Geek Certs Blog

When you copy something (using Edit/Copy from the menu or a key combination of CTRL+C), what you copy is stored in the computer’s memory (RAM). What you copied is stored with its values and formatting. Let’s say you copy some text that has special formatting applied but that you don’t want this formatting in your new document. In this case, don’t select Edit/Paste from the menu. Instead, select Edit/Paste Special. Then, select Unformatted Text from the list. This action pastes in the text but not its special formatting.

In Windows applications and in Windows operating systems, you can learn a lot by right-clicking an object. For example, in a Word document, you can highlight a word (double-click a word to highlight it), sentence, paragraph, or entire document (CTRL+A highlights the entire document). Once you highlight something, right-click it. This opens a context menu that tells you all of the things you can do to the object (in this case, text) you have highlighted. If you select Font from the list, you can format the font for that particular word.

Finally, If you select File and then click Print Preview, you get an idea as to what your document will look like when it prints. Then, after looking over your document, if you click File and then click Page Setup, you can customize what your document will look like when it prints. For example, let’s say that I want my document to print in Landscape rather than Portrait. I can set this here, preview what it looks like, and print it if I like what I see!

Some companies use Microsoft server operating systems to run their Web sites. We could accomplish this by installing Windows Server 2003 on a powerful computer and then enabling IIS (Internet Information Services) on the server. Turn on IIS by navigating to Add/Remove Programs. Then, click Add/Remove Windows Components (in the left side pane). IIS functionality is located in the Application Server item. Click it and then click Details to open a new window. You’ll see IIS listed and you turn it on by enabling its check box. If you’re a current Linux fan, just think of IIS as Microsoft’s equivalent of Apache, the most widely-used Web server operating system used today.

Web pages can be created using applications that hide their complexity. Start out by creating a new document in Microsoft Word and by formatting it with cool fonts, pictures, and graphs. Then, save the document as a Web page by clicking File and then click Save As. You just created your own Web page and saving it as a Web page gives it an .html file extension instead of the standard Microsoft Word .doc file extension.

Creating a Web page in this way is fine when we want to publish a simple page to our company Intranet or our own personal Web site. As you might have guessed, when Web pages are so easily created, they contain a lot of behind the scenes formatting (also known as overhead) that makes the page load slower than if we had created it manually using HTML (hyper text markup language) code.

If you want a professional looking Web site, you’ve got to hire someone who can program in HTML (and a few other Web languages) or you’ll have to learn how to do it yourself. Most Web pages are written in HTML - one of the programming languages that designers use to create Web pages.

You can see any Web page’s HTML code by right-clicking in any text area (don’t click on a graphic). Then, select View Source from the Context Menu that appears to see that page’s HTML code.

A VPN (virtual private network) allows a host (your computer) to communicate over an untrusted network (the Internet) in a secure environment (the VPN). Consider a tunnel that runs through a mountain. The tunnel is pretty safe, but anyone can use it. However, we want a private road that no one else can use. So, we build another tunnel inside the existing tunnel, taking up one of the lanes on the existing tunnel highway (a tunnel inside of a tunnel). The extra tunnel can be likened to a VPN.

Of course, VPNs are done using math and electricity, not cement and roads. For example, Microsoft provides a free VPN client for all of its Windows operating systems. Your network admin could install it on your computer. Then, that same administrator enables VPN capability on the network she manages so that when you remotely connect to the network, you must use a VPN client to connect to the network.

Cisco, and other vendors, sell VPN clients. Cisco’s is not free. They charge over $5,000 for each VPN client you want to install! Yikes. Many people pay the fee though, because Cisco’s product offers robust security.

You use the VPN client your network admin installed on your system by first clicking its icon to start it. After that, you get on the Internet and connect to your company’s IP address (the IP address you have to use to connect to the network). Next, log in to the network while you are safely tucked inside your VPN connection. No one on the Internet can touch your traffic when you’re working inside a VPN. A hacker might see your traffic, but it can’t be understood.

Try it yourself. Create a new network connection on your computer. Click Network Connections in the Control Panel. On the left side of the screen, click Create a New Connection. Pay attention to the windows and select the options to create a new VPN. Just make up a username, IP address, and server name so that you can step through the process. This sets up the client on your computer.