The AutoComplete feature makes it easier to fill out addresses, forms, and passwords by providing a drop-down list of suggestions as you type, based on your previous entries. Internet Explorer has added the capability to customize the AutoComplete settings. To customize your AutoComplete settings, follow these steps:

1. Choose Tools -> Internet Options and click the Content tab.

2. Click the AutoComplete button. The AutoComplete Settings dialog box appears.

3. Select the check boxes for the items for which you want to use AutoComplete. Select the Web Addresses check box to have AutoComplete suggest URLs for previously visited Web pages. Select the Forms check box if you want AutoComplete to match the field values from the most recently submitted form. Select User Names and Passwords on Forms if you want AutoComplete to retain your user ID and password for sites that require them.

4. (Optional) To delete the form information that AutoComplete retains, click the Clear Forms button. To delete the list of user IDs and passwords that AutoComplete retains, click the Clear Passwords button. To delete the list of Web addresses that AutoComplete keeps on file, you must click the Clear History button on the General tab of the Internet Options dialog box.

5. Click OK twice to close both dialog boxes.

Printing and Saving Web Information

With Internet Explorer, you can print and save all or part of a favorite Web page. You can even save an interesting Web graphic or photo and set it as your desktop’s wallpaper. To understand what makes a Web page tick, take a look behind the scenes to examine the HTML code used to create the Web page. This article provides details on the various aspects of storing and reusing the information that you uncover in your travels with Internet Explorer.

Printing a Web Page

Although you can save a Web page to your hard drive (as you discover how to do in the next section, “Saving a Web Page on Your Computer”), you may prefer to just print its contents. Internet Explorer makes it easy to print the contents of the Web page you’re currently browsing. Just remember that a Web page (in spite of its singular name) can produce multiple printed pages due to the amount of information contained on that “page.” When you want to print the contents of the Web page currently displayed in your Internet Explorer browser, you can choose from a couple of methods:  -  Click the Print button on the Standard Buttons toolbar.  -  Choose File -> Print or press Ctrl+P to open the Print dialog box; then click Print or press Enter. Before you print from Internet Explorer, you should check the page settings. You can change page settings from the Page Setup dialog box, which you open by choosing File -> Page Setup. To change the page size, select a new size setting from the Size drop-down list. To change the orientation of the printing from Portrait (vertical) to Landscape (horizontal), click the Landscape option button. To change any or all of the page margins, enter a new value (in inches) in the Left, Right, Top, and Bottom text boxes. When setting up a custom header or footer, you can intersperse the preceding printing codes with standard text. For example, if you want the footer to say something like Page 2 of 3, you need to intersperse the codes &p and &P between the words Page and of in the Footer text box, like this: Page &p of &P All the printing codes and text that you enter in the Header and Footer text boxes in the Page Setup dialog box are automatically left-justified at the top or bottom of the page. To have some of the text or codes right-justified in the header or footer, type the code &b&b immediately before the text and codes that you want to right-justify in the printout. If you want text or codes centered in the text, type &b. To prevent Internet Explorer from printing a header or footer in the Web page printout, delete all the text and printing codes from the Header and Footer text boxes in the Page Setup dialog box.

Saving a Web Page on Your Computer

You can save to your computer’s hard drive any Web page that you visit. Then you use Internet Explorer to view the page offline. To save a Web page to your hard drive, follow these steps:

1. Use Internet Explorer to display the Web page that you want to save to your hard drive; then choose File -> Save As. The Save Web Page dialog box opens.

2. Select the folder on your hard drive where you want to save the Web page. The folder name appears in the Save In drop-down list box.

3. (Optional) If you want to change the filename under which the Web page is saved, you need to edit or replace its current name in the File Name text box.

4. Click the Save button to close the Save Web Page dialog box. Internet Explorer downloads the Web page and saves it on your computer’s hard drive. After the Web page is saved on your hard drive, you can view its contents offline by choosing File -> Work Offline, and then opening it from the Internet Explorer Address bar or from the Open dialog box (choose File -> Open or press Ctrl+O).

Saving a Web Graphic on Your Computer

Internet Explorer makes it easy to save any still graphic images in the GIF or JPG (JPEG) graphics file format. (If you want to save a Web graphic as desktop wallpaper, see “Wallpapering Your Desktop with a Web Graphic,” later in this article.) To save a Web graphic on your computer, follow these steps:

1. Use Internet Explorer to go to the Web page that contains the graphic that you want to save on your computer.

2. Right-click the Web graphic to display its shortcut menu and choose Save Picture As. The Save Picture dialog box opens.

3. In the Save In drop-down list box, select the folder on your hard drive into which you want to save the graphic.

4. (Optional) If you want to change the filename of the Web graphic, edit or replace its current name in the File Name text box.

5. (Optional) By default, Internet Explorer saves the Web graphic in the GIF graphics file format or JPEG graphics file format (depending on which format the Web designer used). To save the graphic in the BMP (bitmapped picture) graphics file format which Windows uses extensively for such things as buttons and desktop backgrounds choose Bitmap (*.bmp) in the Save As Type drop-down list box.

6. Click Save to close the Save Picture dialog box. Internet Explorer downloads the Web graphic and saves it on your computer’s hard drive.

Copying Web Page Information

When surfing the Internet, you may encounter a Web page that contains information that you want to access offline. In those situations, you can use the Windows Copy and Paste features to incorporate the section of Web page text of interest into a document on your hard drive. To copy text of a Web page into a local document, follow these steps:

1. With the Web page displayed in the Internet Explorer browsing window, position the I-beam mouse pointer at the beginning of the text that you want to copy; then click and drag through the characters or rows until all the text you want to copy is selected (highlighted). When you drag through the text, all the graphics that appear between or to the side of the paragraphs that you’re selecting are highlighted for copying as well. If you don’t want to include a particular graphic in your selection, you must copy the text before and after it in separate actions. If you want to copy everything on the page (including all text and graphics) choose Edit -> Select All or press Ctrl+A.

2. Choose Edit -> Copy or press Ctrl+C. The selected text is copied onto the Windows Clipboard.

3. Switch to the word processor (for example, Microsoft Word), text editor (such as WordPad or Notepad), or e-mail editor (such as Outlook Express) that contains the destination document or e-mail message into which you want to paste the selected text. If you prefer, you can close Internet Explorer and launch the word processor, editor, or e-mail program. If you want to copy the selected text into an existing document, open that file with a word processor or text editor. Otherwise, open a new document.

4. Click the I-beam mouse pointer at the place in the document or e-mail message where you want the selected text to appear, and then choose Edit -> Paste or press Ctrl+V. To copy graphics without surrounding text, you use another copy technique covered in the section, “Saving a Web Graphic on Your Computer,” earlier in this article. Depending on the capabilities of the program into which you are pasting the copied Web text, you may find that the copied text retains some or, in rare cases, all of its original formatting (created by using the Web-based computer language HTML). For example, if you copy a section of text formatted in HTML as a bulleted list into a Word document, Word retains the bullets and properly indents the text items. When copying text from a Web page, you usually copy hyperlinks that the author has included within that text. Some word-processing programs (such as Word) and e-mail editors (such as Outlook Express) retain the correct HTML tags for these hyperlinks, making them functioning links within the destination document. Be forewarned, however, that seldom, if ever, do these hyperlinks work properly when clicked. This problem most often occurs because you don’t have the pages to which these links refer copied to your hard drive. You also may end up with extra line breaks or spaces (due to the HTML formatting) when you copy text from a Web page. When copying information from a table on a Web page, you can retain its tabular format by copying entire rows of the table into Word 2003 documents or Outlook 2003 and Outlook Express e-mail messages. For the best results in copying tables from Web pages, copy the entire table into the Word document or Outlook e-mail message. You can now copy information from a Web table into an Excel 2003 worksheet simply by dragging the copied table cells to the blank worksheet cells and releasing the mouse button!

Viewing the HTML Source of a Web Page

A Web page is no more than a special type of text document that makes extensive use of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags to format its contents. If you’re a Web page designer (or have any inclination to become one), you can figure out a lot about Web design by viewing the HTML contents of the really cool pages that you visit. To see the HTML codes behind any Web page displayed in the Internet Explorer browsing window, choose View -> Source. When you select this command, Internet Explorer launches the Windows Notepad utility, which displays a copy of the HTML source page (the page containing all the HTML tags and text) for the current Web page. You can then print the HTML source page by choosing File -> Print within Notepad.

Wallpapering Your Desktop with a Web Graphic

Internet Explorer makes it a snap to copy a favorite graphic from a Web page and use the picture as the background for your Windows desktop. To turn a Web graphic into wallpaper for your desktop, follow these steps:

1. Use Internet Explorer to go to the Web page that contains the graphic that you want to save as wallpaper.

2. Right-click the Web graphic to display its shortcut menu and click the Set As Background command. As soon as you click Set As Background, Internet Explorer makes the graphic the wallpaper for your desktop and copies the selected graphic onto your hard drive, placing it in the Windows folder. The graphic is given the filename Internet Explorer Wallpaper.bmp. To remove the Web graphic wallpaper, right-click the desktop and select Properties from the shortcut menu that appears. The Display Properties dialog box opens. On the Desktop tab, choose a new graphic or HTML file for the wallpaper in the Background box. If you no longer want any graphic displayed as the wallpaper, select the (None) option at the top of the list.