Important Stuff About Programs

There are more than 100,000 different programs that you can run on your computer. Nobody owns them all or needs them all. But everyone has some programs on their computer already. For example, you have Windows Vista and all the programs that came with Windows Vista. If you bought your computer with Windows Vista pre-installed, your computer manufacturer may have preinstalled some other programs as well. Most of the programs at your disposal have icons on the All Programs menu (or in one of the folders on the All Programs menu). To start a program, you click its icon on that menu. When you start a program, it opens in a program window on your desktop.

You can move and size that window, switch among multiple open program windows, and close a program (and its window) when you’ve finished using it. Of all the general things there are to know about programs, the most important is this: Every program has its own built-in Help. There is really no need to try to “figure out” a program by guessing. Once you understand that every program has its own built-in help, you can find out how to use that program or one of its features without all the hair-pulling frustration and ensuing problems of trial-and-error guesswork. Many people make the mistake of looking in the wrong place for help with a program. For example, the Help described in Article 5 of this article is help for Windows Vista. That’s not really the place to look for help with any other programs. Many people search the Web for help. But there you’re searching through billions of pages of text, most having nothing to do with the program you’re seeking help on. When you need help with a specific program, the first place to look is the Help for that program. It’s as simple as that.

WordPad, Word, WordPerfect—What’s the Diff?

Just as there are many brands of toothpaste, shampoo, and cars, there are many brands of word processing programs. WordPad, Microsoft Word, and WordPerfect are basically different “brands” of word processing programs. WordPad is a simple word processor that comes free with every copy of Windows Vista. You don’t have to buy or install anything to use it. It’s just there. Microsoft Word is Microsoft’s professional-grade word processing program. WordPerfect is Corel’s professionalgrade word processing program. Neither Word nor WordPerfect come free with Windows Vista. If you have one or the other, but don’t know why, it’s because your computer manufacturer bundled it with your system.

About the Windows Vista Clipboard

When you cut or copy text using any of the preceding techniques, whatever you cut or copied is placed in an area of your computer’s memory called the Windows Clipboard. The formal name often confuses people because they figure they should be able to see something named Clipboard on the screen, in their menus, or someplace. But there is no such thing to be concerned about. The Clipboard is nothing more than a place in your computer’s memory where Windows temporarily stores the last thing you copied or cut. When you shut off the computer, the Clipboard is emptied. So you should make no attempt to use the Clipboard for any form of long-term storage. The Clipboard is not for documents and files or for long-term storage. Every time you do a copy-and-paste or cut-and-paste you should do so in one smooth motion. Select the text you want, copy or cut it, and paste it where you want to put it.

Installing Fonts

Windows Vista comes with a large selection of fonts. You’ll see just how many there are when you apply a font to selected text. Each font that you can apply to text is stored as a file in your Fonts folders. You can use either of the following techniques to open that folder:

- Tap the Windows key, type font, and click the Fonts folder icon under Programs on the Start menu.

- Click the Start button and choose Control Panel  ->  Appearance and Personalization  ->  Fonts. Because it’s a folder, you can use the Views button to control the size of icons. The Fonts folder has nothing to do with applying fonts to text. You apply fonts in programs where you can type and format text, like WordPad. The Fonts folder is just a repository where all of your available fonts are stored. To see what a font looks like, double-click its icon. A window opens showing a sample. Close that window after viewing the font. If the fonts you already have aren’t enough, you can certainly add more. First you have to acquire those fonts. There are many places where you can purchase fonts, and a few places where you can download fonts for free without being overwhelmed by ads. For example, www.webpagepublicity.com/freefonts- v2.html has more than 6,000 free fonts to choose from. (At least, it did last time I checked.) If that doesn’t work, browse to a search engine like www.google.com and search for download free Windows fonts or purchase Windows fonts, or something like that. When you do find some fonts, try to download TrueType or OpenType .ttf files because those are the easiest to work with. You’ll have to keep track of where you put them, because you’ll need to know their location later to install them.

So consider putting them all in the Downloads folder for your user account, or perhaps your own subfolder within that folder. If the fonts you download are in a compressed folder (Zip file), you’ll need to extract the .ttf file before you can install the font. See “Zipping and Unzipping Files” later in this article for more info. Anyway, once you’ve acquired some fonts and have a .ttf file for each, the rest is easy. The fonts you install will be available to all user accounts. Which means you’re about to make a change that affects all users, and therefore you need administrative privileges. So you may want to log in to an administrative user account before you begin. If you haven’t already done so, open the Fonts folder as described previously. If you don’t see a menu bar in that folder, tap the Alt key to open it. Then choose File  ->  Install New Font from the menu. Use the Drives and Folders list near the bottom of the dialog box to navigate to the folder in which you’ve placed the .ttf files. Then select the fonts you want to install (or click Select All to select them all).

I suggest you also select (check) the “Copy fonts to Fonts folder” so that all of your fonts are together in that folder. Click the Install button. You’ll get some brief feedback as the fonts install. When that’s done, each new font will be represented by an icon in your Fonts folder. Close the Fonts folder. You apply the new fonts just as you do the fonts you already had. Since Fonts is a folder and not a program, it doesn’t have its own built-in help. For more information on Fonts, search Windows Help (click the Start button and choose Help and Support). To remove a font, just delete its icon from the Fonts folder (right-click its icon and choose Delete).