NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, February 2012
Discovering Windows 7 – Part 14
By Neil Stahfest, Vice President,
Tacoma Area PC User Group, Washington
April 2011 issue, the Data Line
http://www.tapcug.org
NCStahfest (at) msn.com (click to email author)

Do you have trouble seeing the text on your computer’s display? New computer displays come in a wide range of sizes. Twenty years ago an 800 pixel by 600 pixel display was considered to be pretty high resolution. Modern LCD displays are available in a number of sizes that can range from 1024 by 600 pixels to 1920 by 1080 pixels. By default Windows attempts to match your computer’s display setting to the number of pixels in the display to give you the sharpest image possible. Sometimes, particularly if you have a very large display, the text may look to small.

Sometimes, however, your display settings may get changed. If you attach a different display or a projector to your computer may change your settings. When you change back to your original display things may look “different” (icons in new locations and bigger or smaller, text larger or smaller).

Windows 7 makes it easy to check and change your display settings. Just click on the Windows Start button and then the Control Panel. Under Appearance and Personalization, click on Adjust screen resolution. This will produce a window like the one shown here which lets you change the appearance of your display. What we want to look at is the button next to Resolution. As shown, when you click on it a small window with slider appears which shows you the range of settings available to you.

Now that we’ve” conquered” the subject of video settings, let’s talk about file extensions. File extensions are a group of letters at the end of a file name that identifies the type of file for the programs in your computer. For example, if I had a picture on my computer it might be named cat.jpg. The name of the file is cat and the extension .jpg identifies it as a picture file for the Windows Photo Viewer program, as well as other programs that I might have for viewing pictures. Through the magic of Windows, you don’t have to specify a particular program to open or view a file. In our example, just double-clicking on cat.jpg will start the right program so I can see the picture of a cat. I have a new laptop computer. It came with Microsoft Word 2010 on it. My old computer has Word 2003 on it. When you create a document with Word 2010, Word places a file extension of .docx on it. If you create a document using Word 2003 it has a file extension of .doc. Why? Because Microsoft changed something in the way it formats document file with Word 2010. Word 2010 can read .doc files created by Word 2003 but Word 2003 cannot read Word 2010 documents with a .docx file extension. For people like me that use Word 2003 on one computer and Word 2010 on another computer, it means that I can’t read documents created on the new computer on my old computer. Fortunately Microsoft has provided a solution. It lets me save documents created with Word 2010 with the format used by Word 2003 (with a .doc file extension) so I work with the same document on both computers.

Now we get to Part 2 of my problem. By default Windows 7, as well as other versions of Windows, hides file extensions. This means that by just looking at the name of a document, I can’t tell if it was saved as a .doc or .docx file. In older versions of Windows there was a way to unhide file extensions. I did that years ago on my old computer, it was something to do with “folder options” nut I no longer remember how I did it. It doesn’t matter. I want to unhide file extensions on my computer with Windows 7. As it turns out, this is very easy.

Start by clicking on the Windows 7 Start Button. In the Search Box that appears above it, type “folder options.” In the window that appears above the Search Box we’ll see “Folder Options.” We can also see that it is located in the Control Panel, but that isn’t important right now. Just by double-clicking on “Folder Options” gets us to the Folder Options window. Which is what we want? If we click on the view tab (as shown in the illustration) we see a list of Advanced settings, including one that says “Hide extensions for known file types.” Notice the check mark in the box next to it. Click on the box to uncheck it and click “OK” to unhide file extensions.

While we’re here in the Folder Options window, notice that there are a lot of other options. I’ll leave it to you to explore them. Just remember, if you mess things up, just click on the “Reset Folders” button to restore everything to the default settings.

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