As the year draws to a close we find ourselves caught up in the inevitable festive season. With its heady mix of parties, traditions and excited children, you can be forgiven for finding Christmas a tad stressful. However, your PC may well be able to help out. Computers and Christmas may seem to be unlikely bedfellows, apart from being given as presents. But there are key ways that a PC can help out during the holidays to improve organization, keep you in touch with loved ones and make the season more fun.
We’ll demonstrate a number of festive uses that you can put your computer to over the long dark evenings of the solstice. You could start by making a list of everyone who’s sent you greetings this year. Put the names and addresses into an Excel Spreadsheet or a table in Word and you’ll be able to use it for your card list next year. You could even get word to print the envelopes for you.
There are other important ways to help stay in touch with friends and relatives at this time of year. Very few people have no email address at all, so you could make use of the speed of electronic communication and send Christmas greetings by email. We’ll show you how to put together some festive stationery to give your messages a little sparkle. If you’ve been disorganized and not managed to get your cards out, why not send out Christmassy emails with a little disclaimer on them saying that you haven’t sent out cards to save on trees? It’s becoming quite fashionable to send emails or e-cards instead of Christmas cards and then make a donation to charity of the money that would have been spent on cards.
Closer to the day, you can use the power of the internet and instant messaging programs to link family groups together that couldn’t travel to one another. Set up a webcam, microphone and messenger and you could even enjoy Christmas dinner together.
Television often dominates Christmas, with families gathering to watch old movies or specials of well loved programmes. Your PC can help make sure that you don’t miss your favourite shows by giving reminders or even recording them for viewing later on.
Photos of friends and relations having fun are great to share, but even more fun if you don’t have to wait a long time to see them. By uploading them to a photo sharing website, you can share them with everyone you know and even discuss them over instant messaging. Instead of a round robin Christmas letter, capture the moment in a family blog that others can read and comment on online. If you’re worried about the cost of Christmas, we’ll show you how to monitor your spending using a spreadsheet to help you budget properly for the season next year.
Before you get started, if you want your PC to look the part, why not put up some digital decorations? You’ll find screensavers, wall paper and games with a seasonal feel at CMB Software http://cmbsoftware.com/christmas.htm.
Festive Stationery
We’re used to sending Christmas cards at this time of year, but what about Christmas emails? Both Outlook Express and Windows Mail in Vista enable you to use customized stationery, giving your email a personal look and feel. If you get a card from someone who wasn’t on your list and you don’t have time to post one back, why not say thanks electronically, with a little festive cheer added for good measure?
The easiest way to apply different stationery is by selecting one of the readymade files that already exist in Outlook Express. Choose Tools, Options, Compose. Here is all you need for customising your email. The middle section of this tab is devoted to stationery. You can select different designs for mail and news postings. Check the box marked Mail and press Select. Choose from the various HTML files that contain the graphics for the notepaper. Put a tick next to Show preview and highlight one of the files to view a thumbnail. Try out several options until you find one you like. Click your choice, followed by OK twice. New email messages will now use that stationery.
Alternatively, you can select different stationery for each message you write. With your inbox selected, click the drop down arrow on the right hand side of the Create Mail button on the toolbar. Choose Select Stationery and make your choice. Press OK to open the new mail message using the design you chose.
Outlook Express stationery files are just standard HTML; the same basic format that web pages use. You’ll find plenty of these online, many of which are available to download for free. As long as the file is placed in the correct folder, Outlook Express will recognise it as stationery and provide it as an option to apply as above. The directory in question is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery, where C is the hard drive used to store programs and Windows. Any image files referenced in the HTML need to be deposited here as well.
There are plenty of download sites that offer Outlook Express stationery. Just run a search for email stationery to turn some up. Alternatively, for a set of different Christmas designs, head to About.com:Email, which has quite a selection at http://email.about.com/od/freechristmasstationery/Free_Christmas_Stationery_for_Outlook_Express_and_Outlook.htm.
Design Your Own
Ready-made notepaper isn’t for everyone and you may decide to create your own. This isn’t difficult. The Stationery Setup Wizard steps you through the process neatly. You can select graphics files to use as a header or tiled behind the text as a continuous image. Bear in mind that a strong image repeated all over the page can make your text impossible to read, so exercise restraint.
The wizard is a bit limiting because the range of background colours available is small and several are bright colours, which make text hard to make out. However, there is an alternative. You can make your stationery by creating an HTML file using any web editing program. Word or FrontPage are ideal. Create your design as if you were making a web page and save it as HTML into your stationery folder to make it accessible by Outlook Express.
Assuming you use Word, here’s how to make some very simple stationery. Create a new document and insert a suitable picture or logo from your own collection or from clip art. Select Format > Background and choose a suitable colour or texture from those on show. Now choose File > Save As and browse to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery. Give the design a name and change the file type to web page (*.htm; *.html). It’s now ready to use.
Add a greeting to your signature
Why not spread a little Christmas cheer whenever you send an email, by adding a greeting to your signature? Signatures are basically blocks of text that you can set to appear at the bottom of your emails. They can be plain text or small HTML files. However the maximum size for a signature is 4KB, so if you plan to use HTML to make it look pretty, you’ll need to use a very efficient web design program or code it yourself. While Word is capable of generating web pages, it isn’t very efficient and won’t manage to create a small enough signature.
On the Signatures tab, press New and give it a suitable name. Now enter the text you want to use, which may be your contact details or just a general observation or quote. If you’re stumped for things to say, check out some Christmassy observations at Quote Garden www.quotegarden.com/christmas.html. Make sure you properly attribute any quotation that you use. Now check Add set to all outgoing messages.
As the day itself grows nearer, your thoughts may turn towards managing the holiday itself. It’s all too easy to forget items in the rush to get things sorted, so take a little of the strain off yourself and use a checklist to get things together? You’ll find some useful advice at WikiHow, which includes guides on how to make cakes, decorations and stockings. Browse to www.wikihow.com and search its archive of advice.
Managing the holiday viewing
Because of the shortage of daylight hours and the poor weather at this time of year, many people find that the Christmas season revolves around the TV. Unfortunately, it can be quite a source of conflict as family members squabble about what to watch. With all the added channels that digital television brings there are bound to be clashes. You may not always be able to resolve these, but better knowledge of the schedules will help, as most programmes are repeated within their first week of broadcast. The trick is to find out when. It helps to have a searchable electronic programme guide that you can check out without interrupting other people’s avid TV watching.
You can get just such a thing in the form of Digiguide. This is an offline programme guide that you can regularly update via the internet. It sorts the schedules according to your preferences and, if you keep it running all the time, it will provide you with pop up reminders and suggestions for things you might like to watch. You can get a free trial of Digiguide from www.digiguide.com. A full subscription costs £5.99 per year. You’ll need to provide a valid email address to get the download link.
Once downloaded and installed on your PC, you’re prompted to configure the guide. First provide your country details, followed by your TV region. You now need to supply details of your TV provider. If you use Freeview, Sky Digital or a cable operator, select the company name from the list. Otherwise, opt for Terrestrial only.
Manage your viewing with Digiguide
Let Digiguide manage your program choices so you don’t miss the best of the Christmas telly.
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Head to www.digiguide.com and opt to download the free trial. First provide your country details, followed by your TV region. You now need to supply details of your TV provider. Use the sliders to indicate which type of shows you like. This information will help Digiguide make viewing suggestions and sort the schedules for you.
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Once you’ve completed the set up, Digiuide will go online to fetch the most recent listings. You can sort these in a number of ways. Choose Multi-channel grid to see a list of what’s on over the next couple of hours on all available channels.
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Depending on your choice of TV provider, you’ll now be presented with some options for additional channels Scroll down the list and tick each channel that you want to view. Click OK and you’re taken to the grid view of programmes currently showing. You can also search for programmes using the find facility.
Once you’ve completed the set up, Digiuide will go online to fetch the most recent listings. You can sort these in a number of ways. Choose Multi-channel grid to see a list of what’s on over the next couple of hours on all available channels. Programmes will be colored to help draw your attention to shows that you might like. Thumbs up symbols indicate suggested viewing. To find out more about a particular listing, right click it and choose Extra programme information. Now when you can see an argument brewing over what to watch at a certain time, open Digiguide and run a search for the programmes concerned. You’ll probably be able to find a suitable repeat to watch at another time or to set your recorder for.
One sure fire way to prevent clashes is to make sure that you can record TV for watching at another time. Windows Media Center in Vista Home Premium and above will handle this for you, as long as you have a TV capture device installed in your Computer. USB Freeview receivers cost as little as £25, which isn’t much to pay to pick up another source of TV recordings. Media Center has its own programme guide and you can set programmes to record well in advance of their transmission. You can also use Media Center to manage your family videos and recordings. The walkthrough demonstrates how to add a folder of video files to your library so you can easily select them for viewing.
If you don’t have Vista, you can still get media centre capabilities by installing a third party program like Media Portal or GB-PVR. These provide similar features to Windows Media Center.
Manage your Christmas recordings
Use Windows Media Center in Vista to catalogue your videos to watch over the season.
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Launch Windows Media Center and on the start screen, use the mouse or your remote to scroll through the options until you get to Tasks. Now move across to Settings and scroll down to Library Setup and select it.
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Choose Add folder to watch. This enables Media Center to include all the video files in the folder that you choose in the video library. Now you need to indicate where the new folder is. You can add folders from this PC or from the network.
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Click Next and browse to the folder that you want to add. Use the buttons with plus signs to expand the folders that you see. To select a folder put a tick in the box next to it. Click Next and Finish.
Share your Christmas photos
Christmas and family holidays are the main times of the year when people take most photographs. Thanks to digital technology and the internet it’s now possible to share your photos with friends and family who are miles away within minutes of taking them. All you have to do is transfer them to your PC and upload them to a website.
The most common way of displaying photos online is as a collection of thumbnails or small versions of the images. When you click on a thumbnail, you get to see a larger version of the picture, although even this one is likely to have been resized from the original which are often hundreds of kilobytes or even megabytes in size, depending on the quality of the camera that took it and the format the pictures was saved in.
A big photo doesn’t look great on a web page, especially if your visitor’s browser is set to a low resolution. There’s also the problem of finite web space and bandwidth. While broadband is widespread, it’s still not a good idea to assume all your visitors are using it. Some web hosts limit the amount of data transferred to and from a web site, too. If your pictures are large, each time someone views one, it will erode away some of your bandwidth allowance. All in all it’s better to resize your images to a manageable size.
If you’re making an online album like this, you’ll need to make your photos a sensible size for the web. You may need to generate the little thumbnails to go with them too. Any photo editor program will enable you to resize pictures, although some provide special thumbnail features. Media Resizer Free is a good one. It enables you to change the size of pictures and add watermarks to claim your ownership. You can get it from www.mediaresizer.com. If you want to batch convert images, you’ll need to get the paid version, which costs £15.78.
Launch Media Resizer Free and click Load Image. Browse to the picture that you want to resize and click Open. Under Resize image, choose the size of the thumbnail that you want in pixels height and width. Also choose if you want to sharpen the image or to crop to an interesting area. Click Add Watermarks and select whether you want to use an image file or some text to watermark your thumbnail. In the case of text, enter the string you want to use, taking advantage of the date and copyright symbol buttons. Choose the position of your text and set the opacity. Click OK and Change Style. Here you can select a style for your thumbnail buttons or place a mask in front of the image to make stars or other interesting shapes. You can also choose to rotate the image in the thumbnail to a certain degree. When you’re happy with your changes, click OK, followed by Save Image.
Instead of making your own web page, you might like to try a photo album service like PBase (www.pbase.com). This provides you with 10MB space for pictures free; if you go beyond this you’ll need to pay. Numerous albums are available for you to browse through and you can leave comments for the photographers concerned. This is a natural progression from the kind
Browse to www.pbase.com. This is a huge collection of public photo galleries. Browse round a few to get a feel of how the place works and have a look at the most popular galleries. To make your own one, click Create your account. Provide your sign up information, including a valid email address, as this is where your confirmation and password will be sent. Your email won’t be displayed alongside your album, so don’t worry about this generating spam. Check out the privacy statement though. Click register. Once you’ve registered, you can sign in using your email address and password. Scroll down the welcome page and take this opportunity to customise your account settings. Add a copyright message and decide how your pictures will appear. You can also decide on who can leave comments on your photos.
Click Update. Now use Winzip or another archiving utility to make a zip archive of all the pictures that you want to upload. PBase handles multiple images in compressed format in Zip or Tar archives. Add the photos you want and save the archive to a safe place. Back at the PBase site, scroll down to Upload Photos to this Gallery. Click Browse and locate your zip file. Click Open, followed by Upload image. If your archive is large the upload may take some time, especially if you’re on a dial up connection. Once uploaded, the images are unzipped automatically. PBase will inform you when all your photos have been unzipped successfully. Browse to your gallery and examine the thumbnails. Click one to enlarge it. Click Edit this Gallery to add more images or to change the titles for each image. Once you’re happy, share the URL of your gallery with friends and family.
Yule Blog
Pictures may be worth thousands of words, but we still need to tell other people what we’ve been up to. Instead of the dreaded round robin letter that some people send out at Christmas, why not put your family news into a blog? It’s easily updated and you’ll save on postage. There are various blogging services available, including Blogger www.blogger.com, Wordpress http://wordpress.com/ and LiveJournal www.livejournal.com. They’re free to use and easy to sign up to. You can enter your posts online or write it using a word processor. A significant development in Word 2007 is the ability to upload blog postings directly. You could only achieve this before by either cutting and pasting into a web interface from Word or by sending your text to a compatible blog service by email. Now you can manage and publish posts directly from Word and you can even include images by defining a location to upload them to.
To create a blog posting click the Office button and choose New, New Blog Entry, Create. If this is your first blog post in Word, you’ll be invited to enter your blog provider details, including the username and password. All popular blog services are included, but you can also post to any service that uses Atom or MetaWebLog by entering the posting URL and your account details. Now all you need to do is enter the title and content of the post and click Publish when you’re done.
Monitoring Christmas Costs
Christmas is a time when you can easily lose track of spending with multiple office parties to visit, various family gatherings and friends to entertain and cater for, not to mention the perennial children’s presents. It seems all too easy to adopt a “pay now, worry about the credit card bill later” attitude, but that road leads to trouble and misery. This is why it helps to put together a spreadsheet to work out exactly what you spend on Christmas this year so that next year you’ll be able to budget for it and you won’t feel the pain the following January.
The spreadsheet that we’ll set up uses three different sheets. This enables us to keep some cells separate from the main data so it doesn’t matter how many transactions appear on the main sheet. The most notable example is where we use sheet 2 to store the totals instead of putting these at the bottom of the table on sheet 1. We don’t have to guess how many transactions we’ll use; we can spread out as much as we like and still see the totals by flicking to the second sheet. We also use sheet 3 to set up the different categories. This gives us room to add new categories later on without having to displace any cells.
Categories are a key part of this auditing approach to your Christmas spending. They enable you to track your finances according to what you’ve spent your money on. When you come back after inputting the data you can quickly see what’s been spent in each category and it doesn’t take much to come up with a total for each. This is a powerful technique which you can also apply to coming up with cost centre totals if you need to file your own taxes. Follow the six step walkthrough to begin putting your spreadsheet together. We’ve used Excel 2007, but you’ll find similar tools in earlier versions of Office.
Setting up your spreadsheet
Produce an excel spreadsheet that will help to monitor your Christmas spending.
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Launch Excel with a blank worksheet open. Move to the tab marked Sheet 2 and then label cells A1, A2 and A3 with Total Outgoings, Total Credits and Account Balance respectively. Switch to cell C1 and enter this formula =SUM(Sheet1!D2:D1000). In C2 enter = SUM(Sheet1!E2:E1000). In C3 type =C2-C1
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Click the C button at the top of the column to highlight it. On the ribbon, select Home, Number, Currency. This will format all the numbers in this column as money. Highlight rows 1-3 and select the font and size you want to use from the Font section of the Home tab.
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Select the Sheet1 tab. We now need to label cells A1 to F1 with suitable headings. We suggest Date, Paid to, Category, Paid out, Paid in, Balance. Make sure that the columns are sized to accommodate the headings and format them in a clear, bold font.
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Christmas spending can be quite complex, so it will probably go on beyond one sheet. To make sure that the headings stay visible however far down the columns you move, click in cell A2 and select Freeze panes on the View tab of the Ribbon. Cells below this row will scroll underneath the headings.
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Now we need to ensure that the monetary entries are formatted as money. Select columns D, E and F and then choose Home, Number, Currency. Now Highlight column A, and choose Number, and choose Long date from the drop down list.
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Most money managing programs enable you to categorise payments so you can track them more easily. Move to Sheet3 to set up your list of categories. Type your first one into cell A1, the next into A2 and so on down the sheet until you’ve used all the categories that you want.
The walkthrough leaves off when you’ve put together a set of categories for your spending on sheet 3. You now need to make these work as a drop down list in sheet 1. Highlight column A which now holds your categories. Select Formulas, Define Name. Enter Category in the resulting dialog and click Add, followed by OK. Sort the categories alphabetically by choosing Data, Sort and selecting A to Z. Click OK. Move back to Sheet 1 and select column C. Choose Data, Data Validation, Settings. In the Allow box select List and enter =Category into the source box. Don’t forget the equals sign or this won’t work. Tick In cell drop down and click OK. If you’ve missed out a category, don’t worry. You can add a new one at any time, by moving to Sheet 3 and adding them to column A. If you want to keep them in alphabetical order, you’ll need to sort them again as we did before.
You’ve now got to enter each cost as it crops up. See how to do this in the box “logging your expenditure”. You now have a basic spreadsheet that will enable you to see how much you’ve spent on mistletoe and sherry which always shows you how much money you have left. You can now look at ways to improve it. Putting the totals on sheet 2 enabled us to sort the data easily, but what if you want to be able to see them while dealing with the main data entry? You can do this by opening a second window.
Select New Window from the View tab on the Ribbon. You may not yet notice a change because you’ll probably have the same view in the second window which has just opened on top of the original. However, choose Arrange All, Horizontal from the same tab and now you’ll see two identical windows, one on top of the other. In the top window, change to sheet 2 so that you can see the totals. You can resize this window so that only the totals show, giving you more room to work with the main data window.
It can be useful to arrange the spreadsheet data so that you see the same categories together. You can do this by sorting the sheet. Select all the columns that contain data; in this case it’s A to F. Now choose Data, Sort and select the column that you want to sort by. Make sure that “My data has headers” is selected. Click OK to sort. You can opt to sort in a hierarchical fashion so that you sort by category first and then by date. Click Add Level to add a second criterion to sort by.
When you’ve completed your spreadsheet and tracked all your spending you can use it to come up with a total cost of Christmas. You’ll see this as you r total outgoings on sheet 2. To spread the cost of next Christmas over the whole year, you need to divide this by 12, allow a little for inflation and put this amount away each month.
The key to a good Christmas is being organized, remaining calm and providing a number of fun diversions. Thankfully your PC can manage most of these tasks, leaving you with a little more time to enjoy food drink and making merry.
Stay in touch at Christmas
If you can’t be with family and friends get your PC to bring them to you.
As Eastenders constantly reminds us, Christmas is a time for family, but it’s not always possible to be with the ones you love on the big day itself. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t spend some time together. Thanks to voice over IP and videoconferencing you can talk and see each other from thousands of miles away.
Programs like Windows Live Messenger (http://uk.messenger.imagine-live.com) and Skype (www.skype.co.uk) mean it’s possible to call your family for little or no cost other than that of your internet connection. Calls to other instant messenger or Skype users are free but you can also stay in touch via their landlines or mobiles by buying Skype Out credits. Hook up a webcam and microphone to your PC and you can watch each other pulling the crackers and share the corny jokes together.
If you opt to keep in touch by email, why not jazz things up with a little festive stationery? It’s easy enough to make your own and you can help spread the spirit of the season. In Outlook Express or Windows Mail, select Tools, Options, Compose. To make your own letter paper, press the button marked Create New. This starts the Stationery Setup Wizard. Click Next to proceed. Select an image or browse to your own picture file. Choose the position of the graphic from the relevant options. Tiling enables you to repeat it to make a continuous image in a line or all over the page. Select a colour if required and click Next. Select a font, point size and colour before clicking Next again. Text appearing over strong graphics looks busy and is hard to read. Create top and left margins to ensure your writing isn’t superimposed over the pictures. Click Next, supply a filename and press finish to complete the creation of your stationery.
Give your emails a festive touch with some specially designed Christmas stationery.
Tuning up audio and video
Make sure that your relatives can see and hear you when you talk online at Christmas.
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Plug in your microphone and/or camera. Install the drivers if necessary. Check that they have power. Choose Tools, Audio and video setup. This runs a wizard that checks your camera, speakers and microphone. Click next and select the soundcard or speaker set that you’re using.
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Click Play Sound to check your speakers and adjust their volume. Click Next and talk into the microphone and watch the playback indicator. Change the volume and mic position until the indicator stays in the yellow zone when you speak. Click Next.
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Select your camera from the drop down list. You should see the picture that your camera is recording. Adjust your position and that of the camera so that the image is what you’d like others to see. If you need to alter brightness or contrast settings click Options.
Logging your expenditure
Once you’ve set up your spreadsheet, here’s how to use it to track costs.
Having got the basic spreadsheet set up as in the walkthrough, you need to enter your Christmas costs. Start by entering an opening balance, which you can take from an arbitrary date before your Christmas spending begins. Put the date in cell A2 and enter Opening Balance in the Paid to column. Put any positive balance into the paid in column. If you’re overdrawn, put it into the paid out column. You can now start entering the transactions that you want to follow. Put the first one into the A3 to E3. Use the drop down list in column C to select a category for this payment.
Into cell F3 we need to put a formula to work out the balance. Enter =F2+E3-D3 and press enter. Type in the rest of your transactions as you make them. To keep the balance up to date, we can use the formula that we used before. Select F3 and choose Home, Copy. Now select the rest of column F below F3 and choose Home, Paste. The formula will be updated for each of the cells below.
Once you’ve logged a set of transactions in this way, you can get Excel to sort them according to the different headings on your spreadsheet. Sorting the sheet at this stage will mix up the opening balance into your transactions. To exclude it, select the second row by clicking the number 2 on the left hand side. Right click it and choose Hide.
Use the drop down list of categories that you created earlier to assign cost centres.
After the holidays
Christmas chores drag on long after the day itself, but your PC can come to the rescue here, too.
Come Boxing day and the long period after, you can find yourself in a house with restless kids, a glut of cold turkey and a stack of thank you letters to write. You can find out things to do with the leftover turkey by going to http://www.leftoverchef.com/ and you can manage the other two problems by helping your offspring write thank you letters mail merging them in Word. To mail merge, you need a data source and a document that contains place markers for the information that changes. The data can come from an Excel spreadsheet, a table in Word, a database or a contacts list.
In Excel create a simple sheet including the name, address and present given by each generous benefactor. Save this and open Word. Choose Tools, Letters and Mailings, Mail Merge in Word 2003 or select Mailings, Start Mail Merge, Step by step Mail Merge Wizard in Word 2007. This opens a Mail Merge pane on the right hand side of the window. Select letter and opt to use the existing document. Under Select Recipients choose Use existing list. Browse to find your Excel file. Open it and choose the first sheet available. You’ll now see the different records in your data source. If there are any recipients that you don’t want to use, clear the check boxes next to them. Click ok and Next: Write your letter.
Enter the text of the letter that you want to keep common to all documents. When you come to a piece of data that you’d like to vary, click More Items under Recipient Information and select the field that you want to use. Click Insert and Cancel to continue typing. Continue to type your letter, inserting different information in the same way. Merge fields that will change in the final document will appear marked by little curly brackets. Complete your writing and click Next: Preview your letters. This will enable you to see the data in place. Scroll through the different recipients to check that the final letters make sense. Once you’re happy that they do work, select Next: Complete the merge, Edit individual letters, All, OK. This merges the data to a new document, which you can further edit or print out for sending.
Make sure your thank you letters get done, by putting together a mail merge.
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