How to use Autofill in Excel

If you have a series of data that you want to enter into Excel, it is best to let AutoFill handle it. With AutoFill, your serial data gets automatically populated – you will only need to enter the first value on the list and the software will populate the rest for you.

To use this feature, start by entering the initial values of the row. In the example below, I entered a date for column A and a numeric value for column B. You can use Excel to autofill dates, numbers, and characters.

Select the initial values and drag the black corner at the lower right portion of the selected cells. This is called the Fill handle. Drag this to the 10th row of the sheet.

The output will be a progression of dates from 5/1/2009 to 5/10/2009 and numbers from 1 to 10.

On column A, the values are iterated by 1 day. Column B on the other hand is by 1. Columns 2 to 10 are automatically filled by serial values. This is much easier than typing manually isn’t it? Excel, by default, adds one unit to a series. This works for data types like dates and numbers.

Now what if you need to iterate it using another value? For example, what if we want to iterate by month and by number 2? The trick here is to “train” Excel by feeding it 2 initial rows so it could determine the amount of iteration used. See the example below:

Column A is iterated by 1 month while Column B is iterated by 2. If you select both rows and drag the Fill handle downwards you will see a series like below:

The 1 month and 2 series iterations are automatically detected and it was able to populate the other rows.

I hope this simple yet effective Excel AutoFill tip helps you get your tasks done quicker and easier.

How to display the Links toolbar as icons only in IE 8

I’ve been using Internet Explorer 8 recently and I have to say it’s definitely better than all of the older versions of IE. It’s faster and it’s got some nice features like favorite websites when you open a new tab, private browsing, and more.

The Favorites toolbar (aka Links toolbar) in IE 8 is just like the toolbar in previous versions of IE. You can drag a website to the toolbar and have 1-click access to that website.

What I realized recently, however, is that all of the icons on my links bar usually have favicons from the website. This makes it really easy to figure out which website each icon represents.

The fact is, all those text labels are just eating up space and causing me to only be able to add 5 or 6 links to my Links toolbar. Annoying! So why not just get rid of them and display only icons. You can make your toolbar look clean and simple, like this:

Can you tell which sites those are by the icons? Easily! Here’s how to display only icons on the Favorites toolbar in IE 8:

Step 1: Open IE and right-click on any of the icons in the Links toolbar to pull up the context menu. Make sure you click on one of the links, not the toolbar itself.

Step 2: Now expand Customize Title Widths and choose Icons Only. You can also choose Short Titles if you want to retain the text labels, but make them smaller.

That’s it! Now you can add way more links to your Links toolbar and be more productive! Make sure to add Online Tech Tips

How to track the original location of an email via its IP address

Here’s a quick how-to guide on how you can track email to it’s originating location by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of emails daily due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in!

There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address.

Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how you would do this for Google, Yahoo and Outlook since those are the most popular email clients.

Google’s Gmail

1. Log into your account and open the email in question.

2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list.

Now here’s the technical part that I was telling you about earlier! You need to look for the lines of text that start with “Received: from“. It might be easier to simply press Cntrl + F and perform a search for that phase. You’ll notice that there are several Received From’s in the message header. This is because the message header contains the IP addresses of all of servers involved in routing that email to you.

To find the first computer that originally sent the email, you’ll have to find the Received From that’s farthest DOWN. As you can see from the above image, the first one is from a computer called “aseem” with the IP address 72.204.154.191. Then it was routed to my ISP’s server at eastrmmtao104.cox.net and so on and so forth till it got to your email server.

The computer aseem is my personal home computer and that’s my public IP address for my house! I’ll go through Yahoo and Outlook before talking about tracking the location of that IP address.

Yahoo Mail Beta

1. Log into your account and open the email (if you’re using Yahoo Mail Beta with the new preview interface, make sure you double-click on the email so that it opens in a new tab)

2. At the top right, you’ll see there is a drop-down option where Standard Header is selected by default.

3. Click on it and choose Full Header.

Again, you’ll see the same information as before, just in a different window:

Microsoft Outlook

1. Open the email in Outlook by double-clicking on it

2. Go to View at the top menu (the menu options for the email, not the main Outlook window) and choose Options.

You’ll get a dialog box where you can set the message options and at the bottom you’ll see the Internet Headers box. For some silly reason, the box is very small and you have to scroll a lot, so it’s best to simply copy and paste the text into Notepad to view it more easily.

Tracking the location of an IP address

Now that we have our originating IP address of 72.204.154.191, let’s find out where that is! You can do this by perform a location lookup on the IP address. My favorites are IP2Location and GeoBytes IP Locator.

GeoBytes gave me a big map of New Orleans, LA along with a bunch of other information about the location itself.

IP2Location also gave me the same information pretty much, including the ISP (Cox Communications). Of course, this is correct since I live in New Orleans!

If you want more information, you can do a WHOIS database search also. My favorite one is the

ARIN WHOIS Database Search

. This will give you information on who hosts that IP address and their registration information. You can always contact them to try and find more information on that particular IP address.

Send and receive files from a Bluetooth device to your PC .

If you have a phone with Bluetooth connectivity, it would be easier for you to sometimes use this wireless protocol to send and receive files to and from your computer. For cases when you are in a hurry and you don’t have time to install the software that came with your phone, use Bluetooth to transfer files.

First locate the Bluetooth system tray icon at the lower part of your Windows screen.

Right click this button and click “Enable Bluetooth Radio”

This is a preview of Send and receive files from a Bluetooth device to your PC. Read the full post (243 words, 5 images)

How to change the default media player in Windows

Posted on May 18, 2009 - Filed Under Computer Tips | Leave a Comment

So I have Windows XP and one thing that I don’t like is the fact that Windows Media Player is setup as the default media player for my music, videos, etc. I prefer to use other media players like GOM player or VLC media player to play my media.

VLC Media Player has many of the most popular codecs already built into the program, so you can watch practically any video file without having to download a codec pack. You can easily change the default media player in Windows XP by following these steps:

This is a preview of How to change the default media player in Windows

Send Ctrl-Alt-Delete in a remote desktop session

Remote Desktop is a nifty little windows feature that allows you to remotely connect to another PC and manage it as if you were physically at the console. You can read my previous post on how to setup remote desktop in Windows XP.

When connecting to another machine, just about all keyboard actions are transmitted to the remote machine, i.e. pressing Enter, typing, pressing the Windows key, etc. However, that is not the case for some key combinations.

One that has bothered me for a very long time when using Remote Desktop in Windows is when I press Ctrl + Alt + Del while logged into the remote computer. Instead of sending the key combo to the remote computer, it would instead perform the action on my computer!

This was actually intended by Microsoft because there are many cases where you may not want that to be sent to the remote computer. So, by default, Ctrl + Alt + Del will only work for the local computer.

So how does one perform this same action on the remote computer? It’s pretty easy actually! In order to send Ctrl + Alt + Del to the remote PC, just press the following alternate key combination:

Ctrl + Alt + End

That’s it! Pretty easy eh? Unfortunately, I tend to use Remote Desktop rarely and therefore forget this key combo all the time! Also, note that there are a bunch of other keyboard shortcuts you can use in Remote Desktop:

Alt + Page Up – Switch between programs (Alt + Tab is the local command)

Ctrl + Alt + End – Display the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc is the local command)

Alt + Home – Brings up the Start menu on the remote computer

Ctrl + Alt + (+) Plus/ (-) Minus – Minus takes a snapshot of the active window and plus takes a snapshot of the entire remote desktop window.

Those are pretty much all of the remote desktop keyboard shortcuts you will ever need! If you know of anymore, post a comment! Enjoy!