Windows Vista includes a wide range of programs to help you with your work and play. These programs come in all shapes and sizes, from monsters such as Windows Mail see Article 17 and Windows Media Player see Article 22 to much smaller programs generally called “applets” little applications or “accessories.” This article shows you how to use the following accessories:

WordPad, Notepad, Character Map, Paint, Calculator, and Command Prompt. You’ll find coverage of other accessories in chap- ters that cover related topics. For example, Article 22 the Windows Media Player article also covers Sound Recorder, an applet for recording audio. These programs have relatively limited functionality:

They’re intended to take care of some basic tasks, but not to discourage you from buying fuller programs from either Microsoft or its com- petitors. Because they’re limited, most of these programs are relatively small and easy to use. This article discusses only the most important features of the programs, leaving you to work out the easy stuff on your own.

Your Computer May Include Different Programs

Where the operating system stops and where other programs begin has long been a source of contention between Microsoft, the U.S. Department of Justice, and more recently the European Commission. For example, the European Commission forced Microsoft to release a version of Windows XP that didn’t include Windows Media Player this was for competitive reasons - so that computer manufacturers could include other companies’ media players.

If your copy of Windows Vista doesn’t include some or all of the programs discussed in this article or other articles, the reason may be that the computer’s manufacturer has decided to include other programs that offer similar functionality. Consult your computer’s documentation for details, or hunt through the Start menu to see what you can uncover.

WordPad

WordPad is a lightweight word-processing program. It provides rudimentary features including font formatting, bulleted lists, paragraph alignment, margin placement, and support for different sizes of paper. It also lets you insert objects such as graphics and parts of other documents, so in a pinch you can create attractive documents with it. WordPad’s Print Preview feature File   Print Preview lets you make sure your documents look okay before you commit them to paper. But WordPad has no advanced features; for example, it doesn’t offer style formatting, tables, or macros. It also lacks a spelling checker or grammar checker, so you’ll need to proof and check your documents visually.

Because of these limitations, if you have Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, Sun StarOffice, OpenOffice.org’s OpenOffice, or another full-fledged word processor, you’ll probably have little use for WordPad. But if you don’t have another word processor, and if you need to create only simple documents, you may find WordPad useful. WordPad can open documents in Rich Text format RTF and text formats. If you have fontformatted documents created in another word processing program, RTF may prove the best format for getting them into WordPad. This is because RTF supports a wide range of formatting, and most word processors can create and read RTF files. Each instance of WordPad can have only one document open at once, but you can run multiple instances of WordPad if you need to have two or more documents open at the same time. Simply choose Start   All Programs   Accessories   WordPad again to open a second or subsequent instance of WordPad. You can also open a new instance of WordPad by right-clicking the document you want to open in an Explorer window or on the Desktop and choosing Open With WordPad from the shortcut menu. If you already have an Explorer window open, this option tends to be quicker and more convenient than opening WordPad from the Start menu. Most of WordPad’s commands are easily found on its six short menus and two toolbars. For example, click the Open button or choose File Open to open a document, and click the Save button or choose File Save to save a document. The following are also worth mentioning:

•    If you’re using WordPad simply to create text, you may want to maximize your workspace by stripping down the interface to the bone. The View menu lets you hide the Toolbar, the Format bar, the ruler, and the status bar, which gives you a good amount more space.

•    WordPad doesn’t have a command for inserting symbols. Instead, run Character Map see “Character Map,” later in this article, copy the character you need, and paste it into your WordPad document.

•    As well as using the Tabs dialog box Format   Tabs to set and clear tabs, you can set and clear tabs for the currently selected paragraph or paragraphs by working in the ruler. Click in the ruler to place a tab where you click. Drag an existing tab to move it to a different location. Or drag an existing tab downward into the document area to get rid of it.

•    If you need to create Windows documentation, you can copy a full screen by pressing Print Screen or capture the active window by pressing Alt+Print Screen. Windows places the resulting graphic on the Clipboard. You can then paste the graphic into a WordPad document. Alternatively, you can paste the graphic into a Paint picture, and then save it as a file for use later.

The most complex part of WordPad is the Options dialog box View   Options, which has four pages:

Options, Text, Rich Text, and Embedded:

•    The Options page of the Options dialog box  lets you choose measurement units:

Inches, Centimeters, Points, or Picas. Points and picas are typesetting measurements. A point is 1/72  inch, and a pica is 1/6  inch, so there are 12 points to the pica. It also contains the Automatic Word Selection check box, which controls whether WordPad selects the whole of each second and subsequent word when you click and drag to select from one word to the next. If Automatic Word Selection is turned off, WordPad lets you select char- acter by character. If you’ve used Word, you’re probably familiar with this behavior.

•    The Text, Rich Text, and Embedded pages contain options for the different document types that WordPad can handle. For each, you can choose word-wrap settings No Wrap, Wrap to Window, or Wrap to Ruler and whether you want to display the toolbar, the Format bar, the ruler, and the status bar.  

Notepad

Notepad is a text editor, a program designed for working with text files. A text file is a file that contains only text characters; it has no formatting and no graphical objects. You may also hear text files described as ASCII files. ASCII is the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Rather than force you to use a monospaced font such as Courier, Notepad lets you select a font for the display of text on-screen choose Format Font. It has a word-wrap option choose Format Word Wrap so that lines of text don’t reach past the border of the window to the horizon on your right. And you can insert the time and date in a Notepad file by choosing Edit Time/Date or press- ing the F5 key.

Avoiding Notepad’s Default TXT Extension

Notepad automatically adds the TXT extension to files you save. To save a file under a different extension, enter the filename and extension in double quotation marks in the File Name text box in the Save As dialog box - for example, “boot.ini“. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t spend any more time using Notepad than you need to, because Notepad is a very limited program. But it’s good for several tasks:

•    Notepad is small and simple, so you can keep it running without worrying about it slow- ing your computer down. Because Notepad takes up little memory, you can run multiple instances without affecting your computer’s performance appreciably. This can be useful for taking a variety of notes. Notepad lets you open only a single file at a time, but by open- ing multiple instances of Notepad, you can open as many files as you need.

•    Notepad is good for editing Windows programs’ configuration files. But if you’re editing any of the standard Windows configuration files that remain in Windows Vista for compatibility with older programs for example, WIN.INI, use the System Configuration Editor instead. The System Configuration Editor is essentially Notepad after a couple of doses of steroids and customizations for editing system files. To run the System Configuration Editor, choose Start   Accessories   Run or press Windows Key+R, enter sysedit in the Open text box in the Run dialog box, and click the OK button.

•    By default, Notepad prints documents with a header that consists of the file name and a footer that consists of “Page” and the page number. This default header and footer can help you tell one document from another, but you’ll sometimes want to either omit the header or footer or use text of your own. To do so, choose File   Page Setup and change the text in the Header text box and the Footer text box.

•    Apart from working with text files that use regular text-file formats such as those with the TXT file extension, Notepad is good for creating and editing other text-only files. For example, it’s good for editing playlists for programs such as MP3 players. These are text files, though they use extensions such as M3U and PLS to give them file-type functionality. If you create such a file using Notepad, remember to use double quotation marks around the filename when saving it.

•    You can use Notepad to open documents other than text files. Select the All Files item in the Files of Type drop-down list in the Open dialog box. For example, if Word for Windows crashes, you may end up with a corrupted file that Word itself cannot open. By opening up the file in Notepad, you may be able to rescue part of the text. You’ll see a lot of nonalphanumeric characters that represent things like Word formatting for example, styles, but you’ll also find readable text. If the document has been saved using Word’s Fast Save feature, you’ll even find deleted parts of the document still in the file - which can be intrigu- ing or embarrassing, depending on whether you wrote the document.

Character Map

Character Map is a small utility that lets you insert characters and symbols that don’t appear on your keyboard in your documents. Windows Vista hides Character Map on the System Tools menu Start All Programs Acces- sories   System Tools   Character Map. If you don’t find it there but think it’s installed on your computer, choose Start All Programs Accessories Run or press Windows Key+R to display the Run dialog box, enter charmap in the Open text box, and click the Open button.

Inserting a Character

To insert a character with Character Map, take the following steps:

1.  Select the font in the Font drop-down list.

2.  Scroll the list box until the character is visible:

•    To display a magnified view of a character, click it. Alternatively, use the arrow keys ,  ,  and  to select it, and then press the spacebar.

magnifier around the grid of characters.

•    To remove the magnified view, click the magnified character or press the spacebar.

3.  Select the character and click the Select button. Character Map copies it into the Characters to Copy text box.

4.  Select other characters as necessary, then click the Copy button to copy the character or characters to the Clipboard.

5.  Activate the program and paste the characters into it.