Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

One of the biggest gripes of Office Letter readers is about the way printing from IE is performed. Most of the time, pages get chopped off -- the right side of the page simply disappears in mid-sentence. Microsoft has been rolling out betas of IE7 lately, and one of the features I particularly like is its Shrink to Fit feature. You use the File/Print Preview menu option, then in the Print Preview window choose Shrink to Fit in the Change Print Size field (press Alt + S to select the field).

Febooti Software offers a similar feature in its utility ieZoom ($24.95), and it has the added benefit of working with the current version of IE. In addition, while IE7 does not offer any control over the amount of shrinking (it’s guess is not bad, just not controllable), Febooti’s ieZoom gives you almost infinite command over printing as well as the display of Web pages (though it’s a bit excessive -- from .3% to 3200% in Advanced mode, .5 to 400% in Standard mode). All you need to do is drag the slider bar to the size (in percent) you want. In our tests, we found that 110% and 80% met our needs best, and set the presets accordingly. Your choices will vary by the Web sites you visit and the resolution and size of your monitor.

ieZoom’s toolbar lets you create three presets (for your three favorite zoom percentages), or you can enter the numeric zoom ratio yourself. A color picker lets you choose any color from your screen (I particularly like this feature because I’m always looking for attractive color combinations for The Office Letter, and when I visit another site I would like to pick a color rather than try to read the code to find out what colors are being used). The color picker returns the value in decimal or hex, and a pop-up tooltip can display the color name (and whether it’s what’s known as a Web-safe color) if that information is available.

The History feature offers a traffic-light display to show you how many times you’ve visited a site: green, yellow, or red dots indicate the last time you visited the site (green can be set so it means the current site was visited within the last 24 hours, for example). I’m not sure this is of much value.

The program offers skins if you want to change the look of the toolbar (the Base Skin looked fine to me). Besides the difference in zoom levels, the Standard mode omits the three zoom presets and omits the color picker by default, though you can select which toolbar features appear in the Standard and Advanced toolbar display modes. In addition, you can set keyboard shortcuts for all toolbar buttons.

Febooti Software offers a 15-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can get more information about ieZoom and download the trial from http://www.febooti.com.

-- James E. Powell

^ Top of page ^

If you like this newsletter, share the free edition with your friends and co-workers. Just point them to:

^ Top of page ^