Tip: If you click “Date and time,” you get a dialog box full of date and time formats (12/18/2010; 12-Dec2010; Saturday, December 18, 2010, and so on). Double-click one to insert that date into your document at the insertion point.
•• Drag-and-drop editing. Instead of using the three-step Copy and Paste routine for moving words and phrases around in your document, you can simply drag highlighted text from place to place on the screen. See page 223 for details.
Ease of Access If you have trouble using your keyboard or making out small text on the screen, the programs in the StartÆAll ProgramsÆAccessoriesÆEase of Access folder may be just what you need. (In previous versions of Windows, this accessibility center was called Universal Access, which pretty much explains why its keyboard shortcut is w+U.) Windows gets disability-friendlier with every new version. It includes a long list of features that let the PC magnify, speak, or otherwise boost the elements of the screen. The Ease of Access item in the Start menu is actually yet another folder. It contains these items: Ease of Access Center This new control panel gathers together all of Windows 7’s accessibility features under one roof. At the top of the window are the triggers for four of the big-ticket accessibility items: Magnifier, On-Screen Keyboard, Narrator, and High Contrast. You can click one of these buttons with your mouse, or, if you can’t use the mouse, just wait; a blue rectangle highlights one after another, pausing a few seconds at each stop. Tap the space bar to open a highlighted option. (The four features are described below.) At the bottom of the window, you find a tidy list of controls that tweak the PC’s audio, visual, mouse, and keyboard settings in special ways to help out people with limited hearing, vision, or mobility. When you click one of these links (such as “Use the computer without a display”), a special, very peculiar window opens, half Explorer window and half dialog box, that’s filled with checkboxes. Here’s the rundown. Tip: These features aren’t useful only to people with disabilities. If you have a flat-panel screen, for example, you may have noticed that everything on the screen is smaller than it might be on a traditional CRT screen. The result is that the cursor is sometimes hard to find, and the text is sometimes hard to read—but these features let you make it more visible.
•• Use the computer without a display. If you have trouble seeing the screen, turn on Narrator (described on page 290) here. You can also turn on Audio Description, in which a disembodied voice describes the action in movies. (Of course, this assumes that the movie comes with a description track, and few do.) This screen also lets you make Windows alert boxes go away by themselves after a while—a solution to a blind person’s typical dilemma (the PC doesn’t seem to react to anything, because, unbeknownst to you, there’s a dialog box on the screen holding up the works).