Downloads area lets you try every title – including new releases – before you buy. There are games for all ages and interests.
Today’s free download: Photographers: I believe this small free utility – BatchPurifier Lite– will allow you direct control over exactly which EXIF (metadata) info you want to remove from your image files. (I have not used this myself, but, there you go.)
Germane to nothing at all: in my world/our local slang, a “yahoo” is a happy-go-lucky idjit (aka a “fool”.)
Today’s quote: “All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Copyright 2007-2012 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
All we really have, in the end, are our stories.
Make yours great ones. Ones to be proud of.
Corel’s WordPerfect (Updated)*
I have mentioned to my readers before that I have been using Windows computers since the days when we looked forward to the release of Windows 95 (think “Jurassic period”).
I was reminiscing with a fellow tech enthusiast, who has been using computers since the very beginning of the PC, and who survived the early days of DOS (think “Triassic period”), and the name WordPerfect came up.
Wow. I haven’t heard that name in… a really long time.
Folks, I know this may be hard to believe, but there was a time before Microsoft Word and MS Office. Back then you composed your documents with WordStar, or more likely, the (then) premier app — WordPerfect.
WordPerfect could do it all. If you had WP, you could actually do fantastic things like use italics and bold and (this was super neat) you could see a preview of what your document would actually print out like.
Before WordPerfect, you kind of had to guesstimate, as your (monochrome) screen used a generic font. (At least, that’s how I remember it…)
But eventually, Microsoft bundled its upstart new word processor – called simply “Word” – with Windows, and so new machines came with Word already — spelling doom for WordPerfect. Us techy-types then spent lots of time training people on Word and converting old WordPerfect documents into the Word format.
Sigh. Those were the ‘good old days’…
Anyway.. after our conversation, I decided to look up WordPerfect on Wikipedia to see what year it went extinct, and I was guessing it would be somewhere about 1992… I confess I was stunned by what I learned -WordPerfect is not dead.
What?!
Yes, Corel’s office suite – featuring WordPerfect – is not only still around, but I read it has a loyal following. It’s current version is called WordPerfect Office X5, and it comes in a “Home and Student” ($100), “Standard” ($180), and “Professional” ($280) versions. I looked at their website and I must say I’m intrigued.
Surely it must have something “going on” for it to still be in the game, and I think it does, so I’m going to download the trial and play with it some. I’m curious about its PDF features and Open document formats…
[update: I never did get time to do this, but I have since come across several more WP loyalists. (I found a good deal on Office 2010, and went with that..)]
Today’s free link(s): WordPerfect Universe calls itself the “first stop for WordPerfect Office users”, and I must say you can find pretty much anything WP-related here. There’s also OfficeCommunity.com – The official WordPerfect Office Community.
Today’s free download: To fit with my theme today, I’m going to break my rule about no “trialware” in this section. If you would like to see what today’s WordPerfect can do, there’s a 30 day trial that is full-featured (everything’s enabled) here, WordPerfect Office X5
Orig post: 5/28/09
Today’s quote: “To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.” ~ Confucius
Copyright 2007-2011 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
How To Add Images And Color In Your Holiday Letters
Word Tricks Makes Letters Merrier
It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2010 pass-by rather quickly?) Each year at this time, I post this article which demonstrates some tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting.
Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, “professional” documents. I’ll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail programs.
Today I’m going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Times New Roman at 12 “points” in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter’s “opener”. As it is a header, I have “centered” the text. 
As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and “best wishes” I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, “Memo from Giganti Corp.” Yawn! So first thing I’m going to do is ‘tweak’ the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone. 
I “highlighted” Season’s Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font– Lucida Handwriting (explore Words various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you’ll agree, this is much more “friendly” than the default’s look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let’s use some color and improve things some more. 
I have again “highlighted” season’s greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Formatting toolbar (If this is not showing, click here to read how to customize your toolbars). I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season’s greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to “select” every other letter. 
I didn’t really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on “More Colors”…. 
… and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red– as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps. 
Much more jolly! But, something’s missing… 
Let’s add one more thing– a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and…
Voila!I could ‘go crazy’, and get carried away with adding things here… but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration — using only two of Word’s functions — that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it’s easy to personalize and ’spice up’ your documents.
Copyright 2007-2010 © “Tech Paul” (Paul Eckstrom). All Rights Reserved.
>> Folks, don’t miss an article! To get Tech – for Everyone articles delivered to your e-mail Inbox, click here, or to subscribe in your RSS reader, click here. <<
| Share this post : |  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Add Festivity to Your Holiday Letters
Word Trick Makes Letters Merrier
It is the Holiday time of year. (Is it just me, or did 2009 pass-by rather quickly?) Today I’m going to demonstrate some tricks to make your Season’s Greetings letters more joyous, and your documents more visually interesting.
Tip of the day: Add some festivity to your documents with fonts and color. MS Word has a lot of features and options built into it that allows for some very creative elements to be added to your correspondence, and is not at all limited to cold, “professional” documents. I’ll use Word for this demo, but you can do this in most text editors, and e-mail programs.
Today I’m going to use a hypothetical holiday greeting letter to show how to add some fun. By default, Word sets the font to Times New Roman at 12 “points” in height. I have typed in my text, to get things started, and will demonstrate using this letter’s “opener”. As it is a header, I have “centered” the text.
As you can see, this font and text does not quite convey the joy and cheer and “best wishes” I am hoping to express. In fact, this may as well say, “Memo from Giganti Corp.” Yawn! So first thing I’m going to do is ‘tweak’ the font style, and make some word bigger (louder), to express a less formal tone.
I “highlighted” Season’s Greetings, and used the Font drop-down arrow and selected a cursive font– Lucida Handwriting (explore Words various fonts, and find the one you like best). I set the point size to 36. I repeated the process on the second sentence, but set the type smaller.. only 18. I think you’ll agree, this is much more “friendly” than the default’s look. But this is just not Festive enough! Let’s use some color and improve things some more.
I have again “highlighted” season’s greetings to select this font, and then clicked the Font Color button on the Formatting toolbar (If this is not showing, click here to read how to customize your toolbars). I then clicked on the little red box in the color-picker. Now season’s greetings is red. I want to alternate letters in green, so I hold down the Ctrl key and use my mouse to “select” every other letter. I didn’t really like the greens available on the color-picker, so I clicked on “More Colors”….
… and selected a green that contrasted nicely with the red– as the box in the lower right corner shows. This is the result of these steps.
Much more jolly! But, something’s missing…
Let’s add one more thing– a picture of a candy cane. I went on the Internet and found a Royalty-free graphic (though a piece of Clip Art would do just as nicely) and…
Voila!I could ‘go crazy’, and get carried away with adding things here… but I hope you will be able to see by this little demonstration — using only two of Word’s functions — that you are limited only by your own creativity, and that it’s easy to personalize and ’spice up’ your documents.
Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved.
post to jaanix
| Share this post : |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
How To Remove Metadata From Your Files
Hidden Attributes and Tags Might Reveal More Than You Would Like
You may not be aware that the documents you generate, and the photos you edit on your computer are “stamped” (if you will) with little bits and pieces of information that the computer thinks are useful — called “metadata“. This metadata is not out in plain site for you to notice, but it’s there. Fortunately, it is not difficult to remove.
Metadata is essentially there to help the computers do their jobs better and faster, and can be helpful to us as well.
Metadata for a photograph would typically include the date and time at which it was taken and details of the camera settings, such as focal length, aperture, exposure. It would also contain any titles or keyword “tags” we’ve added to help us organize our albums.
Metadata for a document would typically include the date and time at which it was created, title, author, subject, number of pages, and the language of the text.
But the metadata will also contain the number of revisions, how long you spent working on it, (possibly) hidden markups/edits, who it is “shared” with, who else it’s been sent to, the Save path (which usually reveals your User Name), computer name, and more.
This can open you up to embarrassment (What? They took 4 hours and 6 revisions to write this ??? And why did they show it Joe?) and/or provide info a hacker might use to gain control of your PC.
Tip of the day: Before you e-mail off your file as an attachment, or turn it in to the boss, it might be a good idea to strip it of the metadata. To do this:
1) right-click of the file and select “Properties” from the context menu. In my example, I’ll use a Word document named BarbaraInvoice.doc.
2) Click on the “Details” tab, and look to the bottom area. Click on “Remove Properties and Personal Information”.
3) A new window will open. Here you will see two choices represented by radio buttons. ‘Remove it all’ is the default, but you can be selective by clicking the second button, and using the window scroll, and remove just certain tags.
4) Click “OK”, and the metadata is gone.
Today’s free link: Amazon’s Game Downloads area lets you try every title – including new releases – before you buy. There are games for all ages and interests.
Today’s free download: Recently, I was asked “what program will fix my computer ?” Well, that sort of depends on what the problem is, now doesn’t it? It’s a nice idea though, isn’t it? One program that fixes everything. (I’d be out of a job!) Advanced SystemCare Free from IObit comes pretty close to fitting that bill. One click will help restore your computer to its youthful vigor, and keep it running smoothly.
Copyright 2007-9 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix
| Share this post : | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Recently opened files show in Start menu
Folks, today a ‘quick tip’- The Windows Start menu can show you a list of the files you have recently opened, which is a handy shortcut for returning to works-in-progress. This feature is called “My Recent Documents” and you can quickly and easily turn it on or off.
Tip of the day: Customize your Start menu to show your most recently opened files (Note: if you’re a ‘minimalist’, and want a leaner, cleaner Start Menu, do the opposite of [uncheck] these steps to disable the Recent Documents feature).
Step 1:Right-click on a blank area of your Taskbar, and select “Properies” from the context menu.
Step 2: Select the Start Menu tab, and click on the “Customize” button.
Step 3: Select the “Advanced” tab, and Place a check in the checkbox labelled “List my most recently opened documents.” Now click “OK”, and “OK” again.
That’s it. You’re done. Now when you click on the Start Button, you will see the last things you were working on, and can quickly launch them by clicking their icon.
For Vista: Vista users can do this too, and actually have a little more control..
.. but the steps are the same. Select the “Start Menu” tab, and place the checks.
Today’s free link: TweakUI, a Microsoft “Power Toy”, is an applet for XP that allows for a remarkable amount of, well, “tweaking” of Windows’ behavior and appearance. “This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.”
Copyright 2007-8 © Tech Paul. All rights reserved. post to jaanix
| Share this post : |  |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
Note: You are responsible for using this blog and its content. I am in no way liable for any losses caused by user error, viruses and/or other malware, hardware or software failure, or any other conceivable reason.
-
Say "thank you!" Buy Tech Paul a cup of coffee (and keep T4E ad free).
-
-
McAfee® Cybersafety Resource Portal, an online help center designed to assist victims of computer crime and provide information on how to avoid becoming a victim.
-
Subscribe to Tech--for Everyone by EmailRecent Comments
-
-
-
-
Also:
-
-
Tech - for Everyone 