Mba's Guide to the Internet: The Essential Internet Reference for Business Professionals

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Author: Stephen L. Nelson | Pat Coleman

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MBA’s GUIDE to The Essential Internet Reference for Business Professionals

the internet Electronic Edition

MBA’s GUIDE to The Essential Internet Reference for Business Professionals

the internet Electronic Edition

Stephen L. Nelson Pat Coleman

MBA’s Guide to the Internet The Essential Internet Reference for Business Professionals Copyright © 2000 Stephen L. Nelson and Pat Coleman Electronic Edition All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any method or any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by Redmond Technology Press 8581 154th Avenue NE Redmond, WA 98052 www.redtechpress.com Library of Congress Catalog Card No: applied for ISBN 1-931150-17-6 Printed and bound in the United States of America. 987654321 Distributed by Independent Publishers Group 814 N. Franklin St. Chicago, IL 60610 www.ipgbook.com Product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. In the preparation of this book, both the author and the publisher have made every effort to provide current, correct, and comprehensible information. Nevertheless, inadvertent errors can occur and software and the principles and regulations concerning business often change. Furthermore, the application and impact of principles, rules, and laws can vary widely from case to case because of the unique facts involved. For these reasons, the author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability or loss that is incurred as a consequence of the use and application, directly or indirectly, of any information presented in this book. If legal or other expert assistance is needed, the services of a professional should be sought.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

Contents at a Glance Introduction ............................................................ xxxi Part 1

QuickPrimers™

1

Chapter 1

Understanding the Internet ...................................... 3

Chapter 2

Connecting to the Internet ..................................... 19

Chapter 3

Using Internet Explorer ........................................... 55

Chapter 4

Using Outlook Express ............................................. 91

Chapter 5

Newsgroups and Mailing Lists .............................. 131

Chapter 6

Reviewing the Other Internet Services ................ 147

Chapter 7

Privacy and Security on the Internet .................... 165

Contents at a Glance

v

Part 2

Internet Business Resources

187

Chapter 8

Internet Search Services ......................................... 189

Chapter 9

Using Fee-Based Internet Business Information Resources ........................................... 233

Chapter 10

Using Free Internet Business Resources ................ 263

Chapter 11

Using Government Web Resources ...................... 289

Chapter 12

Using Wireless Web and E-Mail Services .............. 319

Part 3

Internet Business Projects

327

Chapter 13

Setting Up a Web Site Using FrontPage .............. 329

Chapter 14

Publishing PowerPoint Presentations to the Web .............................................................. 365

Chapter 15

Setting Up a Web Store ......................................... 405

Chapter 16

Setting Up an Intranet ........................................... 421

Chapter 17

Publishing an E-Mail Newsletter ........................... 433

Chapter 18

Using the Internet for Recruiting and Job Searching .................................................. 449

Chapter 19

Setting Up and Using Online Banking ................. 475

Chapter 20

Setting Up and Using Online Investing ................ 501

vi

MBA’s Guide to the Internet - Electronic Edition

Part 4

Appendixes

535

Appendix A

Using Netscape Navigator and Messenger ............................................................... 537

Appendix B

Using Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition ..................................................................... 559

Appendix C

Using Outlook Express Macintosh Edition ..................................................................... 589 Glossary ................................................................... 627 Index........................................................................ 649

Contents at a Glance

vii

Contents

Introduction

xxxi

Why This Book .......................................................................... xxxi What’s in This Book ................................................................. xxxii Conventions Used in This Book .............................................. xxxiii

Part 1

Chapter 1

QuickPrimers™

1

Understanding the Internet

3

Defining the Internet ...................................................................... 4 Understanding How the Internet Works ........................................5 Understanding the Architecture ................................................ 5 Understanding the Protocols ..................................................... 5 Understanding How Information Travels ................................. 6 Who Is in Charge of the Internet? ........................................... 6 A Short History of the Internet ...................................................... 8 Comparing the Internet and Other Technologies ..................... 9 ix

What Can a Business User Do on the Internet? .......................... 10 Understanding Internet Connections ........................................... 12 Internet Connection Devices .................................................. 12 Getting an Account with an Internet Service Provider ........... 13 Four Sites for Business Newcomers to the Internet ...................... 14 Summary ....................................................................................... 17

Chapter 2

Connecting to the Internet

19

Connecting to the Internet via Modem ........................................ 20 How Does a Modem Work? ................................................... 20 Installing a Modem ................................................................. 21 Setting Up a Modem ............................................................... 23 Setting Up Dialing Rules ........................................................ 24 Setting Up Your Internet Connection ..................................... 26 Connecting to the Internet via Cable Modem .............................. 28 How Does a Cable Modem Work? ......................................... 28 Getting Connected.................................................................. 29 Connecting to the Internet via DSL ............................................. 30 How Does DSL Work? ........................................................... 30 Getting Connected.................................................................. 31 Connecting to the Internet via ISDN ........................................... 31 How Does ISDN Work? ......................................................... 31 Getting Connected.................................................................. 32 How Fast Is Fast Enough? ..................................................... 33 Sharing an Internet Connection ................................................... 34 Setting Up the Internet Sharing Computer ............................ 34 x


Setting Up Clients ................................................................... 41 Sharing a High-Speed Connection ......................................... 46 Connecting to a Corporate Network ............................................. 47 Using a Phone Line ................................................................ 48 Setting Up a Calling Card ....................................................... 50 Using a VPN Tunnel ............................................................... 52 Summary ....................................................................................... 54

Chapter 3

Using Internet Explorer

55

Understanding How a Web Browser Works ................................. 56 Opening Internet Explorer ............................................................ 57 A Word About URLs .............................................................. 58 Understanding the Internet Explorer Window ....................... 59 Exploring the Web ........................................................................ 60 Using the Address Bar ............................................................. 60 Navigating with Hyperlinks .................................................... 61 Using the Favorites List ................................................................ 62 Keeping Track of Favorite Sites ............................................... 63 Organizing Favorites ............................................................... 64 Using the History List .................................................................. 64 E-Mailing Pages and Links .......................................................... 65 Listening to the Radio over the Web ............................................ 66 Saving and Printing Web Pages .................................................... 67 Searching the Web ........................................................................ 70 Doing a Basic Search .............................................................. 71 Broadening a Search................................................................ 73 Contents

xi

Dealing with Cookies and Temporary Internet Files .................... 75 Customizing Internet Explorer ..................................................... 78 Personalizing General Settings................................................ 78 Establishing Security Levels for Zones ................................... 82 Establishing Other Security Settings ...................................... 85 Modifying or Creating an Internet or Network Connection .. 88 Specifying Programs to Use for Internet Services ................... 89 Specifying Advanced Options ................................................. 90 Summary ....................................................................................... 90

Chapter 4

Using Outlook Express

91

Understanding How E-Mail Works ............................................. 92 Touring the Outlook Express Window ......................................... 93 Managing Messages ..................................................................... 95 Saving Messages ..................................................................... 97 Printing Messages ................................................................... 98 Marking Messages .................................................................. 98 Replying to Messages .............................................................. 99 Forwarding Messages .............................................................. 99 Deleting Messages ................................................................ 100 Creating and Sending Messages ................................................. 101 Using HTML ....................................................................... 102 Using Stationery .................................................................... 103 Attaching Files to Messages ....................................................... 104

xii


Including a Personalized Signature ............................................. 106 Blocking Messages ...................................................................... 107 Using Identities ........................................................................... 111 Keeping Track of Contact Information ....................................... 112 Adding Information for an Individual ................................... 113 Setting Up a Distribution List ............................................... 114 Finding People ...................................................................... 116 Printing Your Address Book .................................................. 116 Creating and Printing a Map ................................................ 117 Customizing Outlook Express .................................................... 118 Specifying General Options .................................................. 118 Specifying What Happens When You Read Messages or News ................................................................................. 119 Handling Return Receipts ..................................................... 120 Managing How Messages Are Sent ..................................... 121 Changing Fonts, Specifying Stationery, and Using Business Cards ..................................................................................... 122 Checking Spelling ................................................................. 123 Enhancing Security ............................................................... 125 Configuring Your Internet Connection................................. 125 Cleaning the Outlook Express House ................................... 126 Taking Charge of Your Wired Office .......................................... 127 Summary ..................................................................................... 129

Contents

xiii

Chapter 5

Newsgroups and Mailing Lists

131

Working with Newsgroups .......................................................... 131 Setting Up a Newsgroup Account ......................................... 132 Connecting to Newsgroups ................................................... 135 Finding a Topic of Interest .................................................... 136 Using the Web to Find Newsgroups ..................................... 137 Posting to a Newsgroup ......................................................... 138 Using Mailing Lists .................................................................... 139 How Mailing Lists Work ...................................................... 139 Subscribing and Unsubscribing ............................................. 141 Finding Business Mailing Lists ............................................ 142 Mailing List Etiquette ........................................................... 144 Starting Your Own Mailing List ........................................... 145 Mailing Lists Made Easy ...................................................... 145 Summary ..................................................................................... 146

Chapter 6

Reviewing the Other Internet Services

147

Downloading Files with FTP ..................................................... 145 Connecting via Telnet ................................................................. 149 Faxing at Your Computer ............................................................ 150 Receiving a Fax ..................................................................... 152 Using Phone Dialer ..................................................................... 153 Making a Voice Call .............................................................. 153 Receiving Calls ...................................................................... 154 Using an Internet Directory .................................................. 154 Making a Video Call ............................................................. 155 xiv


Using HyperTerminal .................................................................. 156 Establishing a HyperTerminal Connection ........................... 156 Transferring Files with HyperTerminal ................................. 158 Using NetMeeting ...................................................................... 159 Placing a Call ........................................................................ 160 Chatting on the Screen ......................................................... 161 Using the Other NetMeeting Applications .......................... 162 Visiting Chat Rooms ................................................................... 163 Summary ..................................................................................... 163

Chapter 7

Privacy and Security on the Internet

165

Another Point of View .......................................................... 166 Information on the Internet About You and Your Business ....... 167 How to Protect Yourself ........................................................ 169 Your Credit Card and the Internet .............................................. 170 How to Protect Yourself ........................................................ 171 Privacy Policies and the Internet ................................................. 174 How to Protect Yourself ........................................................ 175 Internet Databases and Information About You ......................... 176 How to Protect Yourself ........................................................ 178 E-Mail and Security .................................................................... 180 How to Protect Yourself ........................................................ 182 Encryption............................................................................. 183 Information on the Internet About Privacy and Security ............ 184 Summary ..................................................................................... 185

Contents

xv

Part 2

Chapter 8


187

Internet Search Services

189

Understanding How Search Services Work ................................ 190 Understanding How Portals and Metasearch Software Works ... 192 Searching with Keywords ............................................................ 193 Searching for a Phrase ........................................................... 195 Searching for All the Words .................................................. 195 Using the NOT Operator ...................................................... 196 Using Wildcards .................................................................... 196 Important Search Services for Business Users ............................ 197 AltaVista ................................................................................ 197 Ask Jeeves .............................................................................. 199 Another Good Site for Existing Searches ............................. 201 Dogpile .................................................................................. 202 Go .......................................................................................... 204 Google ................................................................................... 205 Go2Net ................................................................................. 208 HotBot .................................................................................. 209 LookSmart ............................................................................. 210 Lycos ..................................................................................... 212 Northern Light ...................................................................... 213 Yahoo! .................................................................................... 214 Choosing a Search Service .................................................... 215

xvi


Introducing Copernic 2000: Metasearch Software ..................... 217 Downloading and Installing Copernic 2000 ......................... 218 Using Copernic 2000............................................................. 223 Gathering Business Information ................................................. 226 Summary ..................................................................................... 231

Chapter 9

Using Fee-Based Internet Business Information Resources

233

Dun & Bradstreet ........................................................................ 234 Reports Available ................................................................... 234 Using the Service .................................................................. 236 Assessing the Dun & Bradstreet Service .............................. 239 The Economist ............................................................................ 239 Lexis-Nexis News Retrieval Service ............................................ 242 Getting Started ...................................................................... 243 Researching Financial Information ....................................... 244 Researching Company Information ...................................... 246 Researching Industry News .................................................. 247 Researching News About an Individual ................................ 249 Researching Product News ................................................... 251 Caveats About Using Lexis-Nexis ........................................ 252 The Wall Street Journal ............................................................... 252 Personalized E-Mail .............................................................. 254 Personal Journals ................................................................... 254

Contents

xvii

Company Briefing Books ...................................................... 258 Searchable 30-Day Archive ................................................... 259 Reviewing the Publications Library ...................................... 260 Caveats About the wsj.com Web Site ................................... 261 Summary ..................................................................................... 261

Chapter 10

Using Free Internet Business Resources

263

Travel Service Web Sites ............................................................. 263 Online Travel Agents ............................................................ 264 Airline Web Sites .................................................................. 267 Other Business Traveler Information Sources ....................... 270 Investor Information Web Sites .................................................. 274 Product Support Knowledge Base Web Sites .............................. 275 ISP Web Sites ............................................................................. 279 America Online .................................................................... 279 MSN’s bCentral and MoneyCentral ..................................... 281 Other ISP Web Site Resources ............................................. 283 Online Business Information Directories ................................... 284 D-Net .................................................................................... 284 Financial Times Business Directory ...................................... 285 Hoover’s Online .................................................................... 286 Kompass ................................................................................ 287 Yahoo! .................................................................................... 287 Summary ..................................................................................... 288

xviii


Chapter 11

Using Government W eb Resources Web

289

Bureau of Economic Analysis ..................................................... 290 Information Available at the BEA Web Site ........................ 291 Downloading a BEA Publication .......................................... 291 Uncompressing a BEA Publication ...................................... 292 Using BEA Publications ....................................................... 293 Bureau of Labor Statistics ........................................................... 293 Information Available at the BLS Web Site ......................... 294 Using BLS Information ........................................................ 292 Using Adobe Acrobat Reader ................................................ 298 Census Bureau............................................................................. 298 Information Available at the Census Bureau Web Site ......... 299 Using Census Bureau Publications ....................................... 300 Using the Census Bureau Search Engine ............................. 301 Using the Census Bureau Site Index ..................................... 301 EDGAR ...................................................................................... 302 Information Available Through EDGAR ............................. 303 Searching the EDGAR Database ......................................... 304 Federal Reserve ............................................................................ 309 Information Available at the Federal Reserve Web Site ........ 310 Using the Federal Reserve Information................................. 311 Government Printing Office Access Database ........................... 311 Information Available at the GPO Access Database Web Site ................................................................................ 312 Searching the GPO Access Database ................................... 312

Contents

xix

Using Complex Search Criteria ............................................. 313 Using the Publications List .................................................. 314 Internal Revenue Service ............................................................. 315 Summary ..................................................................................... 318

Chapter 12

Using Wireless W eb and E-Mail Services 319 Web What to Expect ........................................................................... 319 Cell Phones ................................................................................. 320 E-Mail-Capable Pagers ............................................................... 321 PDAs ........................................................................................... 322 Palm OS Devices ................................................................... 322 Microsoft Pocket PC Devices ............................................... 324 Laptops ........................................................................................ 325 Summary ..................................................................................... 325

Part 3

Chapter 13


327

Setting Up a W eb Site Using FrontPage 329 Web Step 1: Learning How Web Pages Work .................................... 330 Introducing HTML Code .................................................... 330 New Web Page Technologies ................................................ 333 Step 2: Developing a Web Strategy ............................................. 333 Why Does It Make Sense to Have a Web Site? ................... 333 What Makes for Good Web Content? ................................. 336 How Should a Web Site Be Developed? ............................... 337 Step 3: Setting Up Your Domain................................................. 338 Picking a Domain Name ....................................................... 338

xx


Choosing a Web Hosting Service ......................................... 340 Where to Find a Web Hosting Company ............................ 342 Signing Up for Service .......................................................... 343 Step 4: Collecting and Creating Digital Content ....................... 343 Collecting Existing Digital Content ..................................... 343 Creating New Digital Content .............................................. 345 Creating New Documents .................................................... 346 Step 5: Creating Your Web Pages................................................ 347 Starting with a Wizard .......................................................... 347 Importing Text ....................................................................... 348 Entering and Formatting Text ............................................... 349 Creating Hyperlinks .............................................................. 349 Inserting Images .................................................................... 350 Step 6: Testing Your Web Site ..................................................... 350 Verifying Hyperlinks .............................................................. 350 Testing Your Site in Different Browsers ................................ 351 Usability Testing .................................................................... 354 Step 7: Publishing Your Web Site ............................................... 354 Step 8: Publicizing Your Web Site............................................... 355 Submitting Your Site to Search Engines and Directories ...... 356 Online Advertising ................................................................ 359 Using Newsgroups to Gain Exposure ................................... 361 Creating a Mailing List ......................................................... 362 Offline Publicizing ................................................................ 363 Summary ..................................................................................... 363

Contents

xxi

Chapter 14

Publishing PowerPoint Presentations to the W eb Web

365

Creating a Web Presentation ...................................................... 366 A QuickPrimer on PowerPoint.............................................. 366 Using the AutoContent Wizard to Create an Outline .......... 370 Working on Your Outline ...................................................... 376 Adding Objects to Your Slides............................................... 382 Designing the Look of Your Presentation................................... 396 Using a Design Template ...................................................... 396 Customizing the Master Slides ............................................. 398 Formatting an Object ............................................................ 399 Using the Formatting Toolbar ............................................... 400 Publishing a Presentation to the Web ......................................... 401 Viewing a Presentation on the Web ............................................ 402 Summary ..................................................................................... 403

Chapter 15

Setting Up a W eb Store Web

405

What Is a Web Store? ................................................................. 405 Using an Inventory Database ................................................ 408 Setting Up a Non-Interactive Web Store .................................... 408 Setting Up a Simple Interactive Web Store................................. 411 Creating an Order Form ........................................................ 411 Filling Out the Order Form ................................................... 417 Processing an Order Form ..................................................... 418 Reviewing Other Web Store Options ......................................... 419 Summary ..................................................................................... 419 xxii


Chapter 16

Setting Up an Intranet

421

Is an Intranet Right for Your Business? ...................................... 422 Planning Content ....................................................................... 423 Setting Up Your Intranet ............................................................. 425 Using Windows 2000 Professional and Internet Information Services ............................................................. 426 Using Windows 98 and Personal Web Server ....................... 428 Summary ..................................................................................... 432

Chapter 17

Publishing an E-Mail Newsletter

433

Will a Newsletter Help Your Business? ....................................... 434 Getting Started ............................................................................ 436 Publishing Methods .................................................................... 438 Publishing with Outlook Express .......................................... 439 Publishing with a List-Hosting Service ................................ 440 Using List-Management Software ........................................ 441 Guidelines for Producing an Award-Winning Newsletter .......... 442 Adhering to the Editorial Process ......................................... 443 Creating a Publishing Schedule ............................................ 448 Summary ..................................................................................... 448

Chapter 18

Using the Internet for Recruiting and Job Searching

449

Recruiting on the Internet ........................................................... 450 Posting a Job Opening ........................................................... 450 Posting a Job at Monster.com................................................ 455 Finding Résumés ................................................................... 456 Contents

xxiii

Other Ways to Publicize Your Job Openings on the Internet .................................................................................. 458 More Internet Recruiting Resources ..................................... 459 Seven Tips for Recruiting Online .......................................... 460 Job Searching on the Internet ..................................................... 461 Preparing Your Electronic Résumé ........................................ 461 A Word About Keywords ...................................................... 463 Formatting Your Electronic Résumé ..................................... 465 Seven Sure Ways to Sabotage Your Résumé and Your Job Search .................................................................................... 468 Posting Your Résumé............................................................. 469 Creating an Electronic Cover Letter ..................................... 469 Searching for Jobs .................................................................. 470 Summary ..................................................................................... 473

Chapter 19

Setting Up and Using Online Banking

475

Understanding Online Banking .................................................. 476 Online Bill Payment .............................................................. 476 Online Account Transfers ..................................................... 477 Online Bank Statements ....................................................... 477 Prerequisites for Using Online Banking ..................................... 477 Caveats About Online Bill Payment ..................................... 478 Signing Up for Online Banking Services .............................. 479 Using Online Bill Payment ......................................................... 479 Setting Up an Account for Online Bill Payment .................. 479 Describing Electronic Payees ................................................ 481

xxiv


Paying a Bill with Online Bill Payment ................................. 482 Sending Electronic Payments................................................ 483 Online Bill Payment and Security ......................................... 484 Making Recurring Online Payments .................................... 485 Troubleshooting Problems with Electronic Payments .......... 487 Prerequisites for Using Online Account Transfers and Statements ............................................................................ 490 Signing Up for Online Account Transfers and Statements... 490 Setting Up for Online Account Transfers and Statements.... 491 Using Online Account Transfers and Statements ....................... 492 Transferring Funds Between Accounts ................................. 492 Retrieving Online Account Statements ................................ 493 Approving Online Transactions ............................................ 494 Corresponding with the Bank ............................................... 496 Reconciling an Online Bank Account .................................. 497 Summary ..................................................................................... 499

Chapter 20

Setting Up and Using Online Investing

501

What Is Online Investing? ......................................................... 502 Picking a Broker .......................................................................... 502 Considering Net Investment Costs ....................................... 502 Considering Investment Services .......................................... 503 Signing Up for an Account ................................................... 504 Choosing an Online Portfolio ............................................... 504 How Online Investing Works ..................................................... 504 Connecting to the Broker’s Web Site .................................... 505

Contents

xxv

Buying and Selling Securities Online .................................... 506 Resources for Online Investors ................................................... 511 Investing in Stocks ................................................................ 511 Quote.Yahoo.com .................................................................. 512 Wall Street Research Net ...................................................... 512 Record-Keeping for Online Investing ......................................... 512 Downloading Investment Records ........................................ 512 Keeping Manual Investment Records ................................... 514 Accrued Interest and the 1099-OID Form ........................... 530 Understanding Quicken’s Annual Return Calculations ........ 532 Summary ..................................................................................... 533

Part 4

Appendix A

Appendixes

535

Using Netscape Navigator and Messenger

537

Obtaining and Installing Netscape Communicator .................... 538 Installing Netscape Navigator ............................................... 541 Opening Netscape Navigator ................................................ 541 Exploring Netscape Navigator .................................................... 543 The Menu Bar ....................................................................... 544 The File Menu ...................................................................... 544 The Edit Menu ..................................................................... 545 The View Menu .................................................................... 545 The Go Menu ....................................................................... 546 The Communicator Menu .................................................... 546

xxvi


The Navigation Toolbar ......................................................... 548 The Location Toolbar ............................................................ 549 The Personal Toolbar ............................................................. 549 The Floating Component Bar .............................................. 550 Using Bookmarks ........................................................................ 550 Adding and Opening a Bookmark ........................................ 551 Creating a Bookmark Folder ................................................. 552 Placing a Bookmark Button on the Personal Toolbar ........... 552 Managing Bookmarks ........................................................... 552 Searching the Internet................................................................. 553 Using Netscape Messenger ......................................................... 554 Customizing Netscape Navigator................................................ 557

Appendix B

Using Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition

559

Understanding How a Web Browser Works ............................... 560 Opening Internet Explorer .......................................................... 561 A Word About URLs ............................................................ 562 Understanding the Internet Explorer Window ..................... 563 Exploring the Web ...................................................................... 564 Using the Address Bar ........................................................... 564 Using AutoComplete ............................................................ 564 Navigating with Hyperlinks .................................................. 567 Using the Page Holder .......................................................... 567 Using the Favorites List .............................................................. 569 Adding to the Favorites List.................................................. 569 Contents

xxvii

Organizing the Favorites List ................................................ 570 Using the History List ................................................................ 572 E-Mailing Pages and Links ........................................................ 573 Saving Web Pages ....................................................................... 573 Creating Internet Scrapbooks ..................................................... 574 Printing Web Pages ..................................................................... 576 Searching the Web ...................................................................... 577 Doing a Basic Search ............................................................ 578 Broadening a Search.............................................................. 580 Downloading Files ...................................................................... 582 Dealing with Cookies and Temporary Internet Files .................. 583 Dealing with Cookies ............................................................ 583 Changing History Settings ................................................... 584 Modifying Internet Explorer’s Cache .................................... 585 Changing Your Home Page ........................................................ 586 Summary ..................................................................................... 587

Appendix C

Using Outlook Express Macintosh Edition

589

Understanding How E-Mail Works ........................................... 590 Setting Up Outlook Express ........................................................ 592 Importing Settings................................................................. 592 Setting Up an Existing Mail Account ................................... 594 Signing Up for a Hotmail Account ....................................... 596 Touring the Outlook Express Window ....................................... 597

xxviii


Reading and Managing Messages .............................................. 599 Saving Messages ................................................................... 600 Printing Messages ................................................................. 602 Marking Messages ................................................................ 603 Replying to Messages ............................................................ 603 Forwarding Messages ............................................................ 604 Deleting Messages ................................................................ 605 Creating and Sending Messages ................................................. 606 Formatting Text ..................................................................... 608 Attaching Files to Messages ................................................. 609 Including a Personalized Signature ....................................... 612 Creating Message Rules .............................................................. 615 Using Identities ........................................................................... 617 Keeping Track of Contact Information ....................................... 618 Adding Information for an Individual ................................... 619 Setting Up a Distribution List ............................................... 620 Finding People ...................................................................... 621 Customizing Outlook Express .................................................... 622 Specifying General Options .................................................. 622 Specifying What Happens When You Read Messages or News ................................................................................. 623 Managing How Messages Are Sent ..................................... 623 Checking Spelling ................................................................. 624 Taking Charge of Your Wired Office .......................................... 625 Summary ..................................................................................... 626

Contents

xxix

xxx

Glossary

627

Index

649


INTRODUCTION

Y

ou are unique among readers. Almost nobody reads the Introduction to a book like this. However, you’ll benefit by taking a few minutes to read through this introductory material. Its purpose is to help you maximize your return on the investment you’ve made in this book—your investment in money and especially your even more costly investment in time.

Why This Book Bookstore shelves are packed with guides to the Internet, the biggest network on the planet. So why this book? Because although many fine books have been written about the Internet, there really isn’t a book targeted specifically for business users of the Internet. Other books give you a great deal of information about the Internet and some useful information about how to access it, but don’t give the sorts of detailed commentary and advice useful to business people. Business users of the Internet benefit by having a reference that emphasizes, talks from the point of view, and focuses on the business aspects of the Internet. In short, business users of the Internet need a book that talks about the Internet as a business tool. MBA’s Guide to the Internet is the only book that specifically describes how you can more easily, more productively, and more powerfully use the Internet in business. Although this book’s title references the popular business professional degree, MBA, this book will also be of use to people without MBAs. MBA students, for example, will find this book useful. People with graduate degrees in accounting, public administration, economics, and related fields will find this book useful as well.

xxxi

In addition, anyone who’s finished a good undergraduate program in business or a related field (like accounting) will feel comfortable and gain skills using this book as a desktop reference.

What’ What’ss in This Book The easiest way to see what’s in this book is to turn to the table of contents. It lists each chapter and each chapter’s contents in rich detail. The chapters in this book fall into four parts: Chapters 1 through 7 provide fast-paced but friendly tutorials on programs and services you use to access the Internet. In a nutshell, these seven QuickPrimers™ move you to professional proficiency in using the Internet—even if you’re new to it. If you don’t need this help, of course, you can easily skip these primers. We suggest, however, that even if you already know how to use Microsoft Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and some of the other services, you read Chapter 7, which discusses privacy and security on the Internet. This topic continues to stay near the top of the current events news and is of particular interest to business users. Chapters 8 through 12 provide detailed coverage of several topics of interest to business users of the Internet—topics that are short-changed in books that have to be everything to everybody. Chapter 8, for example, explains how to gather specific types of business information from sites that you can search on the Internet. Chapters 10 and 11 point you toward a number of free and governmental business resources. Chapters 13 through 20 describe how to set up real-life business projects using the Internet—a Web site, a PowerPoint presentation that you can publish to the Web, a Web store, an intranet, an e-mail newsletter, and an online investment portfolio. In addition, chapters in this part of the book discuss how to use the Internet for recruiting, job searching, and online banking. Appendixes A, B, and C explain how to use other popular software products and operating systems to access the Internet. A glossary of Internet terms helps you sort out the language of the “net.”

xxxii


Conventions Used in This Book In this book, the illustrations and the steps for processes primarily assume the use of Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, the most recent release in the Windows family of operating systems. If you have an earlier version of Windows, the steps and what you see on the screen will be similar, but not identical. When you have a question, check out Windows Help. To identify screen elements, the first letter of each word in the description is capitalized. This convention may look a bit strange at first, but it makes it easier to understand some instruction as “click the Print Table Of Links check box.” You’ll also find Notes, Tips, and Warnings, which point out tidbits of useful information. Pay attention to Warnings; they help you avoid potential problems. A few sidebars are also scattered throughout. Sidebars contain helpful information that is not necessarily directly related to the topic at hand, or they may discuss in detail a subject that is mentioned in the running text but which is not elaborated on. One final point: you’ll find many, many URLs (Web site addresses) in this book. If you don’t know already, you will quickly find out that the Internet is an exceedingly dynamic environment. Web sites come and go, and, if their Webmasters are doing their jobs properly, content changes frequently. The best sites will reroute you to their site if their URL changes. If you come to a dead end, try using one of the search services discussed in Chapter 8 to find the site.

Introduction

xxxiii

Part 1

QuickPrimers™

In This Part Chapter 1


3

Chapter 2

Connecting to the Internet

19

Chapter 3


55

Chapter 4


91

Chapter 5


Chapter 6

Reviewing the Other Internet Services 147

Chapter 7


131

165

1

Chapter 1

UNDERST ANDING THE INTERNET UNDERSTANDING

Featuring: • Defining the Internet • Understanding How the Internet Works • A Short History of the Internet • What Can a Business User Do on the Internet? • Understanding Internet Connections • Four Sites for Business Newcomers to the Internet

H

ow important is the Internet? Here is how some U.S. business leaders answered that question:

• “I don’t think there’s been anything more important or more widespread in all my years at GE. Where does the Internet rank in priority? It’s No. 1, 2, 3, and 4.” ( Jack Welch, chairman and CEO, General Electric) • “In the mental geography of e-commerce, distance has been eliminated. There is only one economy and only one market.” (Peter Drucker, known as the “father of modern management”) • “It is easy to make the case for the Internet that no technology has evolved so quickly to touch the lives of so many around the world.” (C. Michael Armstrong, chairman and CEO, AT&T)

3

• “As we approach a new millennium, the Internet is revolutionizing our society, our economy, and our technological systems. No one knows for certain how far, or in what direction, the Internet will evolve. But no one should underestimate its importance.” (Robert E. Kahn, chairman, CEO, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives; and Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president, Internet Architecture and Technology, MCI WorldCom, Inc.) It’s pretty clear—if you’re in the business world today, you need to be on the Internet. Since 1988, the total number of host computers and users has been growing at about 33 percent every six months. In contrast, telephone service grows on average between 5 and 10 percent a year (even counting the proliferation of cell phones). This chapter is an introduction to the Internet—what it is, how it works, where it came from, and how business professionals can use it to increase efficiency and productivity.

Defining the Internet What is the Internet? The short answer is that the Internet is a worldwide network of networks, which raises the question, what is a network? By definition, a network is a group of computers and peripheral devices (such as printers, modems, and so on) that are connected in some way so that their users can share files and other resources. A network can be as simple as two computers in a small office or in a home connected via a communications cable. A more complex network, a local area network (LAN), can connect many computers via a communications cable. Yet a still more complex kind of network is a wide area network (WAN). A WAN is any network that crosses metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries, and so you could say that the Internet is the largest WAN on the planet. The Internet is actually a specific type of WAN—a collection of interconnected networks, which is technically an internetwork. Internet, then, is short for the term internetwork. NOTE

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According to the Federal Networking Council, the term Internet refers to the “global information system that is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/ follow-ons; is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and provides, uses, or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high-level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.” The next section explains this in a more comprehensible fashion.


Understanding How the Internet W orks Works When you send or receive information over the Internet, the process can seem almost instantaneous—under ideal conditions. But the way that information travels over the Internet is fairly complex. We’ll look at the parts and pieces that make it happen a bit later in this section, but first we need to look at two underlying mechanisms that are responsible for the existence of the Internet: client/server architecture and the TCP/IP family of protocols.

Understanding the Architecture Some people say that the real secret to the Internet is an arrangement based on programs called clients and servers. Simply put, a server is a program that provides a service, and a client is a program that requests a service. A server program resides on a computer that is also called a server because it stores the information that the client requests. For example, you have an e-mail program on your computer; it is a client. When you use this client program to send a message over the Internet, it contacts an e-mail server program on another computer, which could be in the same office building or on the other side of the world. That mail server program ensures that your message is delivered to the address you specified. Client programs reside on your computer, but server programs reside on remote computers. Remote doesn’t mean on a desert island, but just some place outside your office or home. The client could care less about where the server is. Now all these client and server programs on the Internet are not all running on the same kinds of computers or on the same operating system. You can access the Internet with a Macintosh computer, with a terminal attached to a mainframe, from a computer that is running the Unix or Linux operating system, from a computer that is running any of several versions of Microsoft Windows, and so on. And the server program you access could also be running on any of a number of different configurations. What makes this possible is that all these computers and programs abide by the same set of communications rules, known as protocols. In particular, the Internet uses the TCP/IP family of protocols.

Understanding the Protocols When information goes out over the Internet, it is sent in chunks called packets. The Internet Protocol moves these packets from one place to another, and the Transmission Control Protocol manages the flow of packets and ensures that the information arrives intact and without errors. Thus, TCP/IP is the mechanism that keeps the Internet running. Chapter 1


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Table 1-1 lists and explains some of the other important Internet protocols, some of which will be discussed in Chapter 6. PROTOCOL

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

Copies files between computers.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Manages communications between a Web browser and a Web server.

Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP)

Defines how users can store e-mail messages on a server and retrieve them at will.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Searches a directory of e-mail addresses. Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)

Distributes newsgroup messages, such as from Usenet.

Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP)

Connects a computer to the Internet.

Post Office Protocol (POP)

Retrieves messages from an e-mail server, storing the messages locally.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)

Facilitates the sending of e-mail messages.

Telnet

Allows you to log on to a remote computer as a terminal.

Table 1-1

NOTE

Some important Internet protocols.

An intranet is a network that is internal to a corporation or organization and uses Internet technology, including the client/server architecture and TCP/IP.

Understanding How Information T ravels Travels After information is broken into packets and begins its journey from one computer to another over the Internet, it can travel through many computers, networks, and hardware devices. Here are some of the most important hardware devices: • Hubs, which link groups of computers and allow them to communicate. Most hubs are also repeaters. • Bridges, which link LANs. • Gateways, which are similar to bridges but also translate information from one kind of network to a different kind of network. 6


• Repeaters, which amplify the information at various intervals so that the signal doesn’t weaken. Repeaters are important when information has to travel long distances. • Routers (often called gateways), which ensure that packets always arrive at the destination for which they are intended. Routers also monitor the traffic on the Internet and, when necessary, send packets to a router that is closer to the ultimate destination. • Backbones, which carry most of the traffic on the Internet. A backbone can connect several locations, and other, smaller networks can be connected to a backbone. Most backbones are very high speed and can transmit enormous quantities of data, ranging from hundreds of megabits per second to many gigabits per second.

Who Is in Charge of the Internet? No one. No one runs the Internet, and no one owns the Internet, and yet it seems to work just fine. Of course, the Internet is composed of many smaller networks, and many of these networks are managed by corporations, governments, and all sorts of other organizations, but no one entity or person is in charge of the Internet. In the early days of the Internet (and we’ll look at that next), anarchy reigned, and to some extent it still does, despite numerous attempts by governments to pass legislation that would tax the Internet, prohibit certain kinds of activity over the Internet, monitor or track e-mail, and so on. This sort of regulation is, of course, anathema to the pioneers of the Internet and to most technology professionals. In Chapter 7, we’ll look at Internet privacy and security issues, and, in that context, it’s important to remember that no one thing or person controls the Internet. The Internet is directed by a group of volunteers called the Internet Society (ISOC), which promotes cooperation and coordination for the Internet, Internet applications, and Internet technologies. In addition, the ISOC coordinates the activities of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which works out issues of standards, network resources, and so on; the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which handles day-to-day issues of Internet operation; the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which is a clearinghouse for Internet addresses, protocol variables, and domain names; and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), which creates long- and short-term research groups that concentrate on protocols, architecture, and technology issues. For information about the Internet Society, go to http://www.isoc.org.

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A Short History of the Internet Harley Hahn, a recognized Internet expert, said recently something to the effect that the Internet is relatively new, but that it’s going to be around for the rest of our lives and long after we are gone. We agree with most of that statement, but the Internet is kind of also not “new.” It evolved through a series of developments in the academic, governmental, and information technology communities, and it’s instructive to take a look at some of these developments: • In 1969, ARPAnet, an experimental four-computer network, was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense as a backup communication system in case of a nuclear attack and so that scientists could communicate. • By 1971, the date that is usually marked as the official beginning of the Internet, ARPAnet comprised almost two dozen sites, including MIT and Harvard. By 1974, ARPAnet comprised 62 sites, and by 1981, more than 200 sites. • During the 1980s, more and more computers using different operating systems were connected. This was made possible by the standardization of TCP/IP, which in 1983 became the official transport mechanism for all connections to ARPAnet. • In 1983, the military portion of ARPAnet was moved onto the MILnet, and ARPAnet was officially disbanded in 1990. • In the late 1980s, the National Science Foundation’s NSFnet began its own network. It was, however, primarily the domain of techies, computer-science graduates, and university professors because commercial traffic was banned. In 1991, the ban was lifted, making way for the age of electronic commerce. • In 1992, the World Wide Web system and software were released, and in late 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released versions of Mosaic (the first graphical Web browser) for Microsoft Windows, for Unix systems running the X Window System, and for the Apple Macintosh. Traffic on the Internet grew at a rate of 341,634 percent a year. • In 1994, Netscape Communications Corp. was formed and released the Netscape Navigator browser.

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• In 1995, NSFnet reverted to its existence as a research project, and the Internet was left in commercial hands. Microsoft released Internet Explorer, a Web browser that competed head-to-head with Netscape Navigator. • In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Telecommunications Act partially in an attempt to regulate the Internet. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this act was unconstitutional. • In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department and attorneys general from several states filed suit against Microsoft, claiming that the inclusion of Internet Explorer in Windows 98 violated antitrust guidelines. At the time of this writing, the case is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. • In 2000, it is estimated that more than 200 million people worldwide are using the Internet and that by 2005 that number will increase to 1 billion.

Comparing the Internet and Other T echnologies Technologies By the time you read this, the 43rd president will probably have taken the oath of office. In preparation, the Internet Policy Institute prepared a series of papers, Briefing the President: What the Next President of the United States Needs To Know about the Internet and Its Transformative Impact on Society. (You can find these papers online at http://www.internetpolicy.org/briefing.) In his introduction to these papers, Jim Barksdale, former president and CEO of Netscape, related the following: • Johann Gutenberg invented movable type about 1436, but it was several centuries before more than a handful of people owned books. • Household electricity was invented in 1873. Fifty years later, only about 25 percent of U.S. households were connected to a power line. • The telephone took 35 years to spread to 25 percent of U.S. households. • Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, television took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers, and cable took 10 years to reach 50 million viewers. • Within five years of its commercial inception, the Internet reached 50 million users.

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What Can a Business User Do on the Internet? If you work in a corporation, the short answer is that you can do anything that isn’t prohibited by the policies or technological controls in place in your organization. That answer begs the question, though, and what you really want to know are what kinds of resources are available on the Internet that can help you be more productive, more efficient, and more informed in your area of the business world. You’ll find lots of suggestions throughout this book, and here is a brief list to get you started: • Send and receive e-mail. • Share files, programs, and other digital resources. • Plan a trip and purchase airline tickets. • Find out what restaurants in a new city would be appropriate for entertaining clients. • Make hotel reservations. • Rent a car. • Print a map and driving instructions. • Get investment information and buy and sell securities. • Look for a new job. • Find prospective employees. • Research the competition. • Do your banking. • Subscribe to professional journals and other publications. • Take classes. • Download and print tax forms. • Buy office equipment and supplies. • Acquire software. • Publicize and promote your business organization. • Chat with an expert in your field. • Do market research. • File your business taxes. • And so on, and on, and on…

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You can take care of almost any business need you can think of by using the Internet, and often doing so can save you hours of time and a lot of hassle. Table 1-2 lists some great Internet sites for business users. We’ll look at some of these sites in more detail in Chapter 8. SITE

URL

DESCRIPTION

Business.com

http://www.business.com

A searchable directory devoted to the “business” Internet.

Commerce Business Daily

http://cbdnet.gpo.gov/

The electronic version of the print newspaper that tells you what you need to know to do business with the U.S. government.

Dun & Bradstreet

http://www.dnb.com

A fee-based source for financial and credit data on publicly traded and privately held companies worldwide.

Hoover’s Online

http://www.hoovers.com

A fee-based searchable online directory of profiles for more than 12,000 public and private companies worldwide.

Internal Revenue Service

http://www.irs.gov

Gives you access to everything the IRS has to offer, including downloadable forms, filing schedules, rules and regulations, and so on.

Statistical Resources on the Web

http://www.lib.umich.edu /libhome/Documents.center /stats.html

Statistics on everything from agriculture and banking to the weather, compiled from sources all over the world.

The Wall Street Journal

http://interactive.wsj.com /home.html

A subscription-only version of the print edition.

The World Factbook

http://www.odci.gov/cia/ publications/factbook /index.html

A publication of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that includes information on every country in the world. This was one of the first reference books every made available on the Internet.

Table 1-2

Some great Internet sites for business users.

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Understanding Internet Connections If you work on a corporate LAN, you most likely don’t need anything special to connect to the Internet because your computer system is set up with a communications channel, and your company has contracted with an Internet service provider (ISP). If, however, you have a home office or your own small business, you need some kind of device that lets you communicate with the Internet, and you need an account with an ISP. Many corporations access the Internet by through a connection called a T1. A T1 is a long-distance circuit that moves data at incredibly fast speeds and is very expensive. Unless money is no object, you’ll need to find some other means to connect your home or office to the Internet. NOTE

In Chapter 2, we’ll look at how you configure your computer to use the communication device you select. Here, we simply want to give you an overview of the possible choices.

Internet Connection Devices Probably the most typical communications device in use today is the modem. Any computer you’ve bought within the last few years or purchase today is probably equipped with one, and it is usually the fastest modem available. That said, you’ll never connect at the modem’s maximum speed because a modem uses your phone line, and the electrical noise on a phone line can decrease the modem’s speed by 30 percent or more. Although today’s 56K modems (capable of up to 53Kbps downloads and 33.6Kbps uploads) are fast when compared with those available even five years ago, they are still the slowest type of Internet connection. Because a modem uses a regular, analog phone line, it is referred to as a dial-up connection. A step up from a modem in terms of speed is an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) line. This type of connection is also provided by the phone company, but it uses all digital technology, which means that it is not subject to as much electrical interference and, thus, is much faster than a modem. ISDN lines can be used for both voice and Internet connections at the same time, although doing so reduces the speed of the connection from 128Kbps to 64Kbps. The next faster connection to the Internet is a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL). DSL speeds start at about 256Kbps and can reach a maximum of 8Mbps. DSL also uses the phone line and can support simultaneous voice and Internet connections. Most DSL connections are always on; that is, unlike using your modem, you don’t have to connect 12


to DSL after you power up your computer. DSL is a permanent connection, and to use it, you need DSL service from your phone company, an account with an ISP who offers DSL, and a DSL modem. Using a DSL connection can be a cost-effective choice, especially if you’ve previously needed two phone lines. Another popular way to connect to the Internet these days is via cable modem. Cable connections are provided by the same companies that provide cable TV, and some of these companies also serve as ISPs. Cable modems are fast (typically 500Kbps- 2Mbps), and your cable company furnishes everything you need to get set up, which usually means a cable modem and an Ethernet adapter, if your computer doesn’t have an Ethernet port. The downside to cable modems is that you must share the bandwidth with everyone in your neighborhood who has one. As usage increases, connection speed decreases, which is not as evident with ISDN or DSL.

Getting an Account with an Internet Service Provider Before you start looking for an ISP, you want to have made the choice about which kind of Internet connection you will use. If you decide on cable modem, for example, you won’t need to find an ISP, because the cable company will probably be your ISP. And if you decide on DSL, you’ll need to find an ISP that offers that kind of account. If you choose to use a dial-up connection, you can choose from any number of ISPs, including those that are in your local area or region or those that are national. When you buy a new computer, you’ll often see an icon on the desktop that gives you easy access to 800 numbers for various ISPs. You can then sign up online. In addition, as you will see in the next chapter, the Internet Connection Wizard can help you find an ISP. Both methods are quick and easy, but may not be the best solution for your particular situation. Often the best way to start is to ask people in your area which ISP they use and if they are happy with the service. You can also check your local newspapers or phone books. Basically, when you contact an ISP, you want to know how much a service costs and exactly what you’re getting for your money. These days, most ISPs offer unlimited access to e-mail and the Web for one set fee. If you travel and take your laptop on the road, be sure to find out if the ISP has a toll-free number that you can dial to check your e-mail.

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Four Sites for Business Newcomers to the Internet Earlier in this chapter, we listed some Web sites that every business user of the Internet should know about. If you are a new business user of the Internet, we think that four sites, in particular, should be your first ports of call: Amazon.com, the Dell Computer site, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) site, and the Social Security Administration site. Each of these sites is an example of using the Internet to its best advantage and gives you an excellent idea of what is available on the Internet for the business user. Amazon.com was one of the first and perhaps the most successful, if not the most profitable, business to exist entirely on the Internet. Initially, the mission of Amazon.com was to sell books, at a discount, over the Internet, and it billed itself as the world’s largest bookstore, even though it had virtually no inventory. Today Amazon.com sells everything from books to software to garden tools, claims to have “earth’s biggest selection” of products, and still has virtually no inventory. Amazon doesn’t order products until after it sells them. Figure 1-1 shows the Amazon.com Welcome page, which you can access by entering http://www.amazon.com in the Address bar of your Web browser.

Figure 1-1 14

The Amazon.com Welcome page.


Dell Computer Corporation was founded in 1984 on the concept of selling personal computer systems directly to customers. Today, about half of Dell’s sales are transacted over the Internet, 40 percent of Dell’s technical support activities occur online, and about 70 percent of Dell’s order-status transactions occur online. Dell sells computer systems to large corporations, government agencies, educational institutions, medium and small businesses, and home computer users. You’ll find the Dell home page at http://www.dell.com, and after you place an order with Dell you can track it online, all the way from the order processing stage, through the building and testing stage, to the final shipping stage at the Support.Dell.Com page, which is shown in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2

Tracking an order at Support.Dell.Com.

You may be aware that each year more and more U.S. citizens are filing their taxes online, but you may not know that the IRS Web site is filled with information and forms for businesses that you can access online and/or download. Whether you need Schedule C, Profit or Loss from Business, or Schedule D, Capital Gains and Losses, or the dates by which you must pay estimated taxes, you’ll find it at http://www.irs.gov. Figure 1-3 shows the IRS e-file for Business page; all businesses can pay electronically through the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS). Chapter 1


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Figure 1-3

The IRS e-file for Business page.

As you saw earlier in this chapter, the U.S. government was in the forefront during the development of the Internet and the technologies that power it. Consequently, many government Web sites are models of how to use interactivity and provide information. In addition to the IRS site, you’ll want to visit the Social Security site at http://www.ssa.gov. Whether you’re self-employed, work for a corporation, are a newcomer to the business world, or are about to start a life after work, understanding what part your contributions to the Social Security fund will play in your retirement is important to you. After an ill-fated attempt to make this information available online a few years ago, the Social Security Administration now has a top-notch electronic procedure that you can use to calculate your benefits. To see how this works, go to the page at http://www.ssa.gov/retire, as shown in Figure 1-4.

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Figure 1-4

The Social Security Retirement Planner.

Using the calculators on this page, you can do a quick or detailed estimate, or you can download a program that will give you a precise estimate. Click the Calculators link, click your calculator of choice, and follow the onscreen instructions.

Summary The purpose of this chapter was to introduce you to the Internet and to give you an overview of how it works and how you can use it to enhance your business efforts. We also looked at how the Internet has evolved over the last few decades, what you as a business user can do on the Internet, what you need to connect to the Internet, and at some sites that are excellent jumping-off places for business users new to the Internet.

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Chapter 2

CONNECTING TO THE INTERNET

Featuring: • Connecting to the Internet via Modem • Connecting to the Internet via Cable Modem • Connecting to the Internet via DSL • Connecting to the Internet via ISDN • Sharing an Internet Connection • Connecting to a Corporate Network

A

ssume you’re in the market for a new computer and that you have only two choices: one computer has all the latest bells and whistles you could ever imagine on a standalone machine; the other has the fastest connection on the planet to the Internet. Cost is not an issue. Which computer would you buy? Well, if you spend as much time on the Internet every day as we do, this decision is a no-brainer. In an ideal world, we’d take the computer with the great connection, and it would never go down. As the business world increasingly relies on the Internet and the services it provides, we yearn for faster and more reliable connections. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some of the options you might consider when selecting a connection for your home office or for a small- to medium-sized business. If you work for a big firm, you may connect at the office to a very high-speed device, such as a T1. A T1 is a long-distance point-to-point communications circuit that transfers data at incredibly fast speeds (1.5Mbps) and is very expensive, somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 a month. 19

Although a T1 is not generally an option for most of us, present and emerging technologies are delivering faster Internet connections to many areas in the United States and at affordable prices. If you live in an outlying area, such as one of us does, providers may be touting what is on the horizon rather than what is actually available in your neighborhood, but even that is progress. We’ll start by discussing the modem, and then we’ll look at some high-speed connections that are becoming more common, depending on your location. We’ll also look at how to share these connections and how to connect to your office when you’re on the road. NOTE

This chapter uses Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional to outline connection steps and uses illustrations from Windows 2000 Professional. If you’re connecting to the Internet using a different operating system, the steps and what you see on the screen will be similar but not identical.

Connecting to the Internet via Modem A modem is the most common device in use for connecting to the Internet, but as we pointed out in Chapter 1, it is also the slowest.

How Does a Modem W ork? Work? A modem is a device that lets a computer transfer information over a telephone line. A computer is a digital device, and a telephone line is an analog device; therefore, a mechanism is needed that can convert digital signals to analog signals and vice versa, and that’s what a modem does. A modem is connected to a computer on one end and plugs into a phone jack on the other end; a modem can be external, that is, on the outside of the computer, or internal, on the inside of the computer. Modem speed is measured in kilobits per second, which is abbreviated Kbps, but people commonly refer to this speed in “bauds” and speak of modem speed as “baud rate.” Modems can typically transfer information over a standard telephone line at a rate of up to 56Kbps, but as we mentioned in Chapter 1, this is a theoretical maximum because of electrical noise on the phone line. Another speed limitation concerns whether you are downloading information (for example, receiving e-mail or accessing a Web page) or uploading information (for example, sending e-mail or posting a Web page to a Web server). Downloading information is faster than uploading for the fastest modems, with the 33.6Kbps the fastest speed you can upload over a modem.

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Installing a Modem If you are using a Plug-and-Play operating system, such as Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows 2000 Professional, the operating system recognizes your modem (if it is Plug and Play, and most of today’s modems are) and installs it when you install the operating system. It also installs the modem if you later upgrade or change modems. At times, however, you may want to install your modem manually. For example, if your modem isn’t working properly, one common troubleshooting approach is to remove it and then reinstall its device driver. Or if Windows doesn’t recognize your modem and, thus, doesn’t have the proper device driver to install, you’ll have to install the driver and the modem manually. To install a modem, follow these steps: TIP

Before you install an external modem, be sure that it is turned on and that it’s connected to both the telephone line and your computer.

1. Open Control Panel. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Control Panel. 2. Open the Phone And Modem Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-1. Click the Phone And Modem Options icon.

Figure 2-1

The Phone And Modem Options dialog box. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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3. Start the Add/Remove Hardware Wizard. Click the Modems tab, and then click the Add button. 4. Follow the onscreen instructions. Click Next, and the wizard will start to test your modem. When the tests are complete, the wizard displays the final screen, as shown in Figure 2-2. Click Finish.

Figure 2-2

The wizard has finished installing the modem.

If the wizard can’t identify your modem, you’ll be asked to choose its make and model from a list. If the list doesn’t contain the make or model of your modem, look in the manual that came with your modem to see whether an equivalent type is listed. If you don’t find an equivalent type, you can do one of the following: • Check the disk that was provided with your modem. If it contains a driver, click the Have Disk button to open the Install From Disk dialog box, and install the driver. • Select one of the standard modem types in the Models list. • Contact the manufacturer of your modem to see whether it has an updated driver.

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Setting Up a Modem When you install a modem or when it’s installed automatically, all your communications programs, such as Microsoft Outlook Express, Fax, HyperTerminal, and so on, use the settings that were configured during installation. These settings include the port on which the modem was installed, the speaker volume of the modem, maximum port speed, and dial control. Normally, you don’t want to change any of these settings. To take a look at them, click the Modems tab in the Phone And Modem Options dialog box, right-click your modem, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu to open the Properties dialog box. Figure 2-3 shows the Properties dialog box for a modem on a computer in our office.

Figure 2-3

The Properties dialog box for a modem.

Internal modems are usually installed on COM port 3 or 4. External modems are normally installed on COM port 2. If you are an advanced user and really know what you are doing, you can change the port setting using the options on the Advanced tab. When you connect using your modem, you’ll hear the modem dialing out—unless the volume of the speaker inside your modem is set too low (or your modem doesn’t have a speaker). To increase or decrease the volume, move the slider bar. When your modem connects with the modem at your ISP, it tries to connect at the maximum speed. In general, set the maximum port speed at three or four times the rated modem speed to take advantage of the modem’s built-in data compression. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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Clear the Wait For Dial Tone Before Dialing check box if you need to manually dial your modem connection or if your modem doesn’t recognize the dial tone used by your current location. You can use the Query Modem button on the Diagnostics tab to see if your modem is responding to Windows. If it’s not, you’ve got a problem, and you should probably get some help from a professional technician.

Setting Up Dialing Rules Later in this chapter, we’ll look at how to connect from a remote location, and in that situation you may want to change the dialing rules. But you may also need to change the dialing rules when, for example, the phone company in your area switches to a 10-digit dialing system or if you move your home or office to a different location. To create a new location or to edit a location, follow these steps: 1. Open the Phone And Modem Options dialog box. Click the Start button, click Settings, click Control Panel, and then click Phone And Modem Options. 2. Add a new location or edit an existing location. Click New to open the New Location dialog box, or click Edit to open the Edit location dialog box. The options are identical in both dialog boxes. Figure 2-4 shows the New Location dialog box.

Figure 2-4 24

The New Location dialog box.


3. Identify the location. In the Location Name box, enter a name for the location. In the Country/Region box, specify the appropriate country, which determines the correct country code. In the Area Code box, enter the area code from which you will be dialing. 4. Specify the dialing rules. If you need to dial a number to reach an outside line (such as 9), enter that number in the first text box. If you need to dial an additional number to access long distance service, enter that number in the second text box. To disable call waiting, select that check box and enter the correct numeric code. You’ll find it in your local phone book. Specify tone or pulse dialing, and then click Apply. If you’re in an area that uses 10-digit dialing for local calls, you’ll need to separate long distance from local calling. You do this by creating a new area code rule. Click the Area Code Rules tab in the New Location (or Edit Location) dialog box, and follow these steps: 1. Open the New Area Code Rule dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-5. Click the New button.

Figure 2-5

The New Area Code Rule dialog box.

Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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2. Specify the dialing rules. In the Area Code box, enter the area code you will be calling. If the entire area code is a local call, click the Dial 1 and the Include Area Code check boxes. If only numbers with certain prefixes are local calls within this area code, click the Include Only The Prefixes In The List Below option and add the local prefixes. Click OK.

Setting Up Y our Internet Connection Your Before you can set up your connection to the Internet, you need an account with an ISP, as we mentioned in Chapter 1. To set up your account, you will need the following information from your ISP: • User name and password • The phone number to dial in to your ISP • The name of your incoming mail server • The name of your outgoing mail server If you haven’t yet set up a connection, you’ll have a Connect To The Internet icon on your desktop, and you can simply click the icon to start the Internet Connection Wizard. If you’ve already set up a connection, you can start the Internet Connection Wizard in the following ways: • Click the Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, and then click Internet Connection Wizard. • Click the Start button, click Settings, click Control Panel, and then click Internet Options to open the Internet Properties dialog box. Click the Connections tab, and then click the Setup button. • In Microsoft Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, click Internet Options to open the Internet Options dialog box, click the Connections tab, and then click the Setup button. Regardless of which method you use, you’ll see the Welcome screen, as shown in Figure 2-6.

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Figure 2-6

The Internet Connection Wizard.

To create a new dial-up connection, obtain an account and then follow these steps: 1. Specify the type of account you want to create. In the Welcome screen, select I Want To Set Up My Internet Connection Manually, Or I Want To Connect Through A Local Area Network (LAN), and click Next. TIP

If you don’t yet have an ISP, you can select the first option to connect to a referral service that will give you a selection of ISPs to choose from. Similarly, if you have an ISP that you’ve been using but don’t have the settings, you may be able to use the second option to retrieve them using your modem.

2. Specify the type of connection. In the Setting Up Your Internet Connection screen, click the I Connect Through A Phone Line And A Modem option, and then click Next. 3. Provide information about your Internet account. Enter the phone number of your ISP, click Next, enter the user name and password provided by your ISP, click Next, enter an identifying name for your connection, and click Next.


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4. Set up an e-mail account. Follow the onscreen instructions. 5. Complete the wizard. When you have provided all your e-mail account information, click Finish, and then click Close to close the wizard and connect to the Internet.

Connecting to the Internet via Cable Modem Most people who use the Internet outside a corporate environment probably start out using a modem. If you spend a lot of time accessing the Web or if you send and receive lots of files, as we do, you soon become dissatisfied with the speed of your connection and start looking for alternatives. One alternative that may be available to you is a cable modem, which uses the same wiring that brings cable TV into your home or office. Today, more than 100 million homes are wired for cable TV, so if your cable provider also provides cable modem service, it might make sense to use a cable modem. We say might because there’s a catch. Downloading over a cable modem can be 4 to 40 times faster (256Kbps to 2Mbps) than downloading over a 56Kbps modem, but uploading is only about 4 times faster (usually 128Kbps). What this means in practical terms is that if you’re primarily interested in accessing Web resources, a cable modem is going to bring them to your screen much, much faster than a modem. On the other hand, if you want fast transmission rates when you’re uploading files, you’re probably better off with DSL, if available in your area. In the plus column, however, a cable modem is usually more affordable than other high-speed options. NOTE

Not all cable companies provide Internet access, although many are in the process of adding this service. If you haven’t seen a flyer advertising cable modem service in the envelope with your monthly cable bill, you can, of course, simply call the cable company and ask.

How Does a Cable Modem W ork? Work? Once you’re connected via a cable modem (and we’ll look at getting connected next), data between your computer and the Internet travels along the following path: • The coaxial cable that comes into your home or office from a pole is divided into two connections by a splitter. One connection goes to your TV, and the other goes to your cable modem, a little box that is external to your computer.

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• The cable modem connects to the network card inside your computer or to the USB adapter on your computer. Data traveling to your computer from the Internet goes through the coaxial cable, through your cable modem, and into your computer. Data traveling from your computer to the Internet follow this path in reverse. • Once data is inside the coaxial cable, its next stop is a node, which is also the next spot on the route for cable television signals. Each cable company divides its region into nodes, or neighborhoods of about 500 subscribers. All 500 subscribers share one node, which can become a bottleneck if all access the Internet at the same time. • From the node, data passes through high-speed fiber-optic lines to a head-end cable facility, which handles the nodes for some four to ten regions. • The head end accesses the Internet by means of high-speed links, and the head end also has high-speed Internet servers for mail, newsgroups, the Web, and so on. Thus, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, your cable company becomes your ISP as well as your connection to the Internet.

Getting Connected The most difficult part of getting connected via cable modem may be getting your cable company to actually come to your home or place of business in a timely fashion. That said, once a technician arrives on the premises, he or she will fiddle with the main cable a bit, attach the splitter, and then run the cable to the cable modem. If your computer already has a network card, the technician will attach the cable modem to the network card with another cable. If your computer doesn’t have a network card, the cable company will probably provide one and configure it—perhaps for an additional fee. The technician should then configure your network settings, and he or she may install some authentication software on your computer. And that’s it. You can now do a couple of things—you can log on to the Internet, or you can call your telephone company and cancel the second line you’ve been using for Internet access, if you had one. WARNING A cable modem is “always on.” You don’t need to dial up and connect as you do with an analog modem. Consequently, your computer system is vulnerable to the possibility of unauthorized access. Be sure that you require passwords to any shared resources, and install firewall software. You can check with your cable service provider for firewall software, or you can get firewall software from companies such as Sybergen Networks (http://www.sygate.com) or Signal 9 Solutions (http://www.signal9.com) for less than $30.00.


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Connecting to the Internet via DSL Another popular high-speed option is a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) modem. DSL comes in two basic flavors—asymmetric and symmetric. DSL service providers often refer to asymmetric DSL as “home” DSL and refer to symmetric DSL as “business” DSL. Here’s why. With asymmetric DSL, download speeds are much faster than upload speeds, which means that you can access a Web page at much higher speeds than you can transmit a document over e-mail. Service providers seem to have collectively decided that home users access Web resources much more often than they transfer files, and so they deem asymmetric DSL the most appropriate for home use. Asymmetric DSL is also usually a good deal cheaper than symmetric DSL. With symmetric DSL, upload and download speeds are the same, and the more you are willing to pay, the faster the speed. For example, at our ISP, asymmetric DSL is available for about $60 a month. This yields download rates of 640Kbps and upload rates of 256Kbps. Symmetric DSL is available at speeds ranging from 144Kbps to 7Mbps (7000Kbps) and at prices ranging from about $100 a month to $400 a month. The speed available to your home or office depends on location, as you will see shortly.

How Does DSL W ork? Work? DSL uses your existing telephone lines, but transmits data at higher frequencies than those used to transmit voice. Therefore, you can use your fax machine, your telephone, or even a modem at the same time that you are accessing the Internet with your computer. The DSL modem attached to your computer must be the proper type for your DSL provider, and the telephone company office (also called a central office) must be within a certain distance of your home or office. The exact distance depends on the type of DSL and the speed. For example, the DSL service provider we consulted informed us that the maximum distance in our case is 18,000 feet. Unfortunately, the distance from our office to the telephone company office is 18,500 feet, so we’re out of luck for the time being. A DSL modem is external to the computer and looks similar to a cable modem, only it really isn’t a modem in the true sense of the word. A modem converts digital signals to analog signals and vice versa. A so-called DSL modem transmits and receives all data as digital signals.

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Getting Connected The process of getting connected with DSL is very similar to the process for getting connected with cable modem. Once a technician arrives on the premises, he or she will fiddle with the phone lines a bit and then connect the phone line to the DSL modem. If your computer already has a network card, the technician will attach the DSL modem to the network card with another cable. If your computer doesn’t have a network card, the technician will probably provide one and configure it—perhaps for an additional fee. The technician should then configure your network settings, and he or she may install some authentication software on your computer. And that’s it. You can now do a couple of things—you can log on to the Internet, or you can call your telephone company and cancel the second line you’ve been using for Internet access, if you had one. WARNING A DSL modem is “always on.” You don’t need to dial up and connect as you do with an analog modem. Consequently, your computer system is vulnerable to the possibility of unauthorized access. Be sure that you require passwords to any shared resources, and install firewall software. You can check with your DSL service provider for firewall software, or you can get firewall software from companies such as Sybergen Networks (http://www.sygate.com) or Signal 9 Solutions (http://www.signal9.com) for less than $30.00.

Connecting to the Internet via ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) is not a new technology, but it has become a popular way to connect to the Internet for several reasons. For starters, it was one of the first alternatives to the analog modem. It continues to be popular because it is more universally available than other high-speed connections, though it tends to be more expensive.

How Does ISDN W ork? Work? ISDN uses existing telephone wires and requires an ISDN modem. As is the case with a DSL modem, an ISDN modem isn’t really a modem. Although it looks like one, it is actually an adapter that lets you send and receive digital signals over ISDN phone lines. For ISDN to work, the telephone company must have digital-switching equipment.


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The most common kind of ISDN access is called Basic Rate Interface (BRI). The ISDN modem sends a digital signal over the telephone wire, which is divided into three channels. A channel is not a wire but a way in which data travels. Two channels transmit data, and the third channel sends routing information. Using ISDN, you can access the Internet while talking on the phone over the same connection; thus, you can disconnect the second phone line you might have been using for Internet access.

Getting Connected After contracting with your phone company for ISDN service, you need to install your ISDN modem. The process is exactly the same as installing an analog modem, and if the ISDN modem is Plug and Play (and it certainly should be), Windows will recognize it and install the necessary driver. To configure an ISDN modem, follow these steps: 1. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder, as shown in Figure 2-7. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections.

Figure 2-7 32

The Network And Dial-Up Connections folder.


2. Open the Properties dialog box for your ISDN connection. Right-click the dial-up connection that uses ISDN, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. 3. Open the ISDN Configure dialog box. Click the General tab, select the ISDN device, and then click Configure. NOTE

Depending on the type of ISDN modem that you have, clicking the Configure button may open the Modem Configurations dialog box.

4. Select a line type. In the Line Type area, select the type of line you will be using. If you want to negotiate for a line type, click the Negotiate Line Type check box. Click OK.

How Fast Is Fast Enough? If all these high-speed options leave you wondering which is best for you, which is fastest, and so on, here are some points to consider: • The fastest analog modem transmits data at 53Kbps. DSL ranges from 144Kbps to 7Mbps. Cable modem access generally peaks at 1 to 10Mbps, but during slow times may be as slow as 256Kbps or slower, and ISDN access maximum access speed is 128Kbps. • With cable modems, DSL modems, and ISDN, you don’t need a second phone line. • With cable modems, you can’t use a separate ISP. • ISDN is usually more expensive than the other high-speed options. Some providers even charge by the minute, but if you want something faster than an analog modem and neither DSL nor cable modem are available in your area, ISDN may be your only choice. • Cable modem speed can be impeded if all the subscribers in your so-called neighborhood are simultaneously accessing the Internet. • In some situations, you can start with a lower speed DSL connection and upgrade to a higher speed. • Cable modems and DSL modems are always on. You need to question your service provider about the security risks this poses. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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Sharing an Internet Connection If you have more than one computer in your office, it makes sense to network them; once you have them networked, you can share files, the printer, applications, and so on. You can also share an Internet connection. In the first part of this section, we’ll look at how to share an analog modem or an ISDN modem. In the latter part, we’ll look at how to share a DSL or cable modem connection.

Setting Up the Internet Sharing Computer Each of the computers with which you want to share an Internet connection must have a network card, and they do if they are on your network. You connect one of the computers on the network to the Internet, using one of the solutions described earlier in this chapter, and then you enable Internet Sharing on that computer. WARNING Do not attempt to share your Internet Connection using this procedure if your network has any Windows NT or Windows 2000 domain controllers or if your network is already using DHCP or DNS.

In Windows 2000 Professional, log on as an administrator, and then follow these steps to share an analog modem or an ISDN modem connection: 1. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections. 2. Open the Properties dialog box for the connection you want to share. Right-click the connection, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu to display the Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 2-8.

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Figure 2-8

The Properties dialog box for a dial-up connection.

3. Enable Internet Connection Sharing. Click the Sharing tab, shown in Figure 2-9, and then click the Enable Internet Connection Sharing For This Connection check box. Be sure that the Enable On-Demand Dialing check box is selected.

Figure 2-9

The Sharing tab in the Properties dialog box for a dial-up connection.


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4. Verify that only TCP/IP is enabled. Click the Networking tab, and you will see the message shown in Figure 2-10. Click Yes, and then in the Networking tab, verify that only Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is selected, as shown in Figure 2-11.

Figure 2-10 A warning about your computer’s IP address.

Figure 2-11 The Networking tab in the Properties dialog box for a dial-up connection.

Now, you have to specify which applications you want to share. This gets a bit tricky, but as far as Internet Connection Sharing is concerned an “application” is one of the TCP/IP family of protocols that we mentioned in Chapter 1. To share your Internet applications such as Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, you enter a friendly name for the application and its sending and receiving port numbers. A port is simply a number that identifies a connection point for a protocol, and standard port numbers are assigned to all Internet (TCP/IP) protocols. To share Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, follow these steps:

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1. Open the Internet Connection Sharing Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-12. In the Properties dialog box for your Internet connection, click the Sharing tab, and then click the Settings button. In Figure 2-12, you can see that we’ve already set up Internet Explorer.

Figure 2-12 The Internet Connection Sharing Settings dialog box.

2. Open the Internet Connection Sharing Application dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-13. If necessary, click the Applications tab, and then click the Add button.

Figure 2-13 The Internet Connection Sharing Application dialog box.


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3. Enter a friendly name for your application, and enter its sending and receiving port numbers. In the Name Of Application box, enter Internet Explorer. In the Remote Server Port Number box, enter 80, be sure that the TCP option button is selected, and in the Incoming Response Ports section, enter 1024-65535 in the TCP box. Click OK. 4. Enter the information for your e-mail protocols. Click the Add button again to open the Internet Connection Sharing Application dialog box. When you send e-mail, you use the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), and when you receive e-mail, you use the Post Office Protocol (POP3). In the Name Of Application box, enter SMTP (or any other name that you choose). In the Remote Server Port Number, enter 25, and in the TCP box, enter 102465535. Click OK, and then repeat the process for POP3. Enter 110 in the Remote Server Port Number box, and enter 1024-65535 in the TCP box. Click OK. Click OK again in the Internet Connection Sharing Settings dialog box, and then click OK once more in the Properties dialog box for your Internet connection. Now you need to enable automatic remote connection. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open Control Panel. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Control Panel. 2. Open the Computer Management window, as shown in Figure 2-14. Click Administrative Tools to open the Administrative Tools folder, and then click Computer Management.

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Figure 2-14 The Computer Management window.

3. Open the Remote Access Auto Connection Manager Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-15. In the Tree pane, expand Services And Applications, select Services, and in the right pane, scroll down to Remote Access Auto Connection Manager. Right-click it, and choose Start from the shortcut menu. Right-click Remote Access Auto Connection Manager again, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu.


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Figure 2-15 The Remote Access Auto Connection Manager Properties dialog box.

4. Change the startup type to automatic. In the Startup Type drop-down list, select Automatic, and then click OK. Close the Computer Management window, and then close Administrative Tools. In a later chapter, we’ll look at some other Internet services that you might want to share over an Internet connection. Table 2-1 lists some of the most important services, their protocols, and the sending port number. Each of these protocols uses 1024-65535 as the TCP incoming response port, and all use TCP rather than UDP. SERVICE

PROTOCOL

REMOTE SERVER PORT NUMBER

File Transfer Protocol

FTP

21

Telnet

Telnet

23

Gopher

Gopher

70

Network News Transfer Protocol

NNTP

119

Table 2-1

Other important Internet services you might want to share.

Now you’re ready to configure the other computers on the network to use your Internet connection.

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Setting Up Clients You must configure each of the other computers on your network one at a time. First, you need to verify that the computer is configured to obtain an IP address automatically. An IP address is a unique number that identifies a computer on your network, for example, 206.135.150.39. If the computer is running Windows 98, follow these steps: 1. Open Control Panel. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Control Panel. 2. Open the Network dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-16. In Control Panel, click Network.

Figure 2-16 The Network dialog box.


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3. Open the Properties dialog box for your network card. Click the Configuration tab if necessary, select TCP/IP Adapter from the list, and click the Properties button. Figure 2-17 shows the Properties dialog box for our adapter.

Figure 2-17 The Properties dialog box for a TCP/IP adapter.

4. Verify that this computer is obtaining an IP address automatically. If necessary, click the IP Address tab, and be sure that the Obtain An IP Address Automatically option is selected. Click OK, and then click OK again in the Network dialog box. Restart the computer to enable the Internet connection. If the computer is running Windows 2000 Professional, follow these steps to ensure that the computer is obtaining an IP address automatically: 1. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections. 2. Open the Properties dialog box for your local area connection. Right-click Local Area Connection, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. Figure 2-18 shows the Properties dialog box for our local area connection.

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Figure 2-18 The Properties dialog box for our local area connection.

3. Open the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-19. Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), and click Properties. Be sure that the Obtain An IP Address Automatically option is selected, and then click OK. Click OK again to close the Local Area Connection Properties dialog box.

Figure 2-19 The Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog box.


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Only one last task remains, and that is to configure the Internet options. If the computer does not already have an established Internet connection, follow these steps (the steps are the same for both Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98): 1. Start the Internet Connection Wizard. Click the Internet Connection icon on your desktop, or click the Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, and then click Internet Connection Wizard. 2. Specify that you want to connect to the Internet through your local area network. Click the I Want To Set Up My Internet Connection Manually, Or I Want To Connect Through A Local Area Network (LAN) option, and then click Next. In the Setting Up Your Internet Connection screen, click the I Connect Through A Local Area Network (LAN) option, and then click Next. 3. Configure the local area network. Clear the Automatic Discovery Of Proxy Server [Recommended] check box, and click Next. 4. Set up an e-mail account. If you want to set up an e-mail account, click Yes, and follow the onscreen instructions. If you don’t want to set up an e-mail account, click No, click Next, and then click Finish. If you have already established an Internet connection, follow these steps: 1. Open Internet Explorer. Click its icon on the taskbar. 2. Open the Internet Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options. 3. Configure your LAN connection. Click the Connections tab, as shown in Figure 2-20, and then click the Never Dial A Connection option, or the Dial Whenever A Network Connection Is Not Present option.

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Figure 2-20 The Connections tab in the Internet Options dialog box.

4. Open the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-21. Click the LAN Settings button.

Figure 2-21 The Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box.

5. Configure the LAN settings. Clear all check boxes in the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box, and click OK. Click OK again in the Internet Options dialog box.


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And that is finally it. Test out your connection. Open Internet Explorer, and see whether you can open a Web page. If your computers are in close proximity, you should hear the modem on your connection-sharing computer swing into action.

Sharing a High-Speed Connection If you’re using a DSL adapter or a cable modem, there are two basic ways you can share your Internet connection. The easiest method is to plug the DSL adapter or cable modem into your network hub. Alternatively, you can add a second network card to your computer and use Internet Connection-Sharing to share the connection as if it were a dial-up connection.

Using a Hub to Share Y our Connection Your If you have a DSL router or cable modem that provides built-in Network Address Translation (NAT) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services, it’s really easy to share your connection. Simply plug your DSL adapter or cable modem into the Uplink port of your hub using an Ethernet crossover cable (this is the cable you’d normally plug into your computer). Once you configure all of your computers to use dynamically assigned addresses (as described in the “Setting Up Clients” section earlier in this chapter), you’re done. If your DSL adapter or cable modem doesn’t provide NAT and DHCP services, you have two options. You can rent more IP addresses from your ISP (usually at $5/month for each IP address) and configure each of your computers to use these addresses. Or you can purchase a DSL/Cable Modem Router. Plug your DSL adapter or cable modem into the DSL/Cable Modem Router and plug all your computers into this router if there are enough ports. If there aren’t enough ports on the router, plug the router into the uplink port of your hub using a crossover cable. Configure all computers to use dynamically assigned addresses.

Using Internet Connection Sharing If you can’t or don’t want to share your Internet connection using your network hub, you add a second network card to your connection-sharing computer. One network card connects to your high-speed connection, and a second connects to your LAN. To configure Internet Connection Sharing with a high-speed connection, follow these steps:

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1. Install your network cards. Make sure that you can connect to the Internet properly using the network card connected to your DSL adapter or cable modem, and that you can access your LAN using the other adapter. 2. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections. 3. Open the Properties for your Internet connection. Right-click the Local Area Connection that connects to your cable modem or DSL adapter, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. 4. Enable Internet Connection Sharing. Click the Sharing tab, and select the Enable Internet Connection Sharing For This Connection. 5. Verify that only TCP/IP is enabled. Click the Networking tab, and you will see the message shown in Figure 2-10. Click Yes, and then in the Networking tab, verify that only Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is selected.

Connecting to a Corporate Network When you connect to a LAN at your place of business, you are probably connecting to a client/server network. If you are running Windows 2000 Professional on your desktop, you could be connecting to Windows 2000 Server or Windows NT 4 Server. When your computer starts, you’ll see a message that network communications are being established. You can then log on to the system as described in Chapter 1. But you can also log on to that LAN from your home network or while you’re on the road, and you can do so in the following ways: • Over a phone line • Using ISDN • Through a VPN tunnel Connecting in this way is called remote access. NOTE

Remote doesn’t mean from some place far from civilization; it just means away from the office LAN. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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Using a Phone Line Perhaps the most common way to access a remote network is by modem. To do this most successfully, you’ll first want to make sure that your modem and the modem at the office are compatible. Of course, you also need the permission to establish this connection. For security reasons, some corporations don’t allow remote access to the system, but as more and more people telecommute, this is becoming less common. To set up a dial-up connection, obtain the phone number you need to dial in to and then follow these steps: 1. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder, as shown in Figure 2-22. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections.

Figure 2-22 The Network And Dial-Up Connections folder.

2. Start the Network Connection Wizard, as shown in Figure 2-23. Click the Make New Connection icon.

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Figure 2-23 The Network Connection Wizard.

3. Select a network connection type. Click Next, click the Dial-Up To Private Network option, and then click Next. 4. Tell your modem which phone number to dial. In the Phone Number To Dial screen, as shown in Figure 2-24, enter a phone number. If you want your computer to decide how to dial in from various locations, click the Use Dialing Rules check box. Click Next.

Figure 2-24 Entering a phone number. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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5. Specify who can use this connection. In the Connection Availability screen, click For All Users or Only For Myself. Click Next. 6. Name the connection. Enter a name for this connection, which will appear in the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder, and then click Finish. If you want to connect immediately, enter your user name and password and click Dial in the Connect dialog box that now appears. If you want to connect later, click Cancel. To connect at any time, click the icon for this connection in the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. To delete a connection, select its icon and press the Delete key.

Setting Up a Calling Card A calling card is a handy device when you’re traveling, especially if you will be billing expenses back to your employer. If you are using a calling card that is in common use, follow these steps to set it up. 1. Open the Phone And Modem Options dialog box. In Control Panel (click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Control Panel), click Phone And Modem Options. 2. Choose your location. In the New Location dialog box, select the location you want to use a calling card with, and then click Edit. 3. Specify the card type. Click the Calling Card tab, shown in Figure 2-25, and select the card from the Card Types list.

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Figure 2-25 The Calling Card tab in the New Location dialog box.

4. Enter the information about your card. Enter your account number, and then enter your PIN number. Access numbers are entered automatically when you select the card type. Click OK. If your card is not listed in the Card Types list, follow these steps: 1. Open the New Calling Card dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-26. In the Calling Card tab, click New.

Figure 2-26 The New Calling Card dialog box.


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2. Enter information about the card. In the Calling Card Name box, enter a name for the card, and then enter the account number and your PIN number. 3. Enter the steps you must follow to make a call. Enter the access number, and then in the Calling Card Dialing Steps box, enter the numbers in the exact order that you must enter them to make a call. For example, click the Access Number button, and enter the access number, click the PIN button, and enter the PIN number, and so on (make sure to click the Destination Number button so that your desired number is dialed). To change the order of a step, click the Move Up or Move Down button. Click OK. To use your calling card to make international or local calls, click the corresponding tab and follow step 3 above.

Using a VPN T unnel Tunnel VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it is a tunnel through the Internet that connects your computer to your corporate network. You can dial up almost any ISP and set up a VPN session. Data that is transmitted via the VPN tunnel is encrypted, so it is secure. To set up a VPN connection, you will need the host name or IP address of your corporate network, which you can obtain from your system administrator if you don’t know it. Follow these steps to set up the connection: 1. Open the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. Click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Network And Dial-Up Connections. 2. Start the Network Connection Wizard. Click the Make New Connection icon. 3. Select a network connection type. Click Next, and in the Network Connection Type screen, click the Connect To A Private Network Through The Internet option. Click Next. 4. Specify whether to automatically dial your ISP. In the Public Network screen, which is shown in Figure 2-27, click the Automatically Dial This Initial Connection option if you want to establish a dial-up connection to your ISP first before connecting to your corporate network. Otherwise, click Do Not Dial The Initial Connection. Click Next. 52


Figure 2-27 Specifying the destination address.

5. Specify the destination address. In the Host Name Or IP Address box, enter the host name or address you obtained from your system administrator. A host name is something like stephenlnelson.com, and an IP (Internet Protocol) address is a string of numbers, such as 123.45.6.78. Click Next. 6. Specify who can use this connection. In the Connection Availability screen, click For All Users or Only For Myself, and then click Next. 7. Name the connection. Enter a name for this connection, which will appear in the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder, and then click Finish. If you want to connect immediately, click Yes in the Initial Connection dialog box that now appears. If you want to connect later, click No. To connect at any time, click the icon for this connection in the Network And Dial-Up Connections folder. To delete a connection, select its icon and press the Delete key. You can copy the connections you made for modem, ISDN, or VPN by right-clicking the connection and choosing Create Copy from the shortcut menu. You can then rightclick the copy, and choose Properties from the shortcut menu to modify the connection for a particular situation. Chapter 2 Connecting to the Internet

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Summary With the information in this chapter, you should be equipped to make an effective decision about which kind of Internet connection will work best for you. You also have at your fingertips the steps you need to take to set up that connection. We’ve looked at analog and ISDN modems, at DSL connections, and at cable modems. In addition, we’ve looked in detail at how to set up Internet Connection Sharing, both for analog and ISDN modems, and for high-speed connections.

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Chapter 3

USING INTERNET EXPLORER

Featuring: • Understanding How a Web Browser Works • Opening Internet Explorer • Exploring the Web • Using the Favorites List • Using the History List • E-Mailing Pages and Links • Listening to Radio over the Web • Saving and Printing Web Pages • Searching the Web • Dealing with Cookies and Temporary Internet Files • Customizing Internet Explorer

A

s you learned in Chapter 1, to access resources on the World Wide Web you need a client program called a Web browser. The Web browser’s primary job is to let you view Web pages and move from one resource to another, although these days most browsers provide much more functionality than that. As you also saw in Chapter 1, the first really popular browser was Netscape Navigator. Appendix A discusses and describes how to use that browser. In this chapter, we focus on Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Web browser that’s included with all current versions of Microsoft Windows, which, of course, has been at the core of Microsoft’s antitrust trial. 55

NOTE

As of this writing, Internet Explorer exists in several versions, including versions for Windows 2000, Windows 95/98/ME, early versions of Windows, for Unix, and for the Macintosh. To some extent, they all work in much the same way. The steps and the illustrations in this chapter use version 5.00.2920.0000, the version of Internet Explorer that is included with Windows 2000 Professional.

Understanding How a W eb Browser W orks Web Works Before getting into Internet Explorer specifics, we want to explain how a Web browser works. You don’t need this information to use a Web browser, of course, but knowing the process will help you understand why access is sometimes slow, give you a clue as to the meaning of some of the cryptic messages you sometimes see on your screen, and, in general, help you to become a more informed business user of the Internet. When you enter a Web address in the Web browser application on your computer, here is a general overview of what happens: • The browser software on your computer sends the address to your Internet service provider (ISP). • Your ISP then sends the address to the nearest node of the domain name server (DNS). The DNS is a set of databases, distributed among servers, that stores the numeric addresses of Web sites. (A later section in this chapter explains URLs and numeric addresses.) • The DNS returns the site’s numeric address to your Web browser. • Your Web browser sends the numeric address to a router, which checks the traffic on the Internet and finds a path that is the least busy to the server that contains the resource you are requesting. • The server receives the address, acknowledges this receipt, and places the request in a queue to wait until the server fulfills earlier requests. When the server acknowledges the receipt, you’ll see a message in the browser’s status line that tells you the connection is successful. • The server then sends the resource back over the Internet to your ISP, which then sends it to your computer.

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This process may sound time-consuming, but even with a slow Internet connection, it can take only seconds, and with a fast Internet connection, it can happen almost instantaneously, whether the resource is stored on a server halfway around the world or on a server in the next building in your office complex.

Opening Internet Explorer You can open Internet Explorer in the following ways: • Click the Launch Internet Explorer Browser button on the Quick Launch toolbar. • Double-click the Internet Explorer shortcut on the desktop. • Click the Start button, click Programs, and then click Internet Explorer. The first time you open Internet Explorer, you’ll see something similar to Figure 3-1, which shows the MSN page. You can retain this start page or select any other. You’ll find the steps later in this chapter.

Figure 3-1

The default start page.

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You can also open Internet Explorer from any document that includes a hyperlink. For example, if you receive an e-mail message that contains a URL in the body, simply click the URL to open that page in Internet Explorer. In addition, in Windows Explorer, clicking a filename that ends in .htm or .html opens that file in Internet Explorer. NOTE

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the programming language that is used to create Web pages. To take a look at the underlying HTML for a Web page, open the page in Internet Explorer, click the View menu, and then click Source. For a brief introduction to HTML code, see Chapter 13.

AW ord About URLs Word URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is an address for a resource on the Internet. It actually represents a string of numbers called an Internet Protocol (IP) address, for example, 169.254.69.104. Since it’s much easier for humans to remember names instead of numbers, we typically use URLs. A URL is composed of a protocol, the name of the server on which the resource resides, and, optionally, the path to the resource and its filename. For example, in the URL http://www.redtechpress.com, http is the protocol (in this case, Hypertext Transfer Protocol), www indicates that the resource is on the World Wide Web, redtechpress is the server, and .com is the domain name. Such a URL might also include the path, such as /catalog, and the name of a document, such as /index.html. You frequently see URLs in various media as simply www.redtechpress.com. Internet Explorer and other Web browsers assume the http protocol unless you specify otherwise. Another less frequently seen protocol is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP); an FTP server contains programs and files that users can download. The final part of the server name, in our example, .com, refers to the domain type. At present seven domain types are recognized: • .com is a commercial organization. • .edu is an educational institution, for example, a university. • .gov is an entity that is part of the U.S. government. • .int is an international organization, such as the United Nations. • .mil is a branch of the U.S. military. • .net is a network organization. • .org is a nonprofit organization. 58


You pronounce the domain part of a URL as dot com, dot e-d-u, dot gov, and so on. You have, no doubt, though seen references to dot-coms, which are businesses that in recent years have sprung up on the Internet. These are not simply businesses that have a Web site, but businesses that exist entirely on the Internet. Mid-2000 found many dot-coms in trouble, and Forrester Research, a leader in compiling Internet and business statistics, predicted that by 2001 most dot-coms would go out of business. The reason, according to some dot-com CEOs, is that the focus was on acquiring an audience at all costs—regardless of the costs. The Internet is a seductive medium, but it’s probably safe to assume that there’s no substitute for a well-designed and carefully thought-out business plan.

Understanding the Internet Explorer Window The components of the Internet Explorer window are much like those in other Windows applications. You’ll see vertical and horizontal scroll bars as necessary, you can size portions of the window by clicking and dragging, and you can display a ScreenTip by pointing to a button. Here is a list of some other components: • The Title bar is at the top of the window, and it displays the name of the current Web page or other file that is open. • The Menu bar is just beneath the Title bar, and it contains a set of menus, many of which appear in other Windows applications. • The Standard Buttons toolbar is just beneath the Menu bar, and it contains several buttons that correspond to items on the Menu bar, as well as the Back, Forward, and Home navigation buttons. • The Address bar is beneath the Standard toolbar, and you use it to enter a URL or filename. You can also click the drop-down arrow to select a URL. • The Links bar is a drop-down list on the far right of the Address bar, and it contains a short list of preselected hyperlinks. You can add or remove links from this list. • The Activity Indicator is at the far right of the Menu bar and is animated when Internet Explorer is sending or receiving data. • The Main window displays the resource you most recently accessed.

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• The Status bar is at the bottom of the screen. When you choose a menu command, the Status bar displays a description of what it does. When you point to a link, the Status bar displays its URL. When you click a link, the Status bar displays a series of messages related to the progress of finding and opening that resource. • The Security zone is at the far right of the Status bar and displays the currently active security zone. We’ll discuss Security zones in detail later in this chapter.

Exploring the W eb Web Once you open Internet Explorer, you can start exploring the Web immediately. All you have to do is click a link or enter a URL you’ve gleaned from TV or someone’s business card in the Address bar. You can, however, use several techniques to make the time spent connected to the Internet more efficient.

Using the Address Bar You’ll notice that sometimes when you start to enter a URL, it sort of completes itself for you. This is the AutoComplete feature at work. If AutoComplete enters the URL you want, simply press the Enter key to go to that resource. If not, continue typing. AutoComplete also works in other fields you fill in on a Web page, such as search queries, a list of stock quotes, information you supply when you purchase items over the Internet, and so on. This feature can be handy, and you need not worry about security when you use AutoComplete. The information you originally enter is encrypted (encoded) and stored on your computer. It is not accessible to Web sites. (Sometimes you’ll even see the encryption displayed on your screen before the information is sent out.) TIP

A handy trick you can use to quickly go to a Web site that begins with www and ends in .com is to enter just the main part of the name (such as microsoft) and then press Ctrl+Enter. This fills in the www and .com for you.

If you’ve entered a URL (perhaps a lengthy one) and then want to use only part of it to try to access a resource, place the cursor in the Address bar, hold down the Ctrl key, and press the right or left arrow key to jump forward or backward to the next separator character (the slashes, the dots, and so on).

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You can use the Address bar to do more than find a resource on the Internet. You can also run a program from the Address bar (for example, type C:\Program Files\NetMeeting\conf ), and you can find a file. For example, if you enter a drive letter (such as d:\) and press the Enter key, you’ll see something similar to Figure 3-2. You can click a folder to open subfolders and files.

Figure 3-2

Looking for a file from the Address bar.

Navigating with Hyperlinks A hyperlink, or simply link, can be a word, a phrase, an image, or a symbol that forms a connection with a resource that can be located on your local computer, your local network, or the Internet. In Internet Explorer, textual links are usually underlined and in a different color from normal text. You know something is a link if the pointer becomes a hand with a pointing finger when you place the mouse cursor over it.

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To follow a link, of course, you simply click it. If you find something you know you’ll want to revisit, you can place a link to it on the Links bar, or you can add it to your Favorites list, which we’ll discuss next. To add a link to the Links bar, simply drag it there. To remove a link from the Links bar, right-click it and choose Delete from the shortcut menu. To rearrange items on the Links bar, drag an item to a new location. By default, the Links bar contains the following links: • Customize Links, which opens a page on the Microsoft Web site that contains information about how to add, remove, and rearrange items on the Links bar. • Free Hotmail, which opens a Web page where you can sign up for an e-mail account. • Windows, which takes you to the Microsoft Windows site. TIP

If you ever lose track of where you are when following links, you can click Home to return to your start page, click Back to return to the page you last visited, or click Forward to return to the page you visited before you clicked the Back button.

Using the Favorites List As we mentioned, you can also keep track of sites you want to revisit by adding them to your Favorites list. (In Netscape Navigator, favorites are called bookmarks.)

Keeping T rack of Favorite Sites Track You can add sites to your Favorites list in two ways: you can use the Favorites menu, or you can click the Favorites button on the toolbar. To use the Favorites menu, follow these steps: 1. Open the Add Favorite dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-3. Click the Favorites menu, and then click Add To Favorites.

Figure 3-3

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The Add Favorite dialog box.


2. Add the site to the list. In the Name box, accept the suggested name, or type another name, and then click OK. To store a favorite site in a particular folder, click Create In to open the Create In list and then select a folder. To create a new folder, click New Folder to open the Create New Folder dialog box, type a name for the folder, and click OK. If you know that the contents of a site will not change, you can click the Make Available Offline check box. In this way, you can access the site when you aren’t connected to the Internet. For example, suppose you find a lengthy report that contains facts and figures you want to be able to access easily and quickly . Make it available offline. You can also add a favorite site by clicking the Favorites toolbar button to open the Favorites bar, as shown in Figure 3-4. Click Add to open the Add Favorite dialog box, and then follow step 2 above.

Figure 3-4

Using the Favorites bar.

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Here are some other ways you can add sites to your Favorites list: • Right-click a link, and choose Add To Favorites from the shortcut menu. • Right-click the current page outside a link, and choose Add To Favorites from the shortcut menu. • Drag and drop a link on a Web page to the Favorites toolbar button.

Organizing Favorites If you just keep adding sites to the Favorites list without any sense of organization, you’ll soon find that you have links to a lot of sites but that you can’t put your cursor on one quickly. Here are some tips for managing the Favorites list: • Create folders for collections of similar sites or for sites that you want to access for a particular project. • Weed out sites that you no longer need to access. Right-click the item, and choose Delete from the shortcut menu. • To move an item to another place in the list or to another folder, drag it to its new location. • To create a new folder from the Favorites list, click the Favorites menu, click Organize Favorites, and then click Create Folder, or click the Organize button on the Favorites bar. • To rename a favorite, right-click it, choose Rename from the shortcut menu, type the new name, and press the Enter key.

Using the History List Another way to find out where you’ve been and return there is to use the History list. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the History list, as shown in Figure 3-5. Click the History button on the toolbar.

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Figure 3-5

Using the History list.

2. Select a view. Click the View button on the History bar, and then choose By Date, By Site, By Most Visited, or By Order Most Visited Today. You can also open a list of sites that you visited yesterday, last week, two weeks ago, and three weeks ago. 3. Search for a site. Click the Search button to open the Search For box, enter a term or a phrase, and click Search Now. TIP

For really quick access to a site, place a shortcut to it on the desktop. With the page open in Internet Explorer, right-click an empty area, and choose Create Shortcut from the shortcut menu.

E-Mailing Pages and Links When you run across a page you want to share with a colleague, you can send the page or a link to it. Simply click the Mail button on the toolbar, and click Send A Link or Send Page. The New Message window will open with the link or the page inserted in the body of the message. (Chapter 4 discusses sending messages in Outlook Express.) Chapter 3


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Listening to the Radio over the W eb Web One component of the Internet Explorer window that we didn’t mention earlier is the Radio bar. It is not displayed by default, but you can display it and then use it to directly access radio stations throughout the United States and around the world. TIP

The quality of your listening experience will depend on your speakers, your system, and the speed at which you access the Internet. You’ll need at least a 56K modem, and a faster connection will be even better.

To listen to a Webcast, follow these steps: 1. Display the Radio toolbar, as shown in Figure 3-6. Click the View menu, click Toolbars, and then click Radio.

Figure 3-6

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Using the Radio toolbar.


2. Locate a station. Click the Radio Stations toolbar button, and then click Radio Station Guide to open the WindowsMedia.com site. Click a button to select a station. The station’s home page loads while the station is being found. To adjust the volume, move the slider on the Volume Control. To turn the radio off, click the Stop button on the Radio toolbar.

Saving and Printing W eb Pages Web You can save a Web page as a file on your local drive or on your network. To save a Web page that is open in Internet Explorer, follow these steps: 1. Open the Save Web Page dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-7. Click the File menu, and then click Save As.

Figure 3-7

Saving a Web page.

2. Select a folder, a filename, and a type. In the Save In box, select a folder in which to save the page. In the File Name box, accept the name that’s suggested or enter another name. In the Save As Type box, select a file type. If you want to save a file with a character set other than Western European, click the drop-down Encoding list, and select a character set.

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3. Save the file. Click the Save button. To save a Web page without opening it, right-click its link and choose Save Target As from the shortcut menu to download the file and open the Save As dialog box. Follow steps 2 and 3 above. To save a portion of a page and place it in another document, follow these steps: 1. Make your selection, and copy it. Select what you want, and press Ctrl+C. 2. Insert your selection in another document. Open the other document, place the insertion point where you want the text, and press Ctrl+V. To save an image from a Web page, follow these steps: 1. Select the image. Right-click the image, and choose Save Picture As to open the Save Picture dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8

Saving an image.

2. Save the file. Select a folder, a filename, and a type, and then click Save. To print a Web page you have open in Internet Explorer, simply click the Print button. By default, background colors and background images are not displayed, which saves printing time, spooling time, and cartridge ink. If you want to print background images and colors, follow these steps: 68


1. Open the Internet Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, click Internet Options, and then click the Advanced tab, as shown in Figure 3-9.

Figure 3-9

The Advanced tab of the Internet Options dialog box.

2. Enable background printing. Scroll down the Settings list, and click the Print Background Colors And Images check box. Click OK. To print a Web page but to exercise finer control over what’s printed, follow these steps: 1. Open the Print dialog box. Click the File menu, and then click Print. For the most part, you use this dialog box just as you would any Print dialog box in Windows. 2. Specify your options. Click the Options tab, as shown in Figure 3-10. If you want to print all the pages that are linked to the current page, click the Print All Linked Documents check box. (Be sure you really want to do this—you might need a lot of paper.) If you want to print a table that lists the links for this page, click the Print Table Of Links check box.

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Figure 3-10 The Options tab in the Print dialog box.

3. Print the document. Click the Print button. To print the target of any link, right-click the link and choose Print Target from the shortcut menu to open the Print dialog box.

Searching the W eb Web If you’ve spent any time at all searching the Internet, you probably know about search services such as AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo!. You know that you can go to those sites and enter a search term or phrase to locate documents and other resources that contain references to your search item. With Internet Explorer, however, it’s possible to search all those services at the same time plus a few more. You can also specify whether you want to find a Web page, a person’s address, a business, a map, a picture, and so on. NOTE

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In this section, we’ll look briefly at the essential search services provided by Internet Explorer. Chapter 8 discusses what every business user should know to turn the Internet and the Web into a powerful research and intelligencegathering tool.


Doing a Basic Search Before we get into all the options you can apply to a search, let’s do a simple search. Although you may be annoyed by all the ad banners on Web pages, you may also find that the Internet is an effective marketing medium for your business products or services. Let’s search for resources that might give us some information about advertising on the Internet. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the Search bar, as shown in Figure 3-11. Click the Search button.

Figure 3-11 Opening the Search bar.

2. Enter a search phrase. In the Find A Web Page Containing box, type “advertising on the Internet”. (Type the quotation marks but not the period. Using quotation marks like this says to find resources that contain the phrase, not just pages that contain all the words.) Click Search. Figure 3-12 shows the results of the search.

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Figure 3-12 The results of a search.

To open a page, simply click it. To begin a new search, click New. TIP

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The fastest way to perform a search is to enter the word find in the Address bar, followed by your search phrase. When you then press the Enter key, Internet Explorer automatically searches for your phrase and displays the results.


Broadening a Search If you want to broaden a search once you’ve seen the results of your first search, click the Use Advanced Search button. As Figure 3-13 shows, you’ll see more options that you can use to be more specific about your search.

Figure 3-13 Specifying more search options.

For even additional options, click the More Options link at the bottom of the Search bar to open MSN Search, as shown in Figure 3-14.

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Figure 3-14 Opening MSN Search.

To further refine a search, click the Customize button to open the Customize Search Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-15. You use this dialog box to specify the search services you use to find individual items. For example, you can choose to use InfoSpace, Bigfoot, and WorldPages to find a person’s mailing address, or you could specify to use only one of the three. Scroll down this dialog box to see your other options. Notice that at the bottom of the dialog box you can check the Previous Searches check box to tell Internet Explorer to store the results of the last 10 searches.

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Figure 3-15 The Customize Search Settings dialog box.

Dealing with Cookies and T emporary Internet Temporary Files A cookie is a file that is stored on your computer by the server of a site that you visit. A cookie is a simple data file that identifies you to the server. When you revisit the site, the cookie can be used to welcome you by name or to present you with a customized version of the page. Cookies are also used to make online shopping carts work. A cookie cannot see what’s on your hard drive or local network, nor can it send any other information back to the server or run other programs on your computer.

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A temporary Internet file is a copy of a Web page that you have visited and is stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive, along with your cookies. When you access a site that you’ve visited before, Internet Explorer first checks to see whether the page is in your Temporary Internet Files folder. If it is, Internet Explorer then checks to see whether the page has been updated since being stored. If the page has not been updated, Internet Explorer opens it from your Temporary Internet Files folder (also called the cache), which is obviously faster than loading the page from the server. You can check out what’s been stored in your Internet Files folder and empty it any time you want. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the Internet Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options. 2. Open the Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-16. Click the General tab, and then click the Settings button.

Figure 3-16 The Settings dialog box.

3. Open the Temporary Internet Files folder, as shown in Figure 3-17. In the Settings dialog box, click the View Files button.

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Figure 3-17 The Temporary Internet Files folder.

As you can see, the Temporary Internet Files folder contains both cookies and the URLs of Web pages stored on your computer. To empty the Temporary Internet Files folder, click the Delete Files button in the General tab in the Internet Options dialog box. To increase or reduce the space for the Temporary Internet Files folder, move the slider bar in the Settings dialog box. NOTE

Cookies aren’t deleted when you empty the Temporary Internet Files folder. To delete cookies, open the Temporary Internet Files folder and manually delete the cookies you don’t want to keep.

To empty the Temporary Internet Files folder automatically when you close Internet Explorer, follow these steps: 1. Open the Internet Options dialog box. In Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options.

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2. Tell Internet Explorer to empty the folder. Click the Advanced tab, scroll down to the Security section, and click the Empty Temporary Files Folder When Browser Is Closed check box. Click OK.

Customizing Internet Explorer Already in this chapter, you’ve seen a few ways that you can change the default settings for Internet Explorer. You can, however, customize Internet Explorer in many other ways. For example, you can specify a different start page, specify particular colors for text and background, set the security level, change your Internet connection, and so on. To do any of this, you open a dialog box that is called either Internet Options or Internet Properties. In Internet Explorer, clicking the Tools menu and then clicking Internet Options opens the Internet Options dialog box. In Control Panel, clicking the Internet Options icon opens the Internet Properties dialog box. Both dialog boxes contain exactly the same tabs and the same options. In this section, we’ll open the dialog box from within Internet Explorer, so the illustrations will show the Internet Options dialog box.

Personalizing General Settings To change your start page, to specify how to handle temporary Internet files, and to manage your History list, click the General tab in the Internet Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-18.

Figure 3-18 The General tab of the Internet Options dialog box. 78


As you saw earlier in this chapter, by default Internet Explorer opens the MSN home page when you open Internet Explorer. To specify a different Web site as your start page, follow these steps: 1. Open the Internet Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options. 2. Specify the current page or a blank page. Open the Web site, open the Internet Options dialog box, and then click Use Current, or enter a URL in the Address box. To specify a blank page, simply click Use Blank. Click OK, or click Apply. In the previous section, you saw how to open your Temporary Internet Files folder and delete those files and cookies, if you want. To change the settings for this folder, click the Settings button to open the Settings dialog box (see Figure 3-16). In the top section, specify whether and when you want Internet Explorer to check the Temporary Internet Files folder before making a trip to the server for a resource. To change the location of your Temporary Internet Files folder, follow these steps: 1. Open the Browse For Folder dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-19. Click the Move Folder button.

Figure 3-19 The Browse For Folder dialog box.

2. Specify a location. Select a new folder, and click OK. Chapter 3


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Sometimes when you open a Web page, a small program is needed to display the page. These programs are stored in your Downloaded Program Files folder. To view this folder, click the View Objects button. If you want to delete one of these programs, right-click it, and choose Delete from the shortcut menu. Remember, though, that some pages might not be fully functional without the program. Earlier in this chapter, we looked at how to use the History list to access pages you’ve visited previously. To specify how long to keep pages in history, use the spin box in the History section of the General tab. To empty the History list, click the Clear History button. The creator of a Web page usually specifies the colors used on the page, otherwise Internet Explorer automatically uses your Windows color scheme to display the page. For pages that the developer has not specified colors or fonts, you can specify what you want. To specify colors for text, background, visited links, unvisited links, and the hover color, click the Colors button to open the Colors dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-20.

Figure 3-20 The Colors dialog box.

To specify fonts, click the Fonts button to open the Fonts dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-21. You can view some sites in multiple languages. To specify the languages you want to use and the order in which they should be used, click the Languages button to open the Language Preference dialog box. Click Add to open the Add Language dialog box to add a language to the list.

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Figure 3-21 The Fonts dialog box.

If you have a vision impairment and want to specify fonts and colors that make a Web page more accessible for you, click the Accessibility button to open the Accessibility dialog box, which is shown in Figure 3-22. In the Formatting section of this dialog box, you can tell Internet Explorer to ignore colors, font styles, or font sizes on specified Web pages. You can also set up a style sheet that incorporates your formatting needs and have Internet Explorer use this style sheet.

Figure 3-22 The Accessibility dialog box.

NOTE

Creating style sheets using the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) specification is beyond the scope of this book. For more information on CSS, refer to http:/ /www.htmlhelp.org.

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Establishing Security Levels for Zones Internet Explorer establishes four Security zones, and you can set the security level you want for each zone, using the Security tab in the Internet Options dialog box, which is shown in Figure 3-23.

Figure 3-23 The Security tab in the Internet Options dialog box.

Each zone pertains to specific kinds of sites: • The Internet zone applies to all sites not specified in the other three zones. By default, its security level is set to Medium. (We’ll explain these levels shortly.) • The Local Intranet zone applies to sites you can access on your corporate intranet, if you have one. By default, its security level is set to Medium-Low. • The Trusted Sites zone applies to Web sites that you are confident will not send you potentially damaging content. By default, its security level is set to Low. • The Restricted Sites zone applies to sites that you visit but that you do not trust to not send you potentially damaging content. By default, its security level is set to High. To add sites to any zone but the Internet zone, follow these steps:

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1. Add a site to the Local Intranet zone. Select the Local Intranet icon, and then click the Sites button to open the Local Intranet dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-24. Clear or check the check boxes to specify which sites to include. Click the Advanced button to open the Local Intranet dialog box to add and remove specific sites.

Figure 3-24 The Local Intranet dialog box.

2. Add a site to the Trusted Sites zone. Select the Trusted Sites icon, and click the Sites button to open the Trusted Sites dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-25. Enter the URL of the site you want to add and then click Add. You’ll probably want to clear the Require Server Verification check box so that you can add non-encrypted sites to this zone.

Figure 3-25 The Trusted Sites dialog box.

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3. Add a site to the Restricted Sites zone. Select the Restricted Sites icon, and click the Sites button to open the Restricted Sites dialog box, which contains the same options as the Trusted Sites dialog box shown in Figure 3-25. To change the security level for a zone, select the zone and then move the slider bar. You have the following choices: • High is the safest setting but also the most restrictive. Less secure features are disabled, including cookies, so you will not have access to all the features of a Web page. • Medium is the next safest setting, and it allows more functionality. You are prompted before you download content that Internet Explorer considers potentially unsafe. • Medium-Low is basically the same as the Medium setting, but you are not prompted before you download potentially unsafe content. • Low is most appropriate for sites that you know you can trust. You are not prompted when downloading most content. To establish a custom security level, click the Custom Level button to open the Security Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-26. Click an option button to disable or enable an item or to specify that you be prompted before downloading a particular item, and then click OK.

Figure 3-26 The Security Settings dialog box. 84


Establishing Other Security Settings To specify the content that can be viewed on your computer, to manage digital certificates, and to configure AutoComplete and set up a personal profile, you use the Content tab in the Internet Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-27.

Figure 3-27 The Content tab in the Internet Options dialog box.

The Content Advisor is a feature that you can use to prevent access to certain sites that you consider inappropriate in your environment. By default, Content Advisor is set to the most conservative level; that is, if Content Advisor is enabled, you will be able to access only those sites that contain content that is the least likely to be offensive. To change this setting, you enable Content Advisor and then set up new viewing criteria. Of course, if Content Advisor is not enabled, your access is in no way restricted.

To enable the Content Advisor, follow these steps: 1. Establish a password. Click the Enable button to open the Supervisor Password Required dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-28. Enter a password in the Password field, and click OK. Now, anyone who wants to change the settings you specify must enter the password.

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Figure 3-28 The Supervisor Password Required dialog box.

2. Open the Content Advisor dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-29. Click the Settings button to open the Supervisor Password Required dialog box, enter your password, and click OK.

Figure 3-29 The Content Advisor dialog box.

The ratings system in effect in Internet Explorer is that established by the Recreational Software Advisory Council and goes by the abbreviation RSACi. It is based on a system known as the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). If Content Advisor is enabled and if you have set various rating levels, Internet Explorer first reads any PICS rating codes it finds in a page before opening that page. If the PICS rating exceeds the limit you’ve established, Internet Explorer does not open the page. To set a level for language, nudity, sex, or violence, select the category in the Ratings tab in the Content Advisor dialog box and then move the slider. You use the other three tabs in the Content Advisor dialog box to do the following: 86


• Click the Approved Sites tab to specify sites that can always be viewed or that can never be viewed, no matter how they are rated. Some businesses use this feature to prevent employees from accessing games sites, gaming sites, and so on. • Click the General tab to specify that users can view unrated sites and that the supervisor can enter a password to let users view restricted content, to change the supervisor password, and to customize the rating system. • Click the Advanced tab to view or modify the list of organizations that provide rating services. A digital certificate is an electronic credential that verifies that you are who you say you are when connected to the Internet. Digital certificates are also used to guarantee the identity of a Web site or a downloaded program. You can acquire a digital certificate from a certificate publisher. One of the most popular is VeriSign, Inc., which you can find at http://www.verisign.com. To manage the digital certificates installed on your system and to specify certain software publishers as trustworthy, use the Certificates section of the Content tab. Earlier this chapter mentioned the AutoComplete feature, which comes to your aid when you enter URLs. You can also use AutoComplete to automatically enter information you commonly supply at certain Web sites. To configure AutoComplete, click the AutoComplete button in the Content tab to open the AutoComplete Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-30.

Figure 3-30 The AutoComplete Settings dialog box.

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If you want to streamline the process of providing personal contact information to a Web site that requests it, you can set up a profile that will automatically be used. To do so, click the My Profile button in the Content tab to open the Address Book–Choose Profile dialog box. You use your Address Book to create a new entry or edit an existing one. When a Web site explicitly requests your personal information from the Profile Assistant (not that many sites do yet), Internet Explorer displays the information the site is requesting and asks your permission to send the information.

Modifying or Creating an Internet or Network Connection You use the Connections tab, as shown in Figure 3-31, in the Internet Options dialog box to configure an Internet connection, dial-up settings, and local area network settings. In Chapter 2, we looked at how to create or modify an Internet connection using the Internet Connection Wizard. You can also start the Internet Connection Wizard by clicking the Setup button in the Connections tab.

Figure 3-31 The Connections tab of the Internet Options dialog box.

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To add, remove, or change the settings for a dial-up connection, you use the buttons in the Dial-Up Settings section. To add a connection, click the Add button to start the Network Connection Wizard. To remove a connection, select it and click the Remove button. To modify the settings for a connection, select it and click the Settings button to open the Settings dialog box for that connection. To modify the settings for a local area network, click the LAN Settings button to open the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box.

Specifying Programs to Use for Internet Services E-mail, newsgroups, an Internet call, creation of a Web page, a calendar, and a contact list are all examples of Internet services, and you use the Programs tab in the Internet Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 3-32, to associate a program with a service. When you then want to access that service, the program you specify is always used.

Figure 3-32 The Programs tab in the Internet Options dialog box.

To change the associated program, click the down arrow in the list box for that service. To return to the programs that were assigned when you installed the operating system as well as the default start page, click the Reset Web Settings button. If you have more than one Web browser installed on your system, clear the check box at the bottom if you want to use another program as the default browser.

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Specifying Advanced Options Earlier in this chapter, we looked briefly at the Advanced tab in the Internet Options dialog box when specifying whether Internet Explorer prints background colors and images. You can also use the options on this tab to configure how Internet Explorer handles accessibility, browsing, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) settings, the Java environment, multimedia, searching from the Address bar, and security. Simply check a check box to enable a feature, or clear a check box to disable a feature. To return to the default settings, click the Restore Defaults button.

Summary Of course, the most important thing about Internet Explorer is not how it works but how you can use it to access the resources that make you a more informed and betterequipped businessperson. You can certainly just point and click to your heart’s desire, but you’ll soon find yourself off track and probably wasting a good bit of time. Using the techniques described in this chapter, you can, for example, click a site from your Favorites list to go immediately to a site whose data you need to check every day or perhaps even more often (such as stock prices or weather conditions). You can quickly search for and find Web sites, business names and addresses, and all sorts of other business resources, and you can save the file, print it, and send it to a colleague or a client. You won’t necessarily need to do all of these things every day, but you can refer to this chapter when a specific task presents itself.

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Chapter 4

USING OUTLOOK EXPRESS

Featuring: • Understanding How E-Mail Works • Touring the Outlook Express Window • Managing Messages • Creating and Sending Messages • Attaching Files to Messages • Including a Personalized Signature • Blocking Messages • Using Identities • Keeping Track of Contact Information • Customizing Outlook Express • Taking Charge of Your Wired Office

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erhaps even more than the Web, electronic mail has become an essential business tool. Before the Internet was available commercially, we worked at companies that provided internal e-mail programs, and with all the right connections, you could access your office e-mail account from home. Within days, most new employees were so dependent on the e-mail system that they ceased to function if the server went down. And that was small potatoes compared with how the business world now relies on the Internet for e-mail.

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Some business users consider e-mail both a blessing and a curse, and at the end of this chapter, you’ll find some ideas about how to manage e-mail (and other components of your electronic office) rather than letting it manage you. In this chapter, we look at how to use Microsoft Outlook Express, the e-mail program that’s included with the most recent versions of Microsoft Windows. Outlook Express is an Internet standards e-mail reader, which means that you can use it to send and receive e-mail if you have an Internet e-mail account. An e-mail account is not the same thing as an account with an online information service such as CompuServe or America Online. An Internet e-mail account provides services such as standards-based e-mail but does not provide services such as chat rooms, access to databases, conferences, and so on. These days most ISPs provide you with an e-mail account as well as access to the Web. Before you can use Outlook Express to send and receive e-mail, you need to configure your e-mail account using the Internet Connection Wizard by following the instructions in Chapter 2. NOTE

This chapter uses the version of Outlook Express that is included with Windows 2000 Professional for illustrations and for describing the steps to accomplish tasks. If you have Outlook Express running on an earlier version of Windows or on some other operating system, the screens will look much the same, and the steps will be similar, although not identical.

Understanding How E-Mail W orks Works As Chapter 3 mentioned, you don’t need to understand how a Web browser works to use it, and you don’t need to understand how e-mail works to use an e-mail program to send and receive messages. But if you know in general the steps involved in getting a message from your computer to another computer on the Internet, you’ll become a more informed business user, and you’ll have an idea of what’s going on when you see, for example, a message that says “POP server unavailable.” After you create an e-mail message and click the Send button, your message travels the following route to get to its intended recipient: • Your e-mail program, such as Outlook Express, contacts your ISP’s computer and connects to an SMTP server program. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The server program acknowledges that it has been contacted, and your e-mail

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program tells the server that it has a message it wants to send. The server program then says to send the message or to wait because it is busy. • If it gets the green light, your e-mail program sends the message to the SMTP server and asks for confirmation. • The server confirms that it has received the message and then asks the domain name server for the best path through the Internet to the intended recipient. • The domain name server replies with the best path, and the SMTP server sends the message on its way. • When the message arrives at the recipient’s SMTP server, it is transferred to a Post Office Protocol (POP) server, Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) server, or HTTP mail server (such as Hotmail), which holds the message until the recipient requests it. • When your recipient logs on to the Internet, opens his or her e-mail program, and checks for new mail, the message is downloaded to the recipient’s computer. Although this process sounds very involved, and technically it is, it can happen very quickly. We live in the United States and exchange messages with a colleague in Greece in a matter of minutes. One exception to the process outlined earlier is America Online (AOL), the largest ISP in the United States. AOL uses proprietary protocols instead of the SMTP and POP protocols and then uses a gateway to translate the proprietary protocols into the standard e-mail protocols so that AOL users and users of standard e-mail programs can communicate. (A gateway is simply a software device that both transfers and converts information that originates from systems using different communication protocols, or rules.)

Touring the Outlook Express Window You can open Outlook Express in the following ways: • Click the Launch Outlook Express button on the Quick Launch toolbar. • Click the Start button, click Programs, and then click Outlook Express. • In Internet Explorer, click the Mail button on the Standard toolbar, and then click Read Mail or Read News. Figure 4-1 shows what you’ll see when you open Outlook Express the first time. Chapter 4


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Figure 4-1

The opening screen in Outlook Express.

This window contains the usual Windows Menu bar and toolbar. The Folders list is a tool for organizing messages and contains the following folders by default, although, as you will see, you can add your own folders to this list: • The Inbox folder is the repository for newly received messages and messages that you haven’t disposed of in some way. • The Outbox folder contains messages that are ready to be sent. • The Sent Items folder contains copies of messages that you have sent. • The Deleted Items folder contains copies of messages that you have deleted. In other words, unless you tell Outlook Express to do otherwise, messages that you delete are not immediately removed but are placed in the Deleted Items folder.

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• The Drafts folder contains messages that you are working on but that aren’t yet ready to be sent. The Contacts list contains the names of people in your Address Book. For information on how to set up and use Address Book, see the section “Keeping Track of Contact Information,” later in this chapter.

Managing Messages From the Outlook Express Main window, you can click the Inbox link or the Read Mail link to open your Inbox folder and read messages. Figure 4-2 shows the Inbox folder in Preview Pane view. Message headers appear in the upper pane, and you select a message to open it in the lower pane. To view messages in a separate window rather than using the Preview pane, click the View menu, click Layout, and in the Layout dialog box, clear the Show Preview Pane check box.

Figure 4-2

Reading a message in Preview Pane view.

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If you are connected to the Internet, Outlook Express will automatically check the mail server for new messages and download them to your Inbox folder when you open Outlook Express. Thereafter, Outlook Express will check for new messages every 30 minutes as along as you are still connected to the Internet. If you want to check for messages more often or less frequently, follow these steps: 1. Open the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-3. Click the Tools menu, and then click Options.

Figure 4-3

The General tab in the Options dialog box.

2. Change the time interval. In the General tab, click the Check For New Message Every x Minutes spin box, and select a new time period. Click OK. By default, Outlook Express plays a sound when new messages arrive in your mailbox. If you prefer silence, clear the Play Sound When New Messages Arrive check box in the General tab of the Options dialog box.

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Saving Messages You can save messages in Windows Explorer folders or in Outlook Express folders, and you can also save attachments to messages. We’ll look at attachments later in this chapter. To save messages in Windows Explorer folders, open the message or select its header, and follow these steps: 1. Open the Save Message As dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-4. Click the File menu, and then click Save As.

Figure 4-4

The Save Message As dialog box.

2. Select a folder. Select a folder, and then accept the file name that’s suggested, or type a new file name. 3. Select a file type. In the Save As Type drop down box, choose how to save the message, and then click Save. To save a message in an Outlook Express folder, simply drag its header to the folder. You can also create your own folders. For example, you might want to create a folder for a project and then place all correspondence related to that project in that folder. Or you might want to create a folder for a person and place all messages from that person in that folder. To create a new Outlook Express folder, follow these steps:

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1. Open the Create Folder dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-5. Click the File menu, click New, and then click Folder.

Figure 4-5

The Create Folder dialog box.

2. Name the folder. In the Folder Name box, enter a name for the folder. 3. Select a folder in which to place the new folder. You can place the folder as a main folder in the Local Folders list, or you can store it in any existing folder. Click OK.

Printing Messages If you need a paper copy of a message, you can print it in the following ways: • Select the header of the message, and click the Print button on the toolbar. • Open the message, and then click the Print button in the Message window. • Select the message or open the message, click the File menu, and then click Print. Whichever method you use, you’ll open the standard Windows Print dialog box.

Marking Messages Although some of us may have a Pavlovian reaction to the mail notification alert, you don’t need to read and process every message the instant it arrives in your Inbox. When you’re checking mail, you can mark messages so that when you have time you can go back and deal with them. You can mark messages in the following ways: 98


• To identify a message as important, select the message header, click the Message menu, and click Flag Message to place a little red flag to the left of the header. • If you’ve read a message but want to read it again later and respond, you can mark it as unread. Select the message header, click the Edit menu, and then click Mark As Unread. Now instead of an open envelope preceding the header, you’ll see a closed envelope, and the header is in boldface.

Replying to Messages To reply to a message from a single sender, you simply click the Reply button on the toolbar. If the message was sent to multiple recipients, you can reply to them as well as the sender by clicking the Reply All button. By default, Outlook Express places all the names of those you reply to in your Address Book—a quick and easy way to store e-mail addresses. By default, Outlook Express includes the text of the original message in your reply. Sometimes this can be helpful, and at other times it can be a real nuisance, especially if you have to wade through several replies to get to the essence of the message. You have a couple of alternatives if you don’t want the original message included in the reply: • Click the Reply button, place your cursor in the body of the message, click the Edit menu, click Select All to highlight the message, and press the Delete key. • Click the Tools menu, click Options to open the Options dialog box, click the Send tab, clear the Include Message In Reply check box, and click OK. Now, the message will never automatically be included in the reply.

Forwarding Messages Sometimes it’s handy to forward a message, and you can include your own comments in the forwarded message as well. As is the case with passing along anything that was created by somebody else, be sure that forwarding a message will not infringe on the original sender. Of course, some people maintain that you should never put anything in an e-mail message that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper, and we’ll discuss security and privacy in Chapter 7. To forward a message, open it, click the Forward button, enter an e-mail address, add your comments if you want, and click the Send button.

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Deleting Messages You can delete a message in the following ways: • Select the message header, and press the Delete key or click the Delete toolbar button. • Open the message, and click the Delete toolbar button. By default, deleted messages are placed in the Deleted Items folder, and they stay there until you manually delete them. To do so, select the Deleted Items folder, click the Edit menu, click Empty ‘Deleted Items’ Folder, and click Yes when you’re asked if you want to delete these items. To automatically clear the Deleted Items folder when you close Outlook Express, follow these steps: 1. Open the Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, and then click Options. 2. Select the Maintenance tab, as shown in Figure 4-6. Click the Maintenance tab, click the Empty Messages From The ‘Deleted Items’ Folder On Exit check box, and click OK.

Figure 4-6

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The Maintenance tab in the Options dialog box.


Creating and Sending Messages You can create a message in two formats: plain text and HTML. By default, Outlook Express uses HTML. As you’ll see in the next section, not all e-mail programs can deal with HTML messages, so you’ll want to use that with caution. To compose and send a message in plain text, follow these steps: 1. Open the New Message window, as shown in Figure 4-7. Click the New Mail button on the toolbar.

Figure 4-7

The New Message window.

2. Specify plain text format. Click the Format menu, and click Plain Text.

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3. Address and compose your message. In the To line, enter an e-mail address, or click the icon to open your Address Book and select the address. Follow the same procedure to copy someone on the message. To send a blind carbon copy of the message, click the Cc icon to open the Select Recipients dialog box, select a name from the list, and click the Bcc button. Enter a subject in the Subject line, place the cursor in the message body, and type your message. 4. Send the message. Click the Send button. By default, messages are sent immediately if you are connected to the Internet. If you want to wait and send a message later, click the File menu, and click Send Later. This places your message in the Outbox folder, and it is sent when you click the Send/Recv button. If you create messages offline (that is, when you aren’t connected to the Internet), your messages are also stored in the Outbox folder.

Using HTML When you use HTML to create a message, you are essentially creating a Web page, and you can include several neat effects, such as a background color or image, sound, and so on. The drawback, as we mentioned earlier, is that not all e-mail programs can deal with these Web pages, including most handheld devices, America Online and the freeware version of Qualcomm Eudora. Before you send someone a message that includes pictures and other HTML elements, send that person a plain text message and ask whether he or she can read HTML messages. When you open the New Message window and see the Formatting toolbar (see Figure 4-7), you know you’re set up to compose a message in HTML. The Formatting toolbar contains many of the tools you see and use in your word processor. You can use it to do the following, among other things, in your message:

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• Insert a bulleted list. • Add effects such as boldface, italics, underline, and font color. • Insert a numbered list. • Format paragraphs as flush left, flush right, or centered. • Insert a horizontal line. • Insert a picture. • Specify a font and font size. Figure 4-8 shows an e-mail message that contains HTML elements.

Figure 4-8

An e-mail message composed in HTML.

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Using Stationery You can also liven up your messages using stationery, or you can create your own stationery. Figure 4-9 shows a message that uses the Formal Announcement stationery that’s included with Outlook Express.

Figure 4-9

A message that uses stationery.

To use stationery, click the Message menu, click New Using, and then select a stationery design from the list, or click Select Stationery to open the Select Stationery dialog box. You’ll find several more designs listed in this dialog box. To create your own stationery, click the Create New button to start the Stationery Setup Wizard.

Attaching Files to Messages Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned that you can save files that are attached to messages. Obviously, you can also attach files to messages. Before getting into the details, though, we need to remind you that some serious computer viruses make the rounds via attachments to e-mail. Many businesses would cease to function these days if they couldn’t e-mail files to colleagues and clients, so abandoning the use of file attachments is not an option. To be on the safe side, we recommend not opening an attachment if 104


you don’t know the source; just select the message header, and press the Delete key. And we’d say to be particularly wary of an attachment that appears to have been forwarded, and forwarded, and forwarded. When you receive a message that has a file attached to it, you’ll see a paper-clip icon preceding the header. When you open the message, you’ll see the filename of the attachment in the Attach line. If the file is in a format that a program on your computer can read, simply double-click the filename of the attachment to open it. To save the attachment, follow these steps: 1. Open the Save Attachments dialog box. Click the File menu, and click Save Attachments. 2. Save the file. In the Save To box, specify a folder into which to save the file, and click the Save button. To attach a file to a message you are composing, follow these steps: 1. Open the Insert Attachment dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-10. Click the Insert menu, and click File Attachment.

Figure 4-10 The Insert Attachment dialog box.

2. Attach the file. Enter the filename in the File Name box or browse to find it, and then click Attach. Your message now contains the name of the file in the Attach line.

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Including a Personalized Signature Many people never bother to sign their e-mail messages. After all, their name appears in the From line. Others create elaborate signatures that are automatically appended to all messages. Your business or organization may, in fact, have guidelines about what you should include in a signature. It’s common to include your name, title, the name of your organization, perhaps its physical address, and your phone number. To create a signature that is automatically appended to all your messages, follow these steps: 1. Open the Options dialog box. Click the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Signatures tab, as shown in Figure 4-11.

Figure 4-11 Creating a signature.

2. Create a signature. Click New, and then in the Text box, enter your contact information. If you have a file that contains the information you want in your signature, click the File option button, and then click Browse to locate the file. 3. Specify the e-mail accounts for which you’ll use this signature. Click the Advanced tab to open the Advanced Signature Settings dialog box. If you have a home e-mail account and a business e-mail account, for example, you might want to specify a different signature for each. Select the account, and click OK. 106


4. Specify which messages will use the signature. If you want the signature attached to all outgoing messages, click the corresponding check box. If you don’t want the signature automatically added to all messages, leave this check box cleared. To add the signature to selected messages, in the New Message window, click the Insert menu, and then click Signature. When you have made your selections, click OK.

Blocking Messages You are not at the mercy of your Inbox. You can choose to block mail from certain senders, and you can route mail from other senders directly to a folder. To do any of this, you use the Message Rules dialog box. Using the options in this dialog box, you can get very detailed about how you filter messages. We’ll take a look at the steps for blocking messages entirely from certain senders and for routing messages from a particular person to a folder, but you can apply these steps to establish many other message rules. To block messages from a particular sender, follow these steps: 1. Open the Message Rules dialog box at the Blocked Senders tab, as shown in Figure 4-12. Click the Tools menu, click Message Rules, and then click Blocked Senders.

Figure 4-12 Blocking messages. Chapter 4


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2. Open the Add Sender dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-13. Click the Add button in the Message Rules dialog box.

Figure 4-13 The Add Sender dialog box.

3. Specify who and what you want to block. In the Address box, enter the e-mail address of the sender you want to block, and then select whether you want to block mail messages, news messages, or both. Click OK, and then click OK again back in the Message Rules dialog box. Now all messages from that e-mail address will go immediately to your Deleted Items folder when they are downloaded to your system. NOTE

In addition to being an e-mail reader, Outlook Express is also a newsreader. Chapter 5 discusses newsgroups.

To establish a rule that sends all mail from a specific person to a specific Outlook Express folder, follow these steps: 1. Open the New Mail Rule dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-14. Click the Tools menu, click Message Rules, and then click Mail.

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Figure 4-14 The New Mail Rule dialog box.

2. Specify the conditions and actions for your new rule. In the Select The Conditions For Your Rule section, click the Where The From Line Contains People check box, and in the Select The Actions For Your Rules section, click the Move It To The Specified Folder check box. You’ll now see links in the Rule Description section that you can click to specify the person and the folder. 3. Specify the person. Click the Contains People link to open the Select People dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-15. Enter the e-mail address of the person, or select it from your Address Book, and click Add.

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Figure 4-15 The Select People dialog box.

4. Specify the folder. Click the Specified link to open the Move dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-16. Create a new folder, or select an existing folder, and click OK.

Figure 4-16 The Move dialog box.

5. Name your new rule. Back in the New Mail Rule dialog box, enter a name in the Name Of The Rule box, and click OK. Now all the mail from the person you specified will go immediately to that person’s folder when it’s downloaded to your system. 110


Using Identities An identity in Outlook Express is sort of an e-mail user profile. You’ll want to use identities if more than one person uses your computer and thus also uses Outlook Express. When you set up identities, each person sees only his or her e-mail messages and has his or her own contacts in Address Book. When you install Outlook Express, you are set up as the main identity. To set up other identities, follow these steps: 1. Open the New Identity dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-17. In the main Outlook Express window, click the File menu, click Identities, and then click Add New Identity.

Figure 4-17 The New Identity dialog box.

2. Specify a name and, optionally, a password for this identity. In the Type Your Name box, enter a name for the new identity. If you want password protection enabled, click the Require A Password check box, which opens the Enter Password dialog box. Type the password twice—once in the New Password box and again in the Confirm New Password box—and then click OK. The name of the new identity will appear in the Identities list in the Manage Identities dialog box, and you’ll be asked whether you want to switch to the new identity now. If not, click No, and then click Close in the Manage Identities dialog box. The first time you log on as the new identity, you’ll be asked for some information about your Internet connection. To switch from one identity to another, follow these steps:

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1. Open the Switch Identities dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-18. Click the File menu, and then click Switch Identity.

Figure 4-18 The Switch Identities dialog box.

2. Select the identity. Select an identity from the list, enter a password if required, and click OK. Once you set up more than one identity, you’ll be asked to select an identity when you open Outlook Express.

Keeping T rack of Contact Information Track Earlier in this chapter, you learned that an easy way to enter an e-mail address in Outlook Express is to add it from your Address Book. This section gives you an overview of Address Book and shows you how to set it up to quickly locate contact information and to set up group, or distribution, lists. You can open Address Book in a couple of ways: • From the desktop, click the Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, and then click Address Book.

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• In Outlook Express, click the Addresses button on the toolbar in the Main window, or in the New Message window, click the To button (which opens the Select Recipients dialog box in Address Book). Figure 4-19 shows an empty Address Book window, ready for you to add contact information. Notice that this Address Book is for the main identity.

Figure 4-19 An empty Address Book window.

Adding Information for an Individual To add contact information for an individual, open Address Book and follow these steps: 1. Open the Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-20. Click the New button on the toolbar, and then click New Contact.

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Figure 4-20 The Properties dialog box for a new contact.

2. Add information for this person. Use the Name, Home, Business, Personal, Other, NetMeeting, Digital IDs, and Online tabs to add as much or as little information as you want. Press the Tab key to move from one field to another in a tab. NOTE

You’ll have the Online tab only if you’ve installed Instant Messaging, a feature you can use with NetMeeting, which is discussed in Chapter 6.

3. Close the Properties dialog box. Click the Close button. You’ll see the new contact listed in the Address Book window. To send mail to this new contact, click the To: button in the New Message window, double-click the name, and click OK.

Setting Up a Distribution List In the Address Book, a distribution list is called a group. To set up a group, follow these steps: 1. Open the Properties dialog box for the new group, as shown in Figure 4-21. In Address Book, click the New button on the toolbar, and then click New Group.

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Figure 4-21 The Properties dialog box for a new group.

2. Name the group. In the Group Name, type a name for the group. This is the name that will appear in the list in the main Address Book window. 3. Add members to the group. You can add members in the following ways: • Click the Select Members button to open the Select Group Members dialog box, select a name from the list, click the Select button, and then click OK. • Click New Contact to open the Properties dialog box for a new contact, enter contact information, and click OK to add a member to the group and to your Address Book. • In the Name and E-Mail boxes at the bottom of the window, enter information to add someone to the group but not to your Address Book. When you’re finished, click OK. The group name now appears in boldface in the main Address Book window.

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Finding People Using Address Book, you can find contact information for people using directory services such as Bigfoot Internet Directory Service, WhoWhere Internet Directory Service, Yahoo! People Search, and so on, if you are connected to the Internet. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the Find People dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-22. In Address Book, click the Find People button on the toolbar.

Figure 4-22 The Find People dialog box.

2. Select a directory service. Click the Look In drop-down list box. 3. Enter some information. In the People tab, fill in the information you know about this person, and then click Find Now.

Printing Y our Address Book Your You can print the contents of your Address Book in three formats: • Memo, which prints all the information you have stored. • Business Card, which prints the information you’d typically find on a business card. • Phone List, which prints only the phone numbers. To print in one of these formats, click the Print button to open the Print dialog box, select a print style (Memo, Business Card, or Phone List), and click Print.

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Creating and Printing a Map If your organization is having an off-site retreat, if you’re inviting your employees for dinner at your new house, or if you just need directions to a business meeting, you can use Address Book to create and print a map to the location. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the Properties dialog box. In the Address Book window, double-click an entry in your Address Book. 2. Enter an address. Click either the Home or the Business tab. You can use the address that’s stored for the person’s name you clicked, or you can simply enter other address information for the map you want to produce. When you’re done, click View Map. You’ll see something similar to Figure 4-23.

Figure 4-23 Creating a map with Address Book.

Now you can print this map, which opens in Internet Explorer, save it, or e-mail it to someone.

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Customizing Outlook Express Unless you’ve turned off Windows sounds, you’ll hear a sound when a new message arrives in your Inbox, and Outlook Express will check for new messages every 30 minutes. You can disable this sound if you want, you can specify that Outlook Express check for new messages more frequently or less often, and you can personalize a number of other features that concern e-mail and news, using the Options dialog box. To open the Options dialog box, click the Tools menu and then click Options. NOTE

This section discusses the features in the Options dialog box that weren’t discussed earlier in this chapter.

Specifying General Options The Options dialog box has either 9 or 10 tabs. (The Spelling tab is available only if you have installed a Microsoft Office program that includes the spell-checking feature, for example, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.) By default, the Options dialog box opens at the General tab, which is shown in Figure 4-24.

Figure 4-24 The General tab of the Options dialog box.

To enable an option, check it; to disable an option, clear the check box. You use the options on the General tab to enable or disable the following features:

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• Open Outlook Express at your Inbox. • Let you know if there are new newsgroups. • Display all folders that contain unread messages. • Log on to the MSN Messenger Service when you open Outlook Express. • Play a sound when you have new mail. • Automatically send and receive messages when you open Outlook Express. • Specify how often to check for new messages. • Specify whether Outlook Express is to be used when you access mail or news features in your Web browser.

Specifying What Happens When Y ou Read Messages or You News Click the Read tab in the Options dialog box, which is shown in Figure 4-25, to specify options that pertain to reading messages and newsgroups. Most of these options are self-explanatory; if you need more information, click the question mark button, and then click the option.

Figure 4-25 The Read tab in the Options dialog box.

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Handling Return Receipts If you want to know when a recipient has received and read a message, click the Tools menu in the New Message window, and then click Request Read Receipt. If you want to know when all the messages you send have been received and read, you use the options on the Receipts tab in the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-26.

Figure 4-26 The Receipts tab in the Options dialog box.

If you want to control how Outlook Express responds to requests for read receipts that you receive, use the options in the Returning Read Receipts section: • Click Never Send A Read Receipt if you don’t want a read receipt sent even though it was requested by the sender of a message. • Click Notify Me For Each Read Receipt Request if you want to know that a read receipt has been requested for a message. You can then decide whether to let the sender know that you have received the message. • By default, the Always Send A Read Receipt option is checked. The options in the Returning Read Receipts section are mutually exclusive. You must select one of the three options. If you or the sender has a secure digital signature, you can specify that the signature be verified by clicking the Secure Receipt button and configuring the options in the Secure Receipt Options dialog box. 120


Managing How Messages Are Sent Earlier in this chapter, we looked at the differences between using plain text and HTML formats for messages and how to specify one or the other in the New Message window. You can also specify the format using the Send tab in the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-27.

Figure 4-27 The Send tab in the Options dialog box.

In addition, you can use the options in the Send tab to enable or disable the following features: • Save a copy of every message you send in the Sent Items folder. This option is selected by default, and we suggest that you leave it that way. Having a record of what you said when and to whom is always a good idea in any business situation. • Bypass the Outbox folder and send messages immediately. Composing messages offline and storing them in the Outbox folder was handy when we paid dearly for online time by the minute. In these days of always-on connections and low-cost unlimited connection time, it’s probably simpler and easier to just compose the message and send it at once—unless you think you might want to edit it again before you send it. In that case, you can store it in the Drafts folder. • Always put the names of senders that you reply to in your Address Book. Again, this option is enabled by default, and we suggest that you leave it that way. It’s much easier to weed out your Address Book than it is to search for an e-mail address. Chapter 4


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• Use AutoComplete for e-mail addresses. This is a handy feature, but even quicker is selecting the address from your Address Book. • Include the original message when you reply to a message. This option is enabled by default, and if you ever want to do this, leave it enabled. Otherwise, you can’t include the message in your reply. If you don’t want to include the message, it’s easy to delete it from your reply. Simply place your cursor in the body of the message, click the Edit menu, choose Select All, and then press Delete. • If you receive messages in both plain text and HTML format, you can reply in the format in which the messages were sent by enabling the last option in the Sending section.

Changing Fonts, Specifying Stationery Stationery,, and Using Business Cards To change the font in which you compose messages, to specify stationery that will be used when you compose a message or post to a newsgroup, and to specify that your business card is always attached to messages or posts, you use the options on the Compose tab in the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-28.

Figure 4-28 The Compose tab in the Options dialog box.

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A business card that you create in Outlook Express is actually a vCard, an electronic personal information card that you can exchange via e-mail. A vCard is an industry standard format for sharing contact information including your name, address, telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address. To create a business card and attach it to all your messages, follow these steps: 1. Open Address Book. Click Addresses in the toolbar in the Outlook Express Main window. 2. Create an entry for yourself. Click the New button, and then click New Contact to open the Properties dialog box. Fill in as much or as little information about yourself as you want to include on your business card, and then click OK. 3. Save your business card to a file. In the Address Book main window, select your name from the list, click the File menu, click Export, and then click Business Card (vCard) to open the Export Business Card dialog box. Save it in the location that Outlook Express suggests, or choose another location and click Save. Close Address Book. 4. Specify that your business card be included in all outgoing messages. Click the Tools menu, and then click Options to open the Options dialog box. Click the Compose tab, click the Mail and News check boxes, and then click OK. To attach a business card to a single message rather than to all messages, leave the Mail and News check boxes blank, and in the New Message window, click the Insert menu, and then click My Business Card.

Checking Spelling Typically, e-mail messages get a bad reputation in the spelling, punctuation, and grammar department, and for good reason. One of our business contacts even sends streamof-consciousness messages—they are in all lowercase letters, have no punctuation, no paragraph indications, contain a lot of abbreviations and misspelled words, and so on. Not impressive from a business point of view, or from any point of view for that matter.

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True, e-mail has developed as one of the most important communications tools ever because it’s quick and easy, but in a business environment you want to apply the same standards to e-mail that you apply to any other form of communication. You want to portray a professional image, and you want your customers, colleagues, and other contacts to trust you and your abilities. At the very least, read through a message before you click the Send button. And if you want to avoid embarrassing typos and misspelled words, select the option in the Spelling tab of the Options dialog box to always check the spelling of a message before it is sent. (As we mentioned earlier, you won’t have the Spelling tab unless you have an Office application installed that contains the spell-checking feature.) Figure 4-29 shows the Spelling tab. The options are, in general, those found in other applications that can check spelling, but in addition you can also check Internet addresses and the original message in a reply or a forward.

Figure 4-29 The Spelling tab in the Options dialog box.

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Enhancing Security You can use the Security tab in the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 4-30, to select an Internet Security zone and to acquire and configure a digital certificate, which is also known as a digital ID. (For more on Security zones, look back at Chapter 3.) If your business involves sending and receiving e-mail that if intercepted by the wrong people could put your business at risk, you’ll want to look into using digital certificates. Click the Tell Me More button for a complete explanation of how digital certificates work, and click the Get Digital ID button to go to a Web page that lists authorities from which you can obtain a digital certificate.

Figure 4-30 The Security tab in the Options dialog box.

Configuring Y our Internet Connection Your You learned in Chapter 2 the various ways you can connect to the Internet, and you saw in Chapter 3 how to modify your connection using the Internet Options dialog box. Outlook Express and Internet Explorer both use the same Internet connection settings. You can modify those settings from within Outlook Express by clicking the Change button in the Connection tab (shown in Figure 4-31) to open the Internet Properties dialog box.

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Figure 4-31 The Connection tab in the Options dialog box.

TIP

Remember, the Internet Properties dialog box and the Internet Options dialog box both contain exactly the same options.

If you have multiple dial-up connections, click the first option in the Dial-Up section of the Connection tab if you want to be notified before connections are switched. If you want your modem to hang up after you send and receive mail, click the Hang Up After Sending And Receiving check box.

Cleaning the Outlook Express House You use the Maintenance tab in the Options dialog box, which is shown in Figure 4-32, to take care of various housekeeping chores, such as emptying the Deleted Items folder, compacting messages to save space, and changing the location of your message folders. To see where your message folders are stored, click the Store Folder button to open the Store Location dialog box. If you want to keep that location, click OK. If you want to change the location, click Change to open the Browse For Folder dialog box.

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Figure 4-32 The Maintenance tab in the Options dialog box.

If you are having trouble sending or receiving mail, click the Mail check box in the Troubleshooting section of the Maintenance tab. All commands sent to and from your mail server are then stored in a log file that you or a technical support person can peruse to see where the bottleneck might be.

Taking Charge of Y our Wired Of fice Your Office Do you ever wonder how you’d get by without the number of communications tools you currently have at your disposal? Phone, voice mail, fax, e-mail, pagers, the Internet and its vast supply of instant resources, even paper memos, reports, home-to-office network connections—the list seems endless. Or, maybe instead you wonder how to get your work done in the midst of all these tools. A recent issue of Harvard Management Update, a newsletter put out by the publishing arm of Harvard Business School, had some suggestions that we’ve adapted for inclusion here. Not every suggestion is applicable to all situations, but among them you’re sure to find some that will help you better manage the deluge of information that faces you in your electronic office.

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• You don’t have to read e-mail the instant you hear the you-have-mail alert. Some business professionals set aside certain times each day to check e-mail. You don’t have to be interrupted unless you want to be. If something is really urgent, the sender will probably find another way to get in touch with you. • You also don’t have to answer the phone just because it rings. You can let voice mail pick it up and then respond at certain times during the day that let you give your full attention to the matters at hand. • Don’t open every e-mail message. If the subject line tells you that another get-rich-quick scheme has just landed in your mailbox, press the Delete key. Agree with your colleagues to use the priority symbols available in Outlook Express for things that are time-sensitive. • If an e-mail message looks interesting but you can tell that it isn’t essential, print it out and read it later or flag it in some way. • Instead of using e-mail for team projects, set up an intranet (an internal Internet) or a newsgroup to which members can post messages. • Take care of paper filing first, and then set up an electronic filing system for e-mail. Create folders for projects, people, and so on, and be diligent about moving messages into these folders. • If you have tons of old messages lying around, just get rid of them. If you can’t bear that thought, save them to a file somewhere. • Multitask. Return phone calls while printing something, or check your paper organizer while downloading a file from the Internet. • Don’t waste time by following links that have nothing to do with the reason you’re searching the Internet. • Unsubscribe to newsletters you no longer need or never get around to reading. (Chapter 6 discusses electronic newsletters and mailing lists.) • Regularly evaluate your sources of information—journals, periodicals, reports, memos, and so on—and discontinue all that are not essential. Be on the lookout for new information sources that will keep you current. • Set aside 5 to 10 minutes each day to learn something new about any of your electronic tools.

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Summary This chapter has covered a multitude of topics concerning electronic mail and, in particular, Outlook Express. Now you know how e-mail works; how to use the Outlook Express Main window; how to read, process, create, and send messages; how to attach files to messages; and how to create a signature and filter messages. You also know how to set up and use your Address Book to quickly insert e-mail addresses, and you know several ways to personalize Outlook Express so that it works efficiently in your business setting. And you have some tips about how to manage the slew of electronic devices that inhabit your office.

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Chapter 5

NEWSGROUPS AND MAILING LISTS

Featuring: • Working with Newsgroups • Using Mailing Lists

I

n the previous chapter, we looked at how to use Microsoft Outlook Express to send and receive electronic mail. You can also use Outlook Express to access newsgroups and mailing lists, two more Internet services that business users should know about.

Working with Newsgroups A newsgroup is not an electronic gathering of people who meet to discuss current events, but a collection of articles about a specific topic. The primary, but not only, source of newsgroups is Usenet, a worldwide distributed discussion system consisting of newsgroups with names that are classified hierarchically by topic. For example, alt.business.accounting is, theoretically, a newsgroup that discusses accounting subjects and practices. The first part of the name represents the largest hierarchical category, and the name gets more specific from left to right. Table 5-1 lists the major top-level newsgroup categories and explains what topics each discusses.

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NEWSGROUP

WHA T IT DISCUSSES WHAT

alt

Free-for-all subjects outside the main structure of the other primary newsgroups.

comp

Computer science and related topics, including operating systems, hardware, artificial intelligence, and graphics.

misc

Anything that does not fit into one of the other categories.

news

Information on Usenet and newsgroups.

rec

Recreational activities such as hobbies, the arts, movies, and books.

sci

Scientific topics such as math, physics, and biology.

soc

Social issues and cultures.

talk

Controversial subjects such as gun control, abortion, religion, and politics.

Table 5-1

The major newsgroups.

In the previous paragraph, we used the word theoretically. In the early days of the Internet, newsgroups and Usenet were widely supported by educators, academicians, computer scientists, and other similar professionals. These days newsgroups seem to have degenerated into venues for get-rich-quick schemes and for discussion of topics that most of us in the business world would consider unseemly, whether at home or at work. Thus, a caveat is in order. Some newsgroups are moderated, but most are not, and you can find anything about anything in even the most unlikely of places. The value of newsgroups to the business user is dubious, but this chapter includes a brief discussion because of their historical importance to the development of the Internet and because Outlook Express, in addition to being an e-mail reader, is also a newsreader.

Setting Up a Newsgroup Account Before you can access and read newsgroups, you need to set up a news account with your ISP. You access newsgroups by accessing the server on which they are stored. Get the name of your ISP’s news server, and then follow these steps to set up an account:

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1. Open Outlook Express. From the desktop, click the Launch Outlook Express icon on the taskbar. 2. Start the Internet Connection Wizard. In the main Outlook Express window, select the Outlook Express folder, as shown in Figure 5-1, and in the pane on the right, click Set Up A Newsgroups Account.

Figure 5-1

Setting up a newsgroup account in Outlook Express.

3. Choose a name. In the Your Name screen, shown in Figure 5-2, enter the name that you want displayed when you post a message to a newsgroup. You can use your own, real name, or you can use an alias if you want to remain anonymous. Click Next.

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Figure 5-2

Enter your real name or an alias.

4. Enter your e-mail address. In the Internet News E-Mail Address screen, shown in Figure 5-3, enter your e-mail address. If you don’t want others in a group sending you e-mail, you can enter a fake e-mail address here. Check with your ISP first though, because some ISPs have policies prohibiting this practice. Click Next.

Figure 5-3 134

Enter your real e-mail address or a fake address.


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Append the term nospam to your real e-mail address to prevent unscrupulous companies from adding your name to a junk mail list. People that want to reply to your postings will then need to manually remove nospam from your e-mail address before replying.

5. Enter the name of your news server. In the Internet News Server Name screen, enter the name of the news server that you obtained from your ISP. This name will be something like news.tw.net. If your news server requires a special logon in addition to your primary logon , click the My News Server Requires Me To Log On check box. You will then need to enter this information in the next screen. If you don’t select this check box, click Next, and then click Finish.

Connecting to Newsgroups After you set up your news account, you are asked if you want to download the list of newsgroups from your ISP’s server. Click Yes. While the list downloads, you’ll see the dialog box shown in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4

Downloading the list of newsgroups.

This could take a while depending on the speed of your Internet connection— newsgroups number in the tens of thousands. But only the names are downloaded; the contents remain on the news server until you specifically access a newsgroup. When the list has downloaded, you’ll see the Newsgroup Subscriptions dialog box, as shown in Figure 5-5.

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Figure 5-5

The Newsgroup Subscriptions dialog box.

Finding a T opic of Interest Topic You can select a newsgroup to read by scrolling this list (a time-consuming task) or by searching on a term. With our earlier caveat in mind, enter a search term in the Display Newsgroups Which Contain box, and then simply wait. Soon you’ll see a list of newsgroup whose names contain the search term. To read a newsgroup, select it and then click Go To. If you find a group that seems to have value for your business or profession, you can subscribe to it. Subscribing simply means creating a subfolder for a particular newsgroup in your news folder.

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Using the W eb to Find Newsgroups Web A master list of newsgroups is maintained at http://metalab.unc.edu/usenet-i/hier-s/ master.html. Figure 5-6 shows the beginning of this list, which can take you some time to scroll in its entirety.

Figure 5-6

A master list of newsgroups.

When you find a group that interests you, click its link, and then click the Goto Group link. A list of messages posted to this group opens in Outlook Express. Click a subject line in the top pane to open the message in the lower pane, as shown in Figure 5-7.

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Figure 5-7

NOTE

Viewing a newsgroup posting.

In this chapter, we use Outlook Express to access newsgroups. You can also access and participate in newsgroups using the deja.com Web site.

Posting to a Newsgroup Replying to a newsgroup article or sending a message to a newsgroup is known as posting. To send an original message to a newsgroup, open the newsgroup and then click the New Post button. The New Message window will open with the group’s name in the To line. To reply via e-mail to the author of a post, click the Reply button; to reply via a posting to the entire newsgroup, click the Reply Group button. TIP

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If you need more information about how to use the New Message window in Outlook Express, look back at Chapter 4.


Using Mailing Lists Having been around since about 1975, mailing lists predate the commercialization of the Internet, but if our personal observation is of any value, they seem to be more popular than ever. A mailing list is simply an e-mail discussion group. As is the case with newsgroups, there are mailing lists that cover just about any topic you can imagine. When you join a list (referred to as subscribing), you receive all the e-mail messages that any member of the group sends out. If you no longer want to receive these messages, you simply drop out of the group by unsubscribing to the list. In this section, we’ll start by giving you a bit of background information about how mailing lists work. We’ll then look at exactly how to subscribe and unsubscribe, and we’ll show you how to find mailing lists that are appropriate for your business use and tell you how you can set up your own mailing list.

How Mailing Lists W ork Work A mailing list is controlled by a list owner, who could be the person who started the list or someone who took over the list from a previous owner. In most cases, the job of list owner is not time-consuming or complicated because most of the work is done by a mailing list program. Typically, the list owner is responsible for creating a message that is sent to all new subscribers. This message explains the rules of the group, describes any special features, and contains instructions about how to unsubscribe. Figure 5-8 shows the Welcome message we received when we subscribed to a list that deals with how to publish your own e-mail newsletter, a topic we’ll discuss in Chapter 17.

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Figure 5-8

A typical Welcome message.

In some cases, the list owner moderates the list, that is, he or she reads through all the messages and determines the appropriateness of each one before allowing it to be sent to all members of the group. Most mailing lists are not moderated, though, so as with Web sites, chat rooms, newsgroups, and all sorts of other Internet resources, you may encounter material that is personally offensive. If you find yourself in this situation, you can register your complaint with the list members (only do so once you have a feel for the group’s culture), or you can simply unsubscribe from the list. The real work of managing a mailing list is done by a computer program, which ensures that subscription and unsubscription requests are processed, distributes the messages to all members of the list, and so on. Three mailing list programs are in common use: • Listserv • Listproc • Majordomo Developed in 1986 for mainframe IBM computers, Listserv is the oldest of these mailing list programs. Listserv is short for list server. Listproc was developed to be the Unix equivalent of Listserv; Listproc is short for list processor. Majordomo was not developed until 1992, and it also was developed for computers running the Unix 140


operating system. The term majordomo refers to the person who manages the servants in a large household, so the inference is that the program is managing the list service. How you subscribe to and unsubscribe from a mailing list depends on which program the mailing list uses.

Subscribing and Unsubscribing Two addresses are important when you are communicating with a mailing list, and you will find that sending information to the wrong list will make you very unpopular with the list members. The subscription address is the address to which you send messages about subscribing and unsubscribing. Such messages go only to the mailing list program. The list address is the address to which you send messages that will be distributed to everyone on the list. Now, you can see how sending a message to the wrong address can get you into trouble, especially if the list includes a lot of people who send a lot of messages. None of these people want to see your subscription request, and, of course, if your subscription request doesn’t get to the mailing list program, you won’t be able to access the messages. To subscribe to a mailing list that is managed by Listserv or Listproc: • Place the subscription address in the To line of your message. • Leave the Subject line blank, or place anything you want in it. • In the body of your message, type subscribe, the name of the list, your first name, and your last name. To subscribe to a mailing list that is managed by Majordomo: • Place the subscription address in the To line of your message. • Leave the Subject line blank, or place anything you want in it. • In the body of your message, type subscribe, and then enter the name of the list. To unsubscribe to a mailing list that is managed by Listserv, Listproc, or Majordomo: • Place the subscription address in the To line of your message. • Leave the Subject line blank, or place anything you want in it. • In the body of your message, type unsubscribe, and then enter the name of the list.

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Finding Business Mailing Lists Well, now you know how mailing lists work and how to subscribe to and unsubscribe from them, but you have no idea if you’d want to do so. What’s available that would be of interest to the business user? Fortunately, you’ll find lists of mailing lists on the Web, and you can even search on a topic to locate a mailing list that is of interest to you. Let’s look at some of these. For starters, take a look at Liszt, The Mailing List Directory, which you’ll find at http://www.liszt.com. Figure 5-9 shows the home page.

Figure 5-9

The list of mailing lists at Liszt.

You can now enter a topic to search on, or you can browse the directory. An advantage to this site, other than the enormous lists of mailing lists it references, is that when you browse the directory, you’ll find a brief description of the list and instructions for subscribing. TIP

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If a description includes the instruction to send list commands to a particular address, that address is the subscription address.


In general, it’s considered imprudent to advertise on noncommercial mailing lists, although you can certainly send mail to the group and find out if this would be offensive to them. Liszt, however, also includes more than 600 commercial lists that you can subscribe to or rent. For rental information, go to http://www.liszt.com/directmail.html. If you create your own mailing list and want to add it to the list at the Liszt site, go to http://www.liszt.com/submit.html. Another source of mailing lists is Tile.Net/Lists at http://www.tile.net/lists, shown in Figure 5-10. Although you can search the list of lists here by topic, and you can display lists by name, description, or domain, this site lacks the handy directory provided at the Liszt site. If you create your own mailing list and want to add it to this list, go to http://www.tile.net/lists/about.html.

Figure 5-10 Another source of mailing lists.

To check out the list of official public Listserv mailing lists, go to the L-Soft site at http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html. Figure 5-11 shows the home page. At this site, you can search for a list by topic and display lists by host country and by the number of subscribers. Chapter 5


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Figure 5-11 The L-Soft list of official public Listserv mailing lists.

Mailing List Etiquette First and foremost, if you subscribe to a mailing list that you read at your office, remember that your activities can be monitored. Be sure that the list is appropriate to your situation and that you use it as a professional. Here are some other guidelines to keep in mind: • Lurk before you post messages to the list. In this case, lurking is good manners not bad. You need to get a sense of the group’s culture and style before you barge in. If you find out that you don’t like the ambience, unsubscribe. • Post only material that is related to the primary subject of the list. In most cases, this rules out posting ads, make-money-fast schemes, sociological surveys, and the like. • If your e-mail program has a spelling checker, use it before you post a message. • Don’t type in all capital letters; that is tantamount to shouting. 144


• Limit your use of common Internet abbreviations and smiley faces. Use only what your readers will understand. • If you want your signature to reflect your business association, do so, but be sure that it’s in good taste and reasonably short. Normally, your name and e-mail address is sufficient. • Don’t post the same message to multiple lists. Because mailing lists are topically oriented, most messages are not necessarily appropriate for multiple audiences. In addition, some people subscribe to multiple mailing lists, and they will be annoyed at seeing your message repeatedly. • In most cases, quote the original message when you’re replying to a post. Doing so gives the other list members a context for what you’re saying. • Never forward a personal message to a mailing list unless you have the original sender’s permission. • Keep your sense of humor, and remember that a human being is attached to each message that is posted.

Starting Y our Own Mailing List Your After you peruse the lists of mailing lists and perhaps subscribe to a few that are appropriate to your type of business, you may consider creating your own list. If you don’t think you’re up to this or don’t have the time, check with your ISP. Many ISPs provide this service for free or for a fee. Or, if you work on a corporate network, your system administrator may be able to provide this service or point you to a consultant. If you are interested in creating the list yourself, you can find all the details about the process at http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8d/owner/owner.html. This is a page at the L-Soft site that provides a manual for creating a mailing list with Listserv. After you create your list, you need to find a site that will host it. Again, check with your system administrator or ISP.

Mailing Lists Made Easy If you don’t mind being bombarded with advertising, you can subscribe to mailing lists and create a mailing list at eGroups (http://www.egroups.com), as shown in Figure 5-12. In this context, a mailing list is a group, and you subscribe to a mailing list by joining a group. You can access the group at this Web site or via your e-mail program. Chapter 5


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Figure 5-12 Mailing lists at eGroups.

Creating a mailing list is referred to as “starting a group.” To start a group, you simply use the online form to describe it, categorize it, and add members by entering their e-mail addresses. Using eGroups is free, but you do have to register and become a member. You might also want to check out ListBot at http://www.listbot.com, which also provides mailing list services. If you don’t mind the advertisements, you can use ListBot for free. For an annual fee, you can use advertisement-free services.

Summary Although newsgroups are a venerable Internet institution, we don’t find them particularly helpful for business purposes. Nevertheless, with the information in this chapter, you can check out the newsgroup scene for yourself. Mailing lists, on the other hand, may be a useful communication tool, depending on the nature of your business and on how Internet-savvy your clients, prospects, customers, and so on are.

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Chapter 6

REVIEWING THE OTHER INTERNET SERVICES

Featuring: • Downloading Files with FTP • Connecting via Telnet • Faxing at Your Computer • Using Phone Dialer • Using HyperTerminal • Using NetMeeting • Visiting Chat Rooms

T

he terms Web and Internet are often used interchangeably, and we have done so in this book, but technically they are not the same thing. The World Wide Web is an Internet service that uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and as you saw in Chapter 1, there are other Internet protocols that are used for e-mail and other Internet services. In this chapter, we’re going to look at some of those other services as well as some programs you can use to access remote computers, make phone calls, and conference over the Internet.

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Downloading Files with FTP FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is an Internet protocol that you can use to download files from or upload files to an FTP site. The address of an FTP site starts with ftp. Although you can use Internet Explorer to find and download files at an FTP site, it is usually easier and faster to use special FTP client software. You can find such software at many places on the Internet, including the ZDNet site at http://hotfiles.zdnet.com. TIP

A particularly easy to use FTP client is CuteFTP, which you can download from http://www.cuteftp.com/products/cuteftp. Whenever you run across FTP information in the form of a URL, copy it to the Windows Clipboard. CuteFTP will then connect to the server and log you in.

Here’s how FTP works: • Using FTP client software, you connect to an FTP server on the Internet. • Log on to the server with a user name and a password. Some FTP sites are private, and you will need an authorized user name and password to access these sites. Other sites are known as anonymous FTP sites because you can log on with the user name of anonymous and use your e-mail address as the password. • Browse through the available files. When you spot a file you want to download, use the commands in your FTP client software to do so. NOTE

For security reasons, you can normally only download files from anonymous FTP sites; you cannot upload.

If you have large files that you need to transfer among disperse groups at your company, you might want to consider setting up an FTP site. Transferring files with FTP can be considerably faster than attaching them to an e-mail message. Consult your technical professional for how to do this. Figure 6-1 show the contents of an FTP site at Microsoft (ftp://ftp.microsoft.com). You won’t find any banners and glitz at an FTP site, but you will be able to quickly find and download information that you need.

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Figure 6-1

The Microsoft FTP site.

Connecting via T elnet Telnet Telnet is a terminal emulation protocol that you use to log on to another computer on the Internet. Your computer actually becomes part of that computer, which is called the host. Depending on your level of access, you can use the host’s services, memory capacity, disk storage, and so on. In other words, your computer emulates a terminal attached to the host computer. To use Telnet, you need Telnet client software installed on your computer. You can find Telnet client software on the Internet by using one of the search services described in Chapter 8. Telnet has long been used in educational institutions to connect students and teachers with resources such as a library or a bulletin board system. Today’s Telnet software is even being used on palm-size computers to connect to a remote system and check e-mail, transfer files, and talk to another person.

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Here’s how Telnet works: • Using your Telnet client software, enter the Internet address of the computer you want to contact. • The remote computer and your computer determine which type of terminal emulation will be used. The most common type is VT-100. Terminal emulation ensures that your keyboard and monitor will function as the host computer expects. • Text that you type on your computer accumulates in a buffer until you press Enter. It is then sent to the host computer, along with the host’s Internet address and your Internet address. • The host computer then returns the data you requested or the results of a command you sent. NOTE

VT-100 is one of a series of terminals that were manufactured by DEC. Many communications and terminal-emulation programs emulate (mimic) the VT-100.

Faxing at Y our Computer Your To send and receive faxes at your computer, you need a fax modem. A fax modem can be used to connect to the Internet and to send and receive faxes. If you acquired your computer within the last couple of years, you probably do have a fax modem. To verify that this is the case, open the Printers folder (click the Start button, click Settings, and then click Printers). If you see a Fax icon, your modem is a fax modem. NOTE

You cannot share a fax printer.

When you installed Windows, the operating system detected your fax modem, installed the fax service, and installed the associated printer. The first time you use the fax service, though, you need to do some configuration. You can fax a document from any Windows application that includes a Print menu. To set up the fax service for the first time, open WordPad and follow these steps: NOTE

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The following steps apply to Windows 2000 Professional. If you are using another version of Windows, the steps will be similar but not identical.


1. Open a document. Create a document or open an existing document to fax. 2. Open the Print dialog box. Click the File menu, and then click Print. 3. Open the Fax Options tab, as shown in Figure 6-2. Select the Fax icon, and then click the Fax Options tab.

Figure 6-2

The Fax Options tab in the Print dialog box.

4. Start the Send Fax Wizard. Click the Print button. In the Welcome screen, click Next. 5. Enter the recipient and dialing information. Fill in the To, Fax Number, and dialing rules information, and click Next. 6. Enter information for your cover page. In the Adding A Cover Page screen of the Wizard, specify whether you want to include a cover page and, if so, what it should contain. Use the Cover Page Template drop-down list box to select a type of cover page. When you’re done, click Next. 7. Specify when to send the fax. Click an option button, and click Next. At the summary screen, click Finish. You can track the progress of the fax using the Fax Monitor dialog box, which now appears on your screen.

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Receiving a Fax To set up your fax service to receive a fax, log on as an administrator, and follow these steps: 1. Open the Fax Service Management dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-3. Click the Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, click Fax, and then click Fax Service Management.

Figure 6-3

The Fax Service Management dialog box.

2. Display the name of your fax modem. In the Tree pane, click Devices. 3. Set up your fax modem to receive. In the Receive column, right-click No, choose Receive from the shortcut menu to display Yes in the Receive column, and then close the Fax Service Management dialog box. NOTE

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You can also set up fax service using the Fax applet in Control Panel. If you want to be notified when you receive a fax, open the Fax Properties dialog box (click the Fax icon in Control Panel), click the Status Monitor, and then click the Play A Sound check box.


Using Phone Dialer If you have a modem, a microphone, a sound card, and speakers, you can use the Phone Dialer application in Windows to make a voice call, make a video call and conference calls, and connect to an Internet directory.

Making a V oice Call Voice We have to admit that it seems easier to us to simply pick up the receiver and dial the number (or press a button if you have speed dial), but you can make and receive voice calls using your computer if you have all the equipment we just mentioned. To make a voice call, follow these steps: 1. Open Phone Dialer, which is shown in Figure 6-4. Click Start, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, and then click Phone Dialer.

Figure 6-4

The Phone Dialer application.

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2. Open the Dial dialog box, which is shown in Figure 6-5. Click the Dial button.

Figure 6-5

The Dial dialog box.

3. Place the call. Enter the phone number, click the Phone Call option button, and then click Place Call. If you want to add the number to your speed-dial list, click the check box near the bottom of the dialog box. NOTE

You can also make a call using the IP address of a computer or its Domain Name System name, and you can call over the Internet or over a local area network.

Receiving Calls To receive a phone call, Phone Dialer must be running. When a call comes in, you’ll see a dialog box in the upper-left corner of the screen. To accept the call, click Take Call. If you’re in the middle of something and don’t want to chat, click Reject Call. Phone Dialer keeps a log of all incoming and outgoing calls within the last 30 days. If you reject a call and then want to see who was calling, click the View menu, and then click Call Log to display the log in Notepad.

Using an Internet Directory An Internet directory is a listing of people and conferences that can receive Internet calls. The directory may be on your local server or on the Internet. Before you can use a directory, you need to add it to the list on your system. To add a directory and connect to it, follow these steps:

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1. Open the Add Directory Server dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-6. Click the Edit menu, and then click Add Directory.

Figure 6-6

The Add Directory Server dialog box.

2. Add the name of the server. In the Directory Name box, enter the name of the server, and then click Add. The name is added to the Directories list on the left of the Phone Dialer dialog box. 3. Connect to a directory. Click the People or the Conferences folder, and select a name.

Making a Video Call If you have a camera installed on your computer, you can make a video call. If you don’t have a camera, you can still receive video if others who do have a camera call you. Each time you make a video call, you need to do some setup work. Follow these steps: 1. Open the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-7. Click the Edit menu, and then click Options.

Figure 6-7

The Options dialog box.

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2. Configure the settings. Click the Audio/Video tab, select the line to use (Phone Calls, Internet Calls, Internet Conference), click the Video Playback check box (if necessary), and then click OK. NOTE

To adjust the volume for various audio devices, click the Sound Settings button to open the Sounds And Multimedia Properties dialog box.

You can also use Phone Dialer to make conference calls, but NetMeeting is our tool of choice for this task. We’ll look at NetMeeting later in this chapter.

Using HyperT erminal HyperTerminal Like Telnet, HyperTerminal is terminal emulation software, but unlike Telnet, HyperTerminal is included with Windows. You need not buy any additional software to run HyperTerminal; you simply set up HyperTerminal and use it. HyperTerminal is text-based and is useful for connecting to public access servers, especially those running operating systems other than Windows, and for running text-based applications. In university settings, students and faculty often have Windows computers, and the main computer system runs Unix. In this case, students and faculty can use HyperTerminal to connect to the main Unix system and run Unix applications. Typically, HyperTerminal is also used to connect to a bulletin board or the catalog at a local library.

Establishing a HyperT erminal Connection HyperTerminal Before you can use HyperTerminal, you need to configure a connection. Obtain the phone number for the computer you’ll connect to, and then follow these steps to configure the connection and to connect: 1. Start HyperTerminal. Click Start, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, and then click HyperTerminal to open the Connection Description dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-8, in the foreground and the HyperTerminal window in the background.

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Figure 6-8

The Connection Description dialog box.

2. Choose a name and an icon for your connection. In the Name field, enter a name, select an icon, and click OK to open the Connect To dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-9.

Figure 6-9

The Connect To dialog box.

3. Open the Connect dialog box, which is shown in Figure 6-10. Verify that the country, area code, and modem are correct, enter the phone number, and click OK.

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Figure 6-10 The Connect dialog box.

4. Get connected. Verify that the phone number is correct. If it is not, click the Modify button to open the Properties dialog box for this connection, and change the phone number. To look at or change any of the options associated with your modem setup, click the Dialing Properties button to open the Phone And Modem Options dialog box. When everything is correct, click Dial. You’ll now be connected to the remote computer system that you dialed. What you see next depends on the system to which you are connecting. You might be asked for a terminal type, to enter a password, or to choose from a menu. When you complete this HyperTerminal session, log off from the remote computer according to the instructions provided you by that system. When you close the HyperTerminal window, you’ll be asked if you want to save the session. Click Yes, and the next time you want to make that connection, you can use a submenu item for it that is added to the HyperTerminal menu item. Clicking the menu item for your connection opens the Connect dialog box, and you simply click Dial to connect. TIP

To save a HyperTerminal session as a text file, click the Transfer menu, and then click Capture Text to open the Capture Text dialog box. Enter a name for the file, and click Start.

Transferring Files with HyperT erminal HyperTerminal During a HyperTerminal session, you can send and receive files. To send a file, follow these steps: 1. Open the Send File dialog box, which is shown in Figure 6-11. Click the Transfer menu, and then click Send File. 158


Figure 6-11 The Send File dialog box.

2. Specify the file name and protocol. In the Filename box, enter a file name or browse to locate it. In the Protocol box, accept the protocol that HyperTerminal suggests, or choose another protocol from the drop-down list. If you don’t know the protocol that the other computer requires, use the protocol that HyperTerminal suggests—Zmodem—which is a generic, commonly used protocol. Click Send to start the file transfer. To receive a file during a HyperTerminal session, click the Transfer menu, and then click Receive File to open the Receive File dialog box. Enter the name of the folder into which to place the file, verify the protocol, and click Receive. TIP

You can also use HyperTerminal to troubleshoot your modem. For details, click the Help menu, click Help Topics, and then select the HyperTerminal Overview topic.

Using NetMeeting NetMeeting is an application that’s included with Windows, and you can use it to do the following if you have the proper equipment: • Chat with someone over the Internet using the telephone or by typing on the screen • Audio conference • Video conference • Share applications • Collaborate on documents • Transfer files • Draw on the whiteboard

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To open NetMeeting, click the Start button, click Programs, click Accessories, click Communications, and then click NetMeeting. Figure 6-12 shows the main NetMeeting window. Place the mouse cursor over a button to display a ScreenTip that describes what the button does.

Figure 6-12 The main NetMeeting window.

Before you can use NetMeeting, you need to configure it. To do so, open NetMeeting and follow the onscreen instructions.

Placing a Call To use NetMeeting to make a call, both the sender and the receiver need microphones, sound cards, and speakers. To place a call, follow these steps: 1. Open the Place A Call dialog box, as shown in Figure 6-13. In the NetMeeting main window, click the Place Call button.

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Figure 6-13 The Place A Call dialog box.

2. Enter an address. In the To box, enter a name, an e-mail address, a computer name, a computer IP address, or a telephone number. 3. Place the call. Click Call.

Chatting on the Screen Once you are connected to another computer, you can also use the other NetMeeting applications, such as Chat. Figure 6-14 shows the Chat window. To open it, click the Chat button in the main NetMeeting window.

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To use Chat, you need to know only the following: • To communicate, type in the Message box, and press Enter. • If a Chat session involves more than you and one other person, click the down arrow in the Send To box to specify whether to send the message to the whole group or only one person. • To save the contents of a Chat session, click the File menu, and then click Save As. • To end a Chat session, click Close.

Using the Other NetMeeting Applications For particulars on the other NetMeeting applications, look in Windows 2000 Professional Help. In general, here is what each does and any special equipment you need to use it: • Click the Find Someone In A Directory button to use directory servers. A directory server is maintained by an organization, and when you log on to it, you can see the names, e-mail addresses, and so on of others who are logged on. Click a name to communicate with that person. • To host a meeting over NetMeeting, click the Call menu, and then click Host Meeting to open the Host A Meeting dialog box. You can start a meeting, place outgoing calls, accept incoming calls, share a document, use the whiteboard, chat, and transfer files. • If you have a camera attached to your computer, you can send video, and, of course, you can video conference if you have a camera and sound equipment. You can, however, receive video even if you don’t have a camera. To set up a video session with NetMeeting, click the Tools menu, click Options to open the Options dialog box, and then click the Video tab. • To share applications in a meeting, open the application you want to share, click the Share Program button to open the Sharing dialog box, select the program you want to share, and then click the Share button. • If you are in a call or in a meeting, you can transfer files. Click the Transfer Files button to open the File Transfer dialog box, click Add File to select a file, click the name of the person to send the file to, and click Send All.

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Visiting Chat Rooms To chat or not to chat, that is a question. At the office, probably not, although you will find a number of reputable business chat rooms on the Internet. Many require that you register, and that means, at the least, providing your real name and your e-mail address, which you may very well not want to do—we don’t. For a list of sites that have or link to business chat rooms on the Internet, use one of the search services described in Chapter 8 to search on business chat. The Excite Education page has a list of business chat Web sites (go to http://www.excite.com/ education/reference/news_and_magazines/business/business_chat), and you’ll also find some business chat rooms at Yahoo!. Some chat rooms are voice enabled, though you can turn off this feature. We found it particularly annoying. Although we have not made an exhaustive survey, we’re sorry to report that every time we visited a so-called business chat room, we were less than pleased with the quality of the conversation, and often the chat was interrupted by offensive personal advertisements. You can, of course, judge for yourself.

Summary Although most business users are somewhat familiar with e-mail and the Web, not everyone is aware of the other services that you can use to become a more effective user of the Internet. In this chapter, we’ve looked at FTP, Telnet, Fax, Phone Dialer, HyperTerminal, and NetMeeting. You may find that you rarely use some of these services and frequently use others.

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Chapter 7

PRIV ACY AND SECURITY ON THE INTERNET PRIVACY

Featuring: • Information on the Internet About You and Your Business • Your Credit Card and the Internet • Privacy Policies and the Internet • Internet Databases and Information About You • E-Mail and Security • Information on the Internet About Privacy and Security

T

hese days, the issue of privacy and security on the Internet is a hot-button topic, ranking just below religion and politics. On the one hand, the Internet developed as a means to share information, and from its earliest days, attempts to regulate it or in any way censor or control it were met with the hostility usually reserved for a mortal enemy. On the other hand, as we increasingly put our businesses, fortunes, and families online, our concern about privacy and security is growing almost as fast as the Internet. The Internet Policy Institute is an independent, nonprofit research and educational organization created to provide research and analysis on policy issues that affect the Internet. Its “Briefing the President” project was created to inform the president of the United States on the fundamental nature of the Internet and policy issues affecting the Internet’s future. This project is a collection of papers written by knowledgeable professionals, and it includes the publication “The Internet and Consumers: Privacy and Security.” You can find this paper and others at http://www.internetpolicy.org. Here are some highlights: 165

• The most recent survey by the Federal Trade Commission confirms that 92 percent of Americans are concerned about the misuse of their personal information on the Internet. • Losses in online sales resulting from consumer apprehension are increasing, which leads to the consensus that protecting privacy on the Internet is important for businesses. • The online industry has argued vigorously that it should remain free from government regulation while it develops industry standards and enforcement mechanisms to protect privacy online. Our mission in this chapter is not to come down on any side of the controversies surrounding this issue, but to ask and answer some questions about what’s really happening when you access Internet resources and to suggest some ways that you can protect your privacy and the integrity of your business when you are working online.

Another Point of View In this chapter we are looking at the issue of privacy and security on the Internet from the perspective of protecting yourself—your business, your information, your assets, your reputation, and so on. As you will soon see, the Internet contains an enormous amount of data on individuals, families, and businesses, and as in other areas of life, the value of this information depends on how it is used. Some personal information database sites are set up with the business user in mind. For a fee, you can find out if a potential employee has a criminal record or a history of bankruptcy, has been married once or many times, has a good credit rating, and many other personal details that you can use to decide whether he or she is a good fit for your organization. You could consider these specifics critical to your ability to making wise hiring decisions. A potential employee who has an iffy personal history but is trying valiantly to get his or her life in order would probably see this search as an invasion of privacy. Here’s another example of the two sides of the privacy-and-security coin. In Texas, where one of us lives, you can search the Texas Department of Public Safety Sex Offender Registration Database (go to http://records.txdps.state.tx.us/so_search.cfm) for data about sex offenders living in your area. And this service is free. You can find

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out the person’s name, address, date of birth, sex, race, height, weight, eye color, hair color, shoe size, and identification number in the database. You can search by area code for a list of offenders, or you can simply enter a person’s name to see whether he or she is listed in the database. The ability to obtain this kind of information has been attacked by civil libertarians and praised by parents and civic leaders attempting to ensure the public safety. We also want to make one other point about some of the fee-based personal information sites we’ll talk about in this chapter: they charge for information that in a lot of cases you could get for free or for less money. In general, these databases glean data from public records. The key, of course, is knowing how to find and search public records and having the time to do so.

Information on the Internet About Y ou and You Your Business In Chapter 8, we’re going to look at how to use Internet search services to gather business information. As you’ll see or as you may already know, you can get all kinds of data online—annual reports, backgrounders, market research, and so on. This information is available because businesses and individuals choose to make it available. But when you browse the Web gathering business information, Web sites are also collecting information about you. Sometimes you give it to them willingly, as when you enter contact information to register at a site. We don’t know about you, but we frequently become annoyed at the kinds of questions we are asked to answer at some sites. Recently, we tried in vain to search the archives of our local metropolitan newspaper. We say “in vain” because before we could access the archives, which were available for free, we needed to answer about four or five screens of information. Some of this stuff our own mothers wouldn’t know about us. Our response was to fire off an e-mail letter to the editor, which, by the way, was basically met with “Who cares?” On the Internet, as elsewhere, it’s occasionally a trade-off between how much information you want to divulge and how much information you can obtain. Almost always, though, the Web sites you visit collect information about you without your knowledge. To see what we mean, follow these steps:

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1. Open Anonymizer.com. In your Web browser, enter http://www.anonymizer.com. 2. Find out what this site already knows about you. Click the Here’s What WE Know About YOU link. Figure 7-1 shows the page that displays all the information about one of us. Remember, all we did was simply go to the site.

Figure 7-1

Information a site can collect about you.

Although you can see only a portion of this page in Figure 7-1, this site automatically collected the following information about us: • The page we visited before we went to this site. • The type of browser we are using and its version number. • The operating system we are using and its version number.

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• Whether VBScript and JavaScript are enabled and working. • The resolution of our computer screen and how many colors it is set to display. • The name, physical address, phone number, and administrative, technical, and billing contacts for our ISP. Now, Anonymizer is giving you an opportunity to see this information because it wants to make a point and sell you one of its protection services, which allow you to browse the Web anonymously. This company’s mission is to make up for what it sees as a major shortcoming in Web technology: user privacy and security are not major concerns for browser companies or Web site administrators. You’ll find details at the site.

How to Protect Y ourself Yourself Now, what you do about any of this depends on how much you care that Web sites have this information. If you care a lot, the easiest solution is to use a privacy service such as Anonymizer. You can also take some other steps. • Clean out your History list. This prevents someone from physically walking up to your computer and viewing the pages you’ve recently visited. In Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, and then click Internet Options to open the Internet Options dialog box. On the General tab, click the Clear History button. Or, you can also opt not to keep a History list by adjusting the Days To Keep Page In History setting to zero. • When posting to newsgroups, don’t use your real name or real e-mail address. See Chapter 5 for information on how to set this up. • Enter a fake name and e-mail address when you configure your Web browser or e-mail program, but keep in mind that this is also what recipients will see when you send e-mail messages. You’ll need to change this back to the real thing when you want people to know it’s you. • When a Web site requests a lot of personal information before allowing you to access its resources, enter fake data when possible, or find another way to get what you were looking for. The Internet is a big place.

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Your Credit Card and the Internet We confess: we love online shopping. We also admit that we worry about the security of our credit cards—when we use them online to buy books or offline to pay for software at the office supply store, to order airline tickets, and so on. And for good reason: one of us was recently the victim of identity theft. We learned about it through a call from a very unpleasant collection agency wanting immediate payment of thousands of dollars that had been charged to a credit card we didn’t have. The thief had all the information needed to set up an account in another person’s name—Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, address, phone numbers, and so on. It took us about six months to straighten out this nightmare. We can’t tell you that by following the guidelines in this section you will never be the victim of identity theft, never have your credit card stolen, and never have to concern yourself about the security of credit card purchases. We can tell you that the safety of your credit card information depends on being informed, starting with an understanding of what happens when you make a credit card purchase over the Internet. Here’s how it works: • Once you indicate to a Web site that you want to buy something using your credit card, you are sent to a secure section of the site. You’ll know that the area is secure when you see https in the Address bar rather than http. (The added “s” in the protocol part of the address stands for secure.) • After you fill out the form and click the Submit button, your credit card information moves from your computer to the site’s secure server in an encrypted form (scrambled so that it can’t be read in transit). • The encrypted information then goes out over the Internet to a transaction server that decrypts (unscrambles) it and then validates the information with your credit card company. • If the card is validated, the transaction server informs the site, and your order is processed. You’ll usually see a page that contains confirmation information. The most important part of this process is encryption. Heed the following advice from financial and technology experts: never submit credit card information to a Web site that claims this data doesn’t need to be encrypted.

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How to Protect Y ourself Yourself Periodically, check your credit report at one of the three national credit reporting agencies: • Trans Union. Phone: 1-800-680-7293. Internet: http://www.transunion.com. • Equifax. Phone: 1-888-567-8688. Internet: http://www.equifax.com. • Experian. Phone: 1-800-353-0809. Internet: http://www.experian.com. At the Trans Union site, you can order your credit report online using a credit card, but you cannot view the report online. The report is mailed to you. Rates charged for credit reports are determined by state law, and so the charge depends on your state of residence. Some state laws prohibit ordering a credit report online, including Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont. If you live in one of those states, you must order by phone or by mail. At the Equifax site, you can order your credit report online and then choose to view it online or have it mailed to you. Unfortunately, the Experian site provides no information about how to obtain your credit report—online or offline. If you want to contact this company, you’ll need to do so by phone. Perhaps a better source for obtaining your credit report is Qspace at http://www.qspace.com. At this site, shown in Figure 7-2, click the Get Your Report In Seconds link. You can then choose to obtain a single report from one of the three major credit bureaus and view it online (for $7.95) or obtain a comprehensive report that contains information merged from all three bureaus. In the latter case, the charge is $29.95, and the report is mailed to you.

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Figure 7-2

TIP

Obtain your credit report online.

If you become a victim of identity theft, immediately report the situation to each of the three major credit bureaus.

If you don’t want the three major credit reporting agencies to share information about you for promotional purposes, you can “opt out.” You’ll find a sample opt-out letter at http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/cred-ltr.htm. A portion of this letter is shown in Figure 7-3.

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Figure 7-3

A sample opt-out letter.

Send this letter to all three agencies at the following addresses: Options Equifax, Inc. PO Box 740123 Atlanta, GA 30374-0123

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Experian Consumer Opt-Out 701 Experian Parkway Allen, TX 75013

Trans Union Corporation’s Name Removal Option PO Box 97328 Jackson, MS 39288-7328 Here are some other ways to protect your credit cards: • If you have your monthly ISP charges billed to your credit card, ask your ISP how it protects its database of customer credit card numbers. If you don’t like the answer you get, it may be time to change your billing method or change your ISP. • When you get your credit card statements, check for phony ISP charges. A scam artist can charge your credit card with a fee that looks similar to a normal ISP charge, say, $19.95. • Don’t use your credit card to make purchases from a site that doesn’t list a mailing address or a phone number.

Privacy Policies and the Internet A privacy policy is a statement that appears on a Web site and sets forth in clear terms the following: • What personal information is collected by the site. • How this information will be used. • With whom this information will be shared. • Whether you can control how personal information about you is used. Figure 7-4 shows the privacy policy of America Online (AOL). If you scroll down the page at http://www.aol.com/info/privacy.html, you’ll see that AOL is a member of the TRUSTe program.

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Figure 7-4

The AOL privacy policy.

TRUSTe is an independent organization whose purpose is to build consumer trust and confidence in the Internet. When you see the TRUSTe seal at a Web site, the site has agreed to adhere to established privacy principles and to comply with ongoing TRUSTe oversight and consumer resolution procedures.

How to Protect Y ourself Yourself For starters, check out your ISP’s privacy policy. Go to their Web site and look around. If you can’t find a privacy policy, contact your ISP and ask them to send you a copy. If they don’t have a privacy policy or don’t want to share it with you, you might think about finding a new ISP. When you visit Web sites, and especially when you are considering making purchases from a Web site, check out the site’s privacy policy. You need to know what they intend to do with the personal and financial information you supply. If you can’t find out, think about taking your business elsewhere.

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If you or your organization has a Web site and you don’t have a published privacy policy, you can use a Wizard at the TRUSTe site to create one (go to http://www.truste.org/ wizard). The TRUSTe staff will work with you to create a privacy policy that complies with the TRUSTe program.

Internet Databases and Information About Y ou You So you’re watching the evening news, and a journalist interviews the second-grade chum or a distant relative of an ordinary person who has just performed an heroic act. Ever wonder how the journalist found this interviewee? Probably by accessing a personal information database over the Internet. A great deal of information about you and your business is available over the Internet. Some of it is free, but even more is available if someone is willing to pay for it. For free, someone accessing any one of several free databases can obtain the following: • Your name, address, phone number (even if it’s unlisted sometimes), fax number, and your e-mail address. • The URL of your home page if you have one. • The same information for about 250 of your closest neighbors. • A map of your neighborhood that’s marked to show your residence. • A guide to the stores and shops in your neighborhood. • Where you went to high school and when. • Your name and address and all this other information if they have your phone number. In addition, someone could phone you, send you an electronic greeting card, send you flowers and gifts, and find your old high-school friends with a mouse click. To find out just exactly what information about you is available for free online, go to any of the following sites and search on your name: • AT&T AnyWho Info at http://www.anywho.com. • PeopleFind.com at http://www.peoplefind.com. Now, if someone is willing to pay a fee, he or she can locate enormous amounts of information about you online, including the following: • The addresses of all the places you’ve lived for the last 10 years. • All phone numbers associated with these addresses. • A description of any properties you own or have owned and any deed transfers. 176


• Any bankruptcies, liens, or judgments against you. • A list of any professional licenses you have. • Names of relatives, roommates, family members, spouses, or friends who used the same address as you during the last 10 years. • The names of all your neighbors over the last 10 years. • Any crimes of which you have been convicted during the last 7 to 10 years. • Your vehicle driving record. • Your physical address (even if you use a post office box). • A history of any civil litigation against you. To see how this can happen, go to A1Trace at http://www.a1trace.com. Figure 7-5 shows this site’s home page. To find out how to obtain specific information and the fee, click one of the links on the left. Much of this information is also available through USSEARCH (http://www.ussearch.com), and the fees are comparable. Figure 7-6 shows this site’s home page.

Figure 7-5

Information about you is also available for a fee.

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Figure 7-6

The USSEARCH.com site.

Of course, at both these sites you can pay the fee to find out what information the site is disseminating about you, and you just might want to do this. Remember, all this information is available to anyone with a credit card, including potential employers, insurers, friends, foes, your hairdresser, your religious adviser, your accountant—anybody who is willing to pay for it.

How to Protect Y ourself Yourself If you’re like us, by now you’ve acquired an acute case of paranoia and are itching to know how you can get some of this data removed from these sites. Unfortunately, you can’t directly get information about you removed from the fee-based sites because it is compiled from public records. Later in this section, we’ll look at a couple of ways you can prevent some of your public records from ending up in a fee-based database, but first let’s look at what you can easily do—remove your personal information from some so-called white pages, the sites that provide free personal information.

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NOTE

As far as we can tell, there is no way to remove your listing from USSEARCH.com or PeopleFind.

In most cases, if you can’t easily discern how to remove your listing at a site, click Help or check the Frequently Asked Questions link. Here are instructions for removing your listing from some major white pages: • To remove your listing from AT&T AnyWho Info, go to the site (http:// www.anywho.com), search on your name, and in the results page click the Change This Listing link. On the next page, click the Remove button. • To remove your listing from Yahoo! People Search (http://people.yahoo.com), go to http://people.yahoo.com/py/psPhoneSupp.py and fill out and submit the Remove Phone Listing form. • To remove your listing from Bigfoot.com, go to the site (http://www.bigfoot.com) and search on your name. In the results page, click the Change This Listing link, and then click the Remove button. As we mentioned, fee-based information sites gather their data from public records such as departments of motor vehicles, registries of deeds, court proceedings, and so on. They make money by allowing quick online access to this information, and they are not doing anything illegal. Consequently, they aren’t the least bit interested in removing data about you or anyone else. You do have some recourse, though it’s admittedly not much. Your state department of motor vehicles collects and maintains a great deal of personal information about you; much of it is right there on your driver’s license. The federal Driver Protection Act lists the ways that this information can and cannot be used, and you can prevent your state department of motor vehicles from distributing this data for marketing and promotional purposes. To get specifics for your state, go to the Federal Trade Commission site at http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/protect.htm and click the link to your state. Scroll to the bottom of this page, shown in Figure 7-7, for instructions on how to remove your listing from many national direct mail and telemarketing companies.

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Figure 7-7

Opt out of direct mail and telemarketing databases.

When you register at most commercial sites, you’ll see a little check box that is checked by default that says you want to receive newsletters, more information, updates, and so on about whatever the site is selling. Be sure to clear this check box if you want to try to avoid landing on yet another marketing list. WARNING Never, ever give out your social security number online.

E-Mail and Security? Secure e-mail is an oxymoron unless you are using encryption, which we’ll look at later in this section. Sending unencrypted e-mail messages is much the same as sending a note on a postcard. E-mail is, in fact, even less secure than a telephone conversation. Any e-mail messages that you send and receive are stored and can be read by any number of people. Chapter 4 discussed how e-mail works, and as you may recall, when you send an e-mail message, it travels across the Internet. Let’s start by looking at what happens when you send e-mail at a corporation. Any e-mail messages you send and receive, whether locally or over the Internet, are saved on 180


the local area network server and probably also backed up to a disk or tape somewhere. And, furthermore, these files are legally owned by the company you work for and can be used in any way the company wants, including to terminate your employment. Many companies make it a practice to let employees in on this and publish rules and policies about the corporate use of e-mail. Others don’t, but you shouldn’t assume, in this case, that your messages aren’t being stored or even monitored. When your e-mail messages start their journey out over the Internet, they go from your local area network (LAN) to your ISP. Again, all messages you send and receive through your ISP are stored on servers that any number of people can read. How long are messages stored on either your LAN servers or ISP servers? To be on the safe side, you should assume forever. If a message that Bill Gates sent to a member of the Microsoft inner sanctum can be used as evidence in court and printed in newspapers all across the country, the same could certainly happen to you. Another concern regarding e-mail privacy and security is Carnivore, the nickname of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) e-mail reading tool. With a warrant, the FBI can install Carnivore at an ISP and detect all messages going to and from a suspected criminal. But, of course, Carnivore can detect anybody’s messages, not just those sent to or by criminals. At the time of this writing, Carnivore was the subject of congressional hearings in the United States, and they and Internet observers were raising additional questions about this technology and how it is or could be used, including: • What other similar technology does the FBI have in production or under development that we should be concerned about? • What happens if Carnivore falls into the hands of those with malicious intent, if it hasn’t already? • Can we trust FBI agents to use Carnivore properly and not pry into the e-mail messages of non-criminals? We mentioned early on in this chapter that the value of the vast amount of information on the Internet depends on how it is used, and the same applies to technology. When it is possible for a single individual to simultaneously bring down several largescale networks such as CNN and Yahoo!, we need a way to track down the offender. At the same time, we need ways—technical and legal—to protect our privacy. Then, don’t forget the obvious. If someone has access to your computer, that person can read any and all e-mail messages stored on that computer.

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How to Protect Y ourself Yourself The first way to protect the e-mail messages that you send and receive is to simply be aware that e-mail is inherently not secure unless it’s encrypted. At the office, don’t use e-mail to discuss sensitive human resources issues such as salary or benefits information, for example. And if you want to keep your account with your ISP and avoid legal action, don’t send e-mail that’s abusive, haranguing, indecent, threatening, or in any other way violates their stated use policy. The second way is the simplest: password-protect your personal computer. If you are using Windows 2000 Professional or Windows NT, password protection is easy to enforce. By default, you must use a password to access your system, even if it is a standalone machine not connected to a LAN. If you are using an earlier version of Windows, password protection is optional on a standalone machine. If you are concerned about the safety and privacy of e-mail files on a standalone machine, always use password protection. You can even enforce password protection when using a screen saver. For information on how to password-protect your local computer, files, a screen saver, and so on, see the help program that’s included with your version of Windows. If you work on a local area network, you will need a user name and a password to access that network, and your ISP will require that you use a password to log on to its servers and access the Internet. If someone has your passwords, he or she has access to your computer, your network, and your Internet account and can pose as you. Using passwords is the first step in protecting yourself against such intrusion, and using them wisely is the second step. Here are some guidelines for choosing passwords that cannot be easily broken and for protecting your passwords: • Most systems specify a minimum and a maximum number of characters that a password should include. Go for longer rather than shorter; a longer, more complicated password is much more difficult to detect. • Use numbers, letters, and symbols in your password. If your system allows it, you can also utilize case-sensitivity, for example, cELt*6. • Change your password frequently. Some systems spell this out and require you to change your password after a certain interval and not to reuse a password until you’ve used a set number of other passwords. • Never write your password on a sticky note and paste it on your monitor or desktop.

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• Never use a plain English word as your password. The English language has a finite number of words, and a computer program can run through them quickly. • Don’t use personal names, pet’s names, words that reflect your job title or organization, or any other easy-to-guess terms. • Never give out your password to anyone, even to help desk personnel at work. They don’t need it for any reason. If a help desk person at work or at your ISP asks for your password, he or she is probably an impostor.

Encryption Earlier, we promised to discuss encryption, and now we turn to that topic. The topic of encryption can become very technical very quickly, and in the last section in this chapter we’ll point you toward some resources that supply the details. Here, we want to give you an overview of how encryption works and mention one encryption program that you can get for free. Basically, encryption scrambles the contents of an e-mail message so that it can only be read by someone who has a key (a secret code) to unscramble it. Most people assume that the best encryption programs are unbreakable, and that’s what their developers claim. However, others—those on the more paranoid side of the fence—believe that they could be broken by someone at a government agency using a supercomputer. Nevertheless, if you need to send secure e-mail in your business, using an encryption program is a fairly safe bet, and as we mentioned earlier, credit card information is encrypted before it is sent across the Internet to a secure transaction server. Here’s how encryption works: • You compose an e-mail message with a key so that as it travels across the Internet it looks like a bunch of random letters, numbers, and characters. • Because you’ve previously sent your recipient the key, he or she uses a key to unscramble your message upon receipt and read it. Keys are of two types: public and private. Your encryption program generates these keys. You distribute the public key to your e-mail recipients, and they distribute their public keys to you, either via e-mail or a Web site. Each person’s private key stays on his or her computer. When you compose mail, you encrypt it with your recipient’s public key, and he or she decrypts it with his or her private key. The process works in reverse when you receive encrypted e-mail.

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If you’re interested in learning more about encryption and want to check out a popular free encryption program, Pretty Good Privacy, go to http://www.pgp.com/products/ freeware. Figure 7-8 shows the page where you can download this program.

Figure 7-8

The PGP Security Web site.

Information on the Internet About Privacy and Security Your best source for information of all kinds about privacy and security on the Internet is the Internet itself. In this section, we list and describe some sites that contained a lot of current information on the technology and the issues when we were writing this book. To keep up-to-date, periodically use one or more of the search services we describe in Chapter 8, and search on “privacy and security on the Internet.”

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• The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT). The CDT works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age. At this site (http: //www.cdt.org) you will find a number of pages devoted to privacy issues as well as the “Top Ten Ways to Protect Privacy Online” page. • The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF). Go to http://www.eff.org/pub/Privacy/ eff_privacy_top_12.html to find what the EFF describes as the top 12 ways to protect your online privacy. The EFF is a nonprofit organization that works to protect fundamental civil liberties in the arena of computers and the Internet. • The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Go to http://www.epic.org/ privacy/tools.html to find EPIC’s online guide to practical privacy tools. EPIC is a public interest research center whose aim is to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy. EPIC also publishes an online guide to privacy resources at http://www.epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq.html. • The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC). Go to http://www.privacyrights.org and click the Fact Sheets link to find practical tips on safeguarding personal privacy. • ZDNet. This site at http://www.zdnet.com is for people who want to buy, use, and learn about technology. Search on “privacy and security” to find links to a number of informative articles as well as an online privacy guide. TIP

You’ll also find numerous links to helpful resources at the other sites mentioned in this chapter.

Summary This chapter has dealt with an issue of primary concern to business users of the Internet—privacy and security. We’ve discussed ways in which information about you and your computer is automatically collected when you browse the Web, how to use credit cards safely over the Internet, how to deal with information about you in large databases, how to find out about privacy policies at the sites you visit, and how to send and receive e-mail with some sense of security.

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Part 2


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Chapter 9


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Chapter 10 Using Free Internet Business Resources

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Chapter 11 Using Government Web Resources

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Chapter 12 Using Wireless Web and E-Mail Services

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Chapter 8

INTERNET SEARCH SERVICES

Featuring: • Understanding How Search Services Work • Understanding How Portals and Metasearch Software Work • Searching with Keywords • Important Search Services for Business Users • Introducing Copernic 2000: Metasearch Software • Gathering Business Information

I

ndexing and searching are skills in which professional librarians excel. If you are among the fortunate, you may work for an organization that employs such a person. If you are like most of us, though, you’ll need to hone your own searching skills in order to find exactly the information you need and want on the Internet. According to the latest estimates, there are some 2.1 billion unique, publicly available pages on the Internet. That makes it highly unlikely that you’ll happen upon just the figures you need for a presentation, the source of a quote, or anything else specific.

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In this chapter, we are going to start by giving you an overview of how searching the Internet works, the types of search tools you can use, and the techniques involved. We’ll then show you how to use this information to turn the Internet and especially the Web into a powerful research and intelligence-gathering tool for business purposes—locating businesses, getting background information on businesses, doing a competitive analysis, scoping out the market, prospecting for sales, and so on.

Understanding How Search Services W ork Work Search service is a relatively new term that describes a Web site from which you can start a search of the Internet. Search services come in two basic flavors: commercial and noncommercial. Commercial search services catalog information on the Internet to attract visitors, and they also display advertisements. Noncommercial search services may exist for research, educational, and academic purposes and for many other purposes. More specifically, there are two types of search services: search engines and directories. Search engines, also referred to as search tools, work like this: • Programs called spiders, robots, or Web crawlers locate and collect information about Web sites. • A software agent then sends this information to an indexing program. • The indexing program then puts the information into a database. Some indexing programs index every word in each document, others index only the key 100 words in each document. In addition, some indexing programs index the size of the document, the number of words in the document, the title, headings, and so on. • When you enter search criteria, the search engine looks in its database and displays a list of Web pages that are relevant to your criteria. Most search engines list the pages from most to least relevant, and display the URL, the title, and sometimes the first few words of the document. HotBot, shown in Figure 8-1, is an example of an Internet search engine, and you will find it at http://www.hotbot.com.

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Figure 8-1

NOTE

HotBot, an Internet search engine.

Web sites come and go, companies change their name and their URL, content of sites changes (if the company is properly supporting its Web site)—the Internet is a dynamic environment. Thus, it’s possible that a URL in this chapter (or elsewhere in this book for that matter) may lead to a dead end or to a replacement site. It’s also possible that the content and options we describe for a site have changed since we visited the site and wrote about it.

A directory is created by people rather than by software alone. Individuals trained in cataloging determine how a Web site and its contents should be classified and place Web sites in multilevel categories that you can browse. Yahoo! is an example of a directory search service. You’ll find it at http://www.yahoo.com, and we’ll look at it in detail later in this chapter.

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Now, we wish it weren’t necessarily so, but the distinction between a search engine and a directory quickly blurs. For one thing, hybrid services exist in which directories use search engines and search engines use directories. Nevertheless, the distinction becomes important when you get ready to choose a search service. If the information you’re looking for can be easily classified, you’ll find it faster and easier using a directory. If you are searching for a very specific word or phrase, you’re better off using a search engine, because it has indexed every word.

Understanding How Portals and Metasearch Software W orks Works We need to look at a couple more ways to search the Internet before we get into some specific searching techniques. A portal is a large Web site that in many cases started out as a search service and evolved into everything but the kitchen sink. Using a portal, you can search the Internet, get a free e-mail account, chat online, instant message, and get news about current events, sports, and finance, among other things. Some of the most popular portals include the following: • Excite (http://www.excite.com) • Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) • Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) • MSN (http://www.msn.com) • Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) • ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com) We’ll look at some of these portals as well as others later in this chapter. Metasearch software is a relatively new way to search the Internet. Unlike search service sites, metasearch accesses many search services simultaneously and display and use the results. Metasearch software works like this: • Enter your search criteria in your metasearch software. • The metasearch software sends agents to contact one or more search services and enter your search criteria. • The search services then report the results of their searches to the agents, which send the results back to the metasearch software. 192


• The metasearch software examines the results, eliminates duplicates, and displays the results, ranking the relevancy of each found site. • You browse the results, as you would in any other search service. Later in this chapter, we’ll take a look at how to use a popular metasearch software, Copernic. NOTE

In addition, there are metasearch engine sites, and we’ll look at how to use one of them later in this chapter.

Searching with Keywords Long before the Internet became available to the general public, professional researchers were searching large electronic databases using the techniques that we can use today to search the Internet. Professional researchers were and are extremely skilled at putting their finger on just exactly the information they want and are still employed by many organizations, especially organizations that rely on specialized information stored in large, proprietary technical databases. At most search service sites, you will find instructions for entering search criteria. Many search services hide the technicalities, making it relatively easy to do a quick, simple search. In a business, however, you will most likely want to exercise much more control so that you can quickly access specifics. You do this by using keywords. As we mentioned earlier in this chapter, some spiders and robots index every single word in a Web page. The search engine compares your keywords with the words in its index and returns the results. Although you might fear getting no results, far more likely is that you’ll get too many results. Use the techniques we’re about to look at here to greatly increase the odds of finding not less than and not more than but exactly what you want. NOTE

For purposes of example, we’ll use the AltaVista search engine at http:// www.altavista.com.

At the AltaVista home page, you enter search criteria in the Find box, and then click Search or press the Enter key. Let’s assume we’re interested in finding out which businesses in Houston have a Web presence. In the Find box, enter the following: businesses on the Web in Houston

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Figure 8-2 shows the results that we got. Look down in the Web Pages bar, and you’ll see that the search engine found more than 10 million pages. In addition, if you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll see how many occurrences were found for each of the words we specified. Fortunately, the search engine ignored the articles and prepositions or we’d have even more pages.

Figure 8-2

The results of a search for businesses on the Web in Houston.

These results are not helpful. Why did we get so many hits? Because we were in essence asking the search engine to find all pages that included any word in our query. Search engines use something called Boolean logic, which works with logical rather than numeric relationships and employs three primary kinds of operators: AND, OR, and NOT. Many search engines (including AltaVista) use the OR operator by default, regardless of whether you enter it. Therefore, the AltaVista search engine was reading our query as follows: businesses OR on OR the OR Web OR in OR Houston Consequently, we ended up with millions of hits. How can we narrow the search?

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Searching for a Phrase One way is to tell the search engine to search for that particular phrase, that is, find all the pages that include the exact words in the exact order in which we enter them. To do this, simply enclose the phrase in quotation marks, like this: “businesses on the Web in Houston” When we entered this search phrase, though, AltaVista found no documents containing it. A better solution might be to search on all the words in the phrase, but not the exact phrase.

Searching for All the W ords Words To search on all the important words in our phrase, we set up an AND Boolean relationship—by using plus signs (+). The plus sign tells the search engine to find all documents that contain businesses AND Web AND Houston: +businesses +Web +Houston NOTE

Press the spacebar after a word and before a plus sign.

Another way to find more pages on your topic is to include variations or synonyms of a word. For example, we might search on businesses and corporations and companies, like this: businesses corporations companies +Web +Houston In this case, we’d find all Web pages that contained the following: businesses AND Web AND Houston corporations AND Web AND Houston companies AND Web AND Houston TIP

If you want a search to be case-sensitive, capitalize the necessary words. If you want the search to find all instances of the word regardless of case, enter the word or words in lowercase. In our example, we would do well to enter web instead of Web, since it is common to find the word in all lowercase or with an initial capital letter.

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Using the NOT Operator You don’t want to get too fancy with this, but the NOT operator can come in handy from time to time. In our example, we want to find documents that contain information about businesses on the Web in the city of Houston. Therefore, we might want to eliminate pages that contain Houston as a person’s last name, such as Whitney Houston. In this case, we could enter the following: +businesses +web +Houston NOT “Whitney Houston” NOTE

Search services deal with operators in different ways. AltaVista, for example, requires that you use AND before NOT. For example, +businesses +Houston AND NOT “Whitney Houston”.

Using Wildcards A wildcard is not a joker, but a symbol you can use in a search string (which is another name for your search criteria) to indicate that you want to search for any and all characters in place of the symbol. The symbol you use is the asterisk (*). For example, if you want to search for corporate, corporation, and corporations, you could enter the following: corporat* The following are situations in which using the asterisk might produce better results: • Your search word could be included only once or twice in a page. If your spelling doesn’t exactly match the spelling in the page, the search engine won’t find it. • The word is often spelled in more than one way, for example, disc and disk. In this case, enter dis* (although this will also return pages with the word disaster, discipline, and any other word beginning with dis).

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Important Search Services for Business Users No one search service or search engine will suffice for all your business searches. Most people tend to have a favorite or favorites, but you’ll find that initially you’ll do yourself a favor if you do some exploring. Select a topic, enter it in several search services, and see what kinds of results you get. The reason that one search service doesn’t fill all or even most needs is that each search engine uses a different scheme to retrieve results, and no one search engine covers the entire Web. In this section, we’ll look at how to use some of the major search services as well as some newcomers to the field and give you some tips on how to get the most out of each one. NOTE

At all the sites we discuss in this section, you can do much more than search, including find a recipe for sweet potato pie, download gambling software, register a domain name, and on and on and on. Because our focus in this chapter is searching the Internet for business purposes, we’ll stick to that. You can play around with the myriad other features on these pages at your leisure.

AltaVista We looked at AltaVista earlier in this chapter when we discussed how to search with keywords, but this venerable search service deserves a second glance. According to some estimates, AltaVista indexes more of the Internet than any other search engine. Unfortunately, rather more links than you’d hope lead to dead ends. This negative may be offset by AltaVista Discovery, a utility that you can download for free. You can use AltaVista Discovery to search the Web, documents on your local hard drive or on your network, or e-mail messages. Figure 8-3 shows the AltaVista home page (http://www.altavista.com), which you can search in 25 languages.

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Figure 8-3

The AltaVista home page.

To do a simple search in AltaVista, enter your keyword or phrase in the search box, select the language, and then click Search. To do an advanced search, using even more tricks with keywords, click the Advanced Search link, and then click the Advanced Cheat Sheet link. This page, shown in Figure 8-4, gives you a summary of the operators we discussed earlier in this chapter as well as a number of additional ways you can make a keyword search more specific.

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Figure 8-4

The AltaVista Advanced Search Cheat Sheet.

You can click the other links on AltaVista’s main page to search for images (photos, graphics, buttons/banners) MP3 and audio files, and video files. NOTE

MP3 is a highly compressed file format for storing digital audio.

Ask Jeeves Ask Jeeves (http://www.askjeeves.com) is the place to start if you think your search query has likely been asked before. For example, here are some business questions that we found at this search service site (the site also includes the answers): • Where can I find an example of what a business plan should look like? • How can I obtain a copyright for an idea? • Why should I franchise my business, and what are the benefits? • Where online can I find team-building exercises for small business teams? • Where can I find information about starting a trade show? • What does debt consolidation mean, and how will it affect my credit? Chapter 8


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Figure 8-5 shows the Ask Jeeves home page.

Figure 8-5

The Ask Jeeves home page.

At the home page, you can simply type a natural-language question in the blank field, and click Ask! to pose a business query. You can also follow these steps to browse the business questions and answers that have already been posed: 1. Select a category in which to ask or answer a question. From the home page, click Answer Point, and then scroll down and click Money & Business. 2. Select a subcategory. Click a Money & Business subcategory, such as Business News, Business Resources, Companies, Jobs & Career Information, and so on.

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You can now browse all questions, all answered questions, or all unanswered questions. To get an idea of the kind of information that is available, click All. Questions and answers are sorted by date, with the most recent first.

Another Good Site for Existing Searches Direct Hit (http://www.directhit.com) is another excellent site to visit if you think your search has most likely been done before. Simply enter your search query in the Search For box, specify whether to search Web sites, Shopping, Categories, or Jeeves Answers, and click the circled arrow. The following illustration shows what we found when we searched on business plan. As you can see, in addition to a list of Web sites ranked in order of popularity, we got a great list of related searches that we can click to go directly to a number of other sites.

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Dogpile Dogpile is a metasearch site that searches on your query in the following 14 search engines, in the following order: • Goto.com • LookSmart • Dogpile Web Catalog • FindWhat • Sprinks From About • Direct • Google • Infoseek • Lycos • Kanoodle • Dogpile Open Directory • RealNames • AltaVista • Yahoo! You can even specify and save the order in which Dogpile uses these search engines. The Dogpile home page is shown in Figure 8-6.

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Figure 8-6

The Dogpile home page.

To search at Dogpile, enter a search string using any of the operators we discussed earlier in this chapter and click Fetch. By default, Dogpile does a Web metasearch, but you can also select an option to search specific areas such as FTP sites, auctions, maps, and so on. To use the Dogpile Web Directory, click on links until you get to the area you’re interested in.

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If you’re interested in exploring other metasearch engines, check out those listed in Table 8-1. SITE

URL

C4

http://www.c4.com

Mamma

http://www.mamma.com

Search.com

http://www.search.com

Go Gettem

http://www.gogettem.com

Table 8-1

Metasearch engine sites.

Go The Go search service (http://www.go.com) is a reincarnation of Infoseek, and as you can see in Figure 8-7, at its home page you can check your horoscope, look for movie times, and do all sorts of things one might expect at a site that is now owned by the Walt Disney Company.

Figure 8-7 204

The Go.com home page.


The Infoseek search service is still there, however, and we look at it in this section because it’s been around a long time (in computer years) and it’s easy to use. You can use the search field to look for information on the Web, for images, and for audio and video. You can’t, though, use Boolean operators, limit a search by date, or select languages. The directory at Go.com includes only reviewed sites, and so using the directory may be your best bet here. To display the directory, click the Search tab. Results are preceded by a list of categories that you can use to narrow your search, and you can sort the results by date and hide the summaries if you want. You can also search within the results you retrieve by selecting the Search Within Results option button.

Google Google is a goofy name for a search service, but in our opinion what it does is not goofy. You won’t find free e-mail, shopping, or clubs on Google because it does only one thing: search. Google has been called the “hottest search engine on the Internet.” In mid-2000 it claimed to have indexed more than 1 billion Web pages and claimed that an average search took 0.04 seconds. The Yahoo! search service, which we’ll look at later in this section, uses the Google search engine. The Google search engine looks at all the Web pages that link to a Web site and then ranks those sites first when it returns search results. The Google directory contains more than 1.5 million URLs and is integrated with the Open Directory pages. The Open Directory Project is a large public directory managed by Netscape and maintained by a group of volunteer editors from around the world. These editors select Web pages and organize them into categories and subcategories. Google uses this hierarchy as the basis for its directory. Figure 8-8 shows the Google home page (http://www.google.com). To do a basic search, enter your keyword or phrase and press the Enter key. If you enter multiple terms, Google automatically connects them with the AND operator.

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Figure 8-8

The Google home page.

The Google home page is deceptively simple. To use the directory, click the Google Search button and then click the Try Our Web Directory link. You’ll see something similar to Figure 8-9.

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Figure 8-9

The Google Web Directory.

When you do a basic search, the results are enhanced by information from the directory. You can click these links to access similar pages in the same category or other related categories. You might want to go straight to the directory though in the following situations: • When you aren’t sure how to narrow your search from a broad category. • When you want to search for a topic only within a category instead of searching the entire Internet. • When you want to see only those sites that have been evaluated by an editor.

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Go2Net The Go2Net site (http://www.go2net.com) is important to business users for one primary reason: it gives you quick access to a directory of indispensable business directories. Thus, we aren’t going to look at the other features of this site; you can search it much the same as many other sites. But we do want to point you to the directory links. From the Go2Net start page, click the Search tab. In the Directory section, click the Business Companies link, and on the next page, click the Company Directories link. You’ll see a listing similar to that in Figure 8-10. (Go2Net uses the LookSmart search engine.)

Figure 8-10 An extensive listing of business directories at Go2Net.

Here’s just a sample of the type of information you’ll find. Scroll down to the CompaniesOnline link, and click it to open a Dun & Bradstreet directory to more than 900,000 public and private companies.

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HotBot CNET is a leading company whose business is to provide information and services relating to computers and technology. It disseminates this information over its Web site (http:///www.cnet.com) and over television and radio. Recently, CNET reported that HotBot delivers the most accurate results of any of the top-rated search engines. The HotBot search engine tracks which search results links a user clicks and how long the user stays at each site. The longer a user stays, the higher the site is ranked in the search results. Figure 8-11 shows the HotBot home page, and as you can see, almost everything is at your fingertips on this page. You can search by keyword, you can use the HotBot directory, and you can restrict or expand your search using the options in the box on the left.

Figure 8-11 The HotBot home page.

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You can use the Look For drop-down list box to search on any or all keywords without using the Boolean operators. You use the Date drop-down list box to search by date, and you can search for only pages that include images, video, MP3, or JavaScript. In addition, you can specify the number of return results and whether you want the results to display full descriptions, brief descriptions, or only URLs. As if all this weren’t enough, click the Advanced Search button to open the page shown in Figure 8-12, which includes even more options. You can search specific resources, and you can specify a language, a filter, a domain, word stemming, and so on using the options on the right. HotBot is an easy-to-use, powerful search engine.

Figure 8-12 Advanced HotBot search options.

LookSmart The LookSmart site (http://www.looksmart.com) is a keyword and directory search service that claims to reach more than 50 million unique users each month. Its directory of some 1.5 million Web sites has been indexed into more than 100,000 categories by professional taxonomists and editors who update the directory every day. If 210


searching Web sites that have been reviewed is important to you and to the nature of your business, LookSmart is a site to add to your Favorites list. To search by keyword, simply enter the term or phrase and click Search. Don’t use plus or minus signs, quotation marks, or any other symbols to restrict your search. Boolean operators are not necessary in LookSmart. When the search process is complete, you’ll see a couple levels of results: • The first level contains a number of categories that you can use to further refine your search. • The second level contains a list of sites. • The third level displays results that have been reviewed by the LookSmart staff. To search by category rather than by keyword, simply click categories and subcategories until you get to an area in which you want to search. Figure 8-13 shows the LookSmart home page, on which you can begin a directory search.

Figure 8-13 The LookSmart home page.

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Lycos Lycos, Inc., was founded in 1995 and originally used a search engine and directory that was based on intelligent spidering technology that was originally created at Carnegie Mellon University. Today it combines a proprietary technology with other search technologies to keep track of all the visible text on every page it finds on the Internet. To do a basic search at Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), simply enter the keyword in the Search For box and click the Go Get It! button. Here are some tips to help you search efficiently at this site: • If you want to search on a phrase exactly as you enter it, enclose it in quotation marks. • To screen out a word in a search string, precede it with a minus sign. • If certain words must be included in the results, precede them with a plus sign. • To search for specific types of documents and to specify a language, click the Advanced Search link on the Lycos home page. • To search for images, movies, or sounds, click the appropriate link in the Find section of the Lycos home page. Figure 8-14 shows the Lycos home page.

Figure 8-14 The Lycos home page. 212


Northern Light The Northern Light search service site seems to have been created with the business user in mind. Using its Business Search feature, you can do specialized searching for industry-focused Web pages, market research, and company reports for business professionals. To start a business search, go to http://www.northernlight.com and click the Business Search link. You’ll see something similar to Figure 8-15.

Figure 8-15 Doing a specialized business search at the Northern Light site.

Using the form on this page, you can search by word or phrase, by title, by publication, by company, and by research firm. You can search specific sources and specific industries, and you can browse all documents within a specific industry. Here are some tips for using the Business Search feature:

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• Use natural language searching, which means simply typing a question in the Search For box. • Use all Boolean operators and symbols in a search query if you want. • For help on using the Business Search feature, click the Tips link next to the Search button.

Yahoo! Whether we’ve saved the best search service for last is a matter of opinion, but there’s no doubt that Yahoo! is an amazing and extremely popular site. As are most of the sites we’ve discussed in this section, Yahoo! is much more than a search service, as you can see in its home page in Figure 8-16. Nevertheless, in this section we’ll concentrate on the search services.

Figure 8-16 The Yahoo! home page.

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Yahoo! was conceived by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994 while they were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University. Their purpose was simple: they needed a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Rumor has it that Yahoo! stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Filo and Yang say they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos. Today, many Internet users have come to think of searching the Internet as synonymous with going to the Yahoo site (http://www.yahoo.com). When you enter a search query, the Yahoo! search engine doesn’t search the full text of Web sites; it searches its own directory of the Web, which consists of Web page titles and short descriptions if they have been provided by the designers of the page. In other words, Yahoo! doesn’t match your keywords against all the words in the Web sites represented by the directory, but against the words in the directory itself. Yahoo! returns a list of matching Yahoo! categories and a list of matching Web sites. If the search engine finds no matching categories or sites, Yahoo! uses another search engine to do a full-document search. To do a basic search at Yahoo!, enter your keyword or phrase and click Search. Enter double quotation marks around a phrase if you want to search on the exact phrase. You can also use the plus and minus signs, as we discussed earlier in this chapter. Click the category links to search the directory by hierarchical topics. For example, if you want to search for employment laws that apply to small businesses, click the main Business & Economy category, click Small Business Information, click Employment Law, and then click the link to one of the Web sites that Yahoo! lists.

Choosing a Search Service As we mentioned earlier, no single search service is going to meet all your needs when you have a business project to research. Table 8-2 lists some directories and suggests situations in which they are best used.

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SITE

URL

BEST USED IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

123 Link

http://www.123link.com

Business listings.

Alexa

http://www.alexa.com

Search software that you can down load.

GoTo.com

http://www.goto.com

A site that is easy to use and returns content that has been reviewed.

LookSmart

http://www.looksmart.com

Content that has been reviewed by professional editors.

Magellan

http://magellan.excite.com

Concepts related to keyword searches.

RealNames

http://web.realnames.com

Names of companies, products, and brands.

Zip2

http://www.zip2.com

Business listings.

Table 8-2

Specific sites for specific purposes.

If you want to search for a specific, hard-to-find topic, try one of the sites listed in Table 8-3. SITE

URL

DESCRIPTION

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com

Searches one of the largest indexes on the Internet.

Deja

http://www.deja.com

Searches Usenet newsgroup articles.

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com

Easy to use and searches one of the largest indexes on the Internet.

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com

Includes searchable databases.

Northern Light

http://www.northernlight.com Searches one of the largest indexes on the Internet and makes subscription services available.

Table 8-3

Sites to search for specific, hard-to-find topics.

In our increasingly globalized economy, business users of the Internet will want to take advantage of some international search services. Table 8-4 lists some of these search services, all of which are available in English.

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AREA

SITE

URL

Africa

Orientation Africa

http://af.orientation.com

Australia

LookSmart Australia

http://www.looksmart.com.au

Belgium

Webbel

http://www.webbel.be

Canada

LookSmart Canada

http://canada.looksmart.com

Europe

WebTop

http://www.webtop.com

Greece

United Hellas

http://www.united-hellas.com

Japan

Gateway-Japan

http://www.gateway-japan.org

Scotland

Scotland.org

http://www.scotland.org

South Africa

SA Online

http://www.southafrica.co.za

Sweden

CityGuide Sweden

http://www.cityguide.se

United Kingdom

LookSmart UK

http://www.looksmart.co.uk

Table 8-4

International search services.

Introducing Copernic 2000: Metasearch Software Earlier in this chapter, we described metasearch software, and in this section we’ll look at how to download and use the Copernic metasearch software. Copernic is available in three versions: • Copernic 2000, which you can download for free and which lets you use 6 categories to search simultaneously some 80 information sources. • Copernic 2000 Plus, a commercial product, which lets you access more than 600 search engines and specialized information sources grouped in 55 categories. • Copernic 2000 Pro, also a commercial product, which also lets you access more than 600 search engines and specialized information sources grouped in 55 categories and, in addition, lets you schedule search updates and receive e-mail alerts. In this section, we’ll first download and install Copernic 2000, which is free, and then we’ll look at how to use this very powerful tool to search the Internet.

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Downloading and Installing Copernic 2000 You can download Copernic 2000 from the Copernic.com home page, as shown in Figure 8-17. Go to http://www.copernic.com, click the Download Now button in the Copernic 2000 area, and then follow these steps:

Figure 8-17 The Copernic.com home page.

1. Select a version to download. To use Copernic 2000, you must be running Microsoft Windows 95/98, NT, or 2000, and you must be using Netscape version 3 or later or Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3 or later. You can choose to download Copernic in any of six languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. Click Download Now, and then click the version you want to download. 2. Save the file to your hard drive. In the File Download dialog box, shown in Figure 8-18, click the Save This Program To Disk option button, and click OK.

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Figure 8-18 The File Download dialog box.

3. Select a location in which to save the file. In the Save As dialog box, click Save to save the file on your desktop, or select another location and click Save. The file will now download. If you have a 56Kbps modem, this shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes. Of course, if you have a high-speed connection, the download will take even less time. An animated bar indicates the progress of the download, and you’ll also see an estimate of the time remaining. After the download is complete, you’ll need to install Copernic 2000. Click the Copernic icon on your desktop to start Copernic 2000 Setup, and then follow these steps: 1. Accept or reject the license agreement. Click Next, and then click Yes or No on the Software License Agreement screen. Take a look at the Readme Information screen, and click Next. 2. Select an additional language or country-based category if you want. Click an option to choose French, German, Italian, or Spanish, or select to search a country-specific Web, and click Next. If you don’t want to select another language or category, leave the No Additional Category option selected, and click Next. 3. Choose a folder in which to store Copernic 2000. Accept the default, which is to store Copernic 2000 in its own folder in the Program Files folder, or click Browse and select another destination. When you have selected a destination folder, click Next. In the Installation Complete dialog box, click OK.

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The first time you click the Copernic 2000 icon on your desktop, you’ll see the Copernic Configuration dialog box, as shown in Figure 8-19.

Figure 8-19 The Copernic Configuration dialog box.

Follow these steps: 1. Select a user profile. Click the Normal option button to use only basic features; click the Advanced option button to use both basic and advanced features. Click Next to proceed with configuration. 2. Enter some information about yourself. Enter at least your e-mail address and your country of residence, and click Next. 3. Describe your Internet connection. Specify whether you connect via a phone line and modem or through a LAN. Click Next.

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4. Specify whether you want to check for search engine updates. Click Yes (Recommended) or click No, and then click Next. If you select Yes, Copernic will then check for updates (if you are connected to the Internet). Click Finish to open Copernic 2000, as shown in Figure 8-20.

Figure 8-20 The Copernic 2000 main window.

By default, Copernic 2000 adds search features to the Internet Explorer Search bar, pop-up menu, and Address bar, as shown in Figure 8-21.

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Figure 8-21 Copernic 2000 features added to Internet Explorer.

To return to the default setup, including the default Search bar, follow these steps: 1. Open the Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 8-22. In Copernic 2000, click the Tools menu, and then click Options.

Figure 8-22 The Options dialog box. 222


2. Open the Internet Explorer Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 8-23. Click the Browser tab, and then click Settings in the Internet Explorer section.

Figure 8-23 The Internet Explorer Settings dialog box.

3. Specify the settings you want. Clear the Enable Internet Explorer Toolbar Extensions check box, and click OK. Click OK again in the Options dialog box.

Using Copernic 2000 To use Copernic to do a basic search, open Copernic and follow these steps: 1. Start the Search Wizard, as shown in Figure 8-24. Click the New button on the toolbar, or click File and then click New. Select a category, and click Next.

Figure 8-24 The Copernic Search Wizard. Chapter 8


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2. Enter your search query. In the Search Query screen, shown in Figure 8-25, enter a question, a keyword, or a phrase, and then choose the appropriate option. Click Search Now.

Figure 8-25 The Search Query screen.

Figure 8-26 shows the list of 58 results we received when we searched on meta-search software. To open one of these resources, you simply double-click it. Scroll down to see the specific search engines that Copernic 2000 used to retrieve these results. We have performed this exact search in several of the other search services we’ve looked at in this chapter and never retrieved such targeted, specific results. Nor has one of the other search services returned as many hits.

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Figure 8-26 Copernic 2000 returns specific, targeted results.

To use more advanced search steps, clear the Skip Advanced Search Steps check box and click Next to open the Search Scheme screen. Here you can specify a quick, normal, detailed, or custom search, and you can specify the maximum number of results that each search engine retrieves (the default is 10) and the number of total results (the default is 100). TIP

You can also open the Search Query screen by clicking an item in the Categories pane.

In this section, we really have only introduced you to Copernic 2000. As you can already see, Copernic 2000 is a very powerful search tool. To find out much more about how to use it, click Help and then click Help Topics to open Copernic Help.

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Gathering Business Information Up to this point in this chapter, we’ve been talking about the tools you can use to search the Internet for business information. Now, we want to focus on how you go about gathering some specific business information. In other words, you need to know how to do research as well as search. We can’t begin to imagine all the types of research that might be called for in your business organization, but in this section we’ll look at a rather common type of business research: gathering background information on a company You may want background information on a company for many reasons. Perhaps you’re thinking about investing in the company or doing business with them. Or, maybe they’ve offered you a job, and you want to know about the company’s stability and its potential for the future. Typically, background information includes the following: • Contact information about the company—its name, address, phone number, fax number, e-mail address, URL, and so on • The names and titles of those in management positions • The company’s mission statement or a description of its products and services • The number of employees • A financial statement • Credit rating and history • News about any recent developments within the company So, where do you start? You could start with the obvious, the company’s Web site (if it has one, and these days, most do). If you don’t know the URL, you could simply take a guess, and enter the company name plus .com. You could also use Yahoo! or one of the other search services we’ve discussed in this chapter to locate it. Once you find the company’s home page, you’re ready to start amassing basic information. For example purposes, in this section we’ll look at Cisco Systems (http:// www.cisco.com), a company that provides hardware and software that powers the Internet. Figure 8-27 shows the Cisco home page. To get information about this company, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the About Cisco link. (Most business Web sites will have a similar link, though it might be labeled Contact Us or something similar.) 226


Figure 8-27 The Cisco Systems home page.

Clicking the About Cisco link takes you to a page that contains links to a wealth of corporate news and information that you can use in your backgrounder: a company overview, the annual report, biographies of management personnel, news of recent company developments, and so on. Click the Contact Cisco link to get contact information for company headquarters and for office locations and departments around the world, including maps. But, obviously, what you’re getting here is Cisco’s side of the story. For a quick, more objective overview and some detailed financials, go to Yahoo!. Click the Stock Quotes link, enter csco (the stock symbol for Cisco), and click Get Quotes. Now click the Profile link in the More Info column. You’ll see something similar to Figure 8-28. Scroll down this page to see all sorts of financial information as well as contact information, links that will take you to sites for Cisco’s competitors, recent trading history, and so on.

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Figure 8-28 Financial information about Cisco Systems.

And if you don’t yet have all the background information you want on a company, check out Hoover’s Online (http://www.hoovers.com). Figure 8-29 shows the home page. Enter the company name in the For box, and click Go or press the Enter key. The results are returned in directory format. Click a tab to refine your search. Some information, indicated by a gold key, is available for members only. At the time of this writing, the membership fee was $14.95 a month.

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Figure 8-29 Hoover’s Online.

NOTE

Don’t forget to check some of the many online newspapers and magazines for company information. Use one of the search services described in this chapter to locate the URL.

In addition to gathering background information on a company, business users can also use the Internet to do market research, competitive analysis, research stocks and investments, find case studies that illustrate various management theories, and on and on. Table 8-5 lists some sites that will be useful in doing business research. Some of these are feebased, and some make certain areas available for free and charge for other areas. Be sure to check the fine print.

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SITE

URL

COMMENT

BigBook

http://www.bigbook.com

A directory of businesses within cities and states that you select.

bizjournals.com

http://www.bizjournals.com

A collection of business newspapers from cities throughout the United States.

Business.com

http://www.business.com

A directory to business-only Internet sites that is compiled by 50 research analysts; a gold mine for the business user.

BusinessWire

http://www.businesswire.com

Distributes corporate backgrounders and press releases.

CompaniesOnline http://www.companiesonline.com

Lets you search by name or stock symbol.

Dun & Bradstreet http://www.dnb.com

A comprehensive source of company information, including a large database of business profiles and reports for public and private enterprises.

LibrarySpot

Links to libraries of all sorts, reference sources such as the Library of Congress and Encyclopaedia Britannica, answers to frequently asked research questions, and much more.

http://www.libraryspot.com

Thomson Financial http://www.tfsd.com/ Securities Data

Table 8-5

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Other sources for business research.


The complete text of reports companies and industries, prepared by analysts and market-research firms.

Summary Searching the Internet can seem an overwhelming task if you don’t know how to use and find the resources we’ve discussed in this chapter. Getting a handle on the various kinds of search services and how they work is essential to becoming a skilled business researcher. In this chapter, we also looked at several sites that are important to the business user of the Internet, and we gave you some tips that are sure to get you started in the right direction when you want to gather business information from the Internet.

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Chapter 9

USING FEE-BASED INTERNET BUSINESS INFORMA TION RESOURCES INFORMATION

Featuring: • Dun & Bradstreet • The Economist • Lexis-Nexis News Retrieval Service • The Wall Street Journal

S

ome Web publishers and more than a few investors lament that to date much of the Internet’s content hasn’t yet been monetized. Even when a Web site provides interesting and useful information, these people say, a Web publisher often still can’t charge users for access to the information. One group of Web publishers has been successful in monetizing their content: the large business information publishers. Because many business professionals aren’t as knowledgeable as they should be about this information, this chapter reviews the most powerful business information sites we’ve found.

TIP

Even if your budget doesn’t allow you to freely spend money on the sorts of business information Web sites discussed here, you may still want to review this chapter to learn what other business users are learning about their competitors—and perhaps even about you.

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Dun & Bradstreet Dun & Bradstreet maintains a rich database of information about firms doing business in the United States and, more recently, elsewhere. Traditionally, banks considering loans and trade creditors have used the Dun & Bradstreet service to make better credit decisions. NOTE

Dun & Bradstreet maintains information on more than 11 million companies in the United States and more than 26 million companies around the world.

Anyone with an Internet connection, however, can tap into this rich database through the Dun & Bradstreet site at http://www.dnb.com. Although the Dun & Bradstreet database and the types of information it supplies reflects its history as a credit analysis tool, the reports available from the Dun & Bradstreet site are very useful for anyone interested in the financial condition of a firm: employees or prospective employees, competitors, customers, litigants, and so on. You can access the Dun & Bradstreet service in two ways. You can subscribe to the service by paying a monthly fee. (This method of access lets you tap all of Dun & Bradstreet’s information resources.) Or, you can use a credit card to pay individual charges for each of the reports you order. (This method lets you tap a subset, but still a rich subset, of Dun & Bradstreet’s information resources.) The discussion that follows assumes you’re using the credit-card method of access.

Reports A vailable Available Dun & Bradstreet provides three general categories of reports: U.S. Company Reports (which is what people usually refer to when they talk of “running a D&B”), GlobalSeek Reports (which are more abbreviated reports, generally on non-U.S. companies), and Marketing Lists (which are lists of companies meeting your search or selection criteria).

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U.S. Company Reports Dun & Bradstreet provides five different types of U.S. Company Reports: • Business Information Report ($89) • Comprehensive Report ($105) • Supplier Evaluation Report ($93) • Credit Scoring Report ($49) • Business Background Report ($23) The Comprehensive Report supplies the richest information. It provides a summary with information about key financial items such as sales revenue and net worth, a special events report that describes changes in a firm’s operation or ownership, detailed information about a firm’s payment history to vendors, high level but useful information on the firm’s financial performance and condition, information about any public filings such as lawsuits and liens, a short history of the firm, and also operating information such as the number of employees and the size of the firm’s offices, factory, or warehouse. The Business Background Report, the least comprehensive and least expensive, provides a subset of this information, giving a summary, a short history, and operating information on a particular company. The other reports fall between these two in terms of both price and content. If you have questions, you can view sample reports by clicking the View A Sample hyperlinks.

GlobalSeek Reports GlobalSeek Reports provide cursory reports on more than 26 million companies located around the world. These reports cost roughly $5 and include the business name, address, and telephone number as well as information about the firm’s sales, lines of business, and principals.

Marketing Lists Marketing Lists are reports built from the Dun & Bradstreet database using search and selection criteria you specify. For example, you can build a list of construction companies with revenues of $2 million to $5 million that are located in California. Dun & Bradstreet charges a fee based on the number of names on the list. The fee is roughly $1 per name, but it varies based on the richness of the information you choose to include on the report.

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Using the Service To use the Dun & Bradstreet service, follow these steps: 1. Open the Dun & Bradstreet home page. Start your Web browser, and then enter the URL for the Dun & Bradstreet Web site, www.dnb.com, in the Address box. Figure 9-1 shows the home page.

Figure 9-1

The Dun & Bradstreet home page.

2. Indicate you want to run a Dun & Bradstreet Report. Use the boxes shown on the home page to select your language and country. Then, click the Click Here To Run A Dun & Bradstreet Report hyperlink. 3. Identify whether you’re a subscriber or a credit card customer. Identify yourself by clicking the appropriate hyperlink.

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4. Specify whether you want a U.S. Company Report, a GlobalSeek Report, or a Marketing List. Click the hyperlink that matches the type of report you want. As needed, work your way through any pages of instructions. 5. Provide the search criteria. Provide search criteria so that the site can find the information. If you’re looking for company-specific information, provide the firm’s name and at least some of its address, as shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2

The Dun & Bradstreet form that collects identity information on a U.S. company.

If you are creating a list, say for marketing purposes, describe the type of companies you want listed by providing standard industry classification (SIC) codes and other criteria such as location or size, as shown in Figure 9-3. This form is the first of several provided for your search criteria.

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Figure 9-3

The first Dun & Bradstreet form that collects search criteria for a list of firms.

6. Direct the site to perform the search. After you supply the correct search criteria, click the Find button. 7. Review the search results, and pay for the report or list. The site displays a list of companies that match your search criteria. Select the company you want, and specify the type of report you want to order if you’re producing a U.S. Company Report or how much information you want on your list if you’re producing a marketing list. NOTE

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The very first time you request a report, you may be required to register. As part of registering, you give your name and address as well as a credit card number. The service uses this information to bill you for current and future uses.


8. Retrieve the report. After you pay for the report, press the Enter key or click the appropriate button to retrieve the report. Your Web browser will display the report in its window. You can then save the report and print it.

Assessing the Dun & Bradstreet Service We have found the Dun & Bradstreet service to be very useful, particularly when attempting to learn more about small and medium-size, privately owned firms. However, you should be aware of two weaknesses in the Dun & Bradstreet system. First, many companies choose not to report full financial information, so even the Comprehensive Report, Dun & Bradstreet’s best, may give you far less information than you need, want, and perhaps, thought you were paying for. (Although, if a company isn’t providing financial information, that may be useful information, too.) A second weakness is that much of the data reported by the companies is not independently verified. For example, sales revenue when it’s reported isn’t independently verified. (In fairness, how could it be?) So, you can’t know for sure how good the information is that you’re receiving. Even taking these weaknesses into consideration, however, we’ve found that the money is well spent if you really want to know what an important vendor, customer, or competitor is doing. We also suspect that many employment candidates might do well to consider running a Dun & Bradstreet report on a prospective employer.

The Economist The economist.com Web site provides an online archive of all the articles, reviews, and essays that have appeared in the British newsmagazine The Economist since 1995. The Web site also provides online editions of its current issue and the two most recent back issues. To use the economist.com Web site, register by providing your name, address, and billing formation. In this process, you also create a user name and password, which you’ll use later to sign on to the site and use its tools.

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A subscription of the online edition of The Economist costs around $50 a year, although it’s currently free to subscribers of the print edition of the newsmagazine. We think the subscription is well worth the price for three reasons: the editorial depth, the European perspective, and the extra online content. Each reason deserves a quick explanation. The first reason for at least being aware of the economist.com site concerns its lengthy feature articles and their editorial depth. Feature articles in The Economist are often five or six times the length of feature articles in equivalent U.S. newsmagazines. And this extra length means that you get far richer detail and much more information. Suppose, for example, that you need to learn more about the winemaking industry. If you search the economist.com archive, you’ll find an article (actually a set of articles) about winemaking from the December 18, 1999, issue that totals 5,000 words—roughly equivalent to a 20-page booklet. Not surprisingly, you can learn far more from an article of this length than something a page or two in length. A second reason for noting the economist.com site—at least for Americans—is its British or European perspective. As Americans bombarded by the stereotypes, language, intrinsic assumptions, and national biases of the U.S. media—a media we’re part of—the distinct differences that permeate the economist.com site give us a new perspective that’s often thought provoking. A third reason for knowing about the economist.com site is that the online edition often provides additional raw content. For example, at the back of each issue of the print edition of The Economist, the magazine supplies tables of interesting economic and financial data. Because of limited magazine page space, however, these tables are frequently incomplete. A table in the print edition of The Economist, for example, might show economic information on the following countries: • Australia • Austria • Belgium • Britain • Canada • Denmark

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• France • Germany • Italy • Japan • Netherlands • Spain • Sweden • Switzerland • United States • Euro-11 The Web edition of this table, however, would add information on the following countries: • Finland • Iceland • Ireland • Luxemburg • New Zealand • Norway • Portugal Searching the economist.com site is straightforward. You can conduct simple searches by entering your search term in the Search box on the Search form, as shown in Figure 9-4. As is the case with many search tools, you can use the Boolean search operators AND, OR, and NOT to refine and control your search.

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Figure 9-4

The Economist Search form.

NOTE

For more information on Boolean search operators, see Chapter 8.

If you want to exercise even more control over the search, you can specify whether you want to search all text, headlines, or the index (by using the Search drop-down list box) and a range of dates (by using the From and To boxes). When you find articles you want to save, of course, choose your browser’s Print command or save the article on a local disk.

Lexis-Nexis News Retrieval Service The Lexis-Nexis Web site at http://www.lexis-nexis.com is a news and information retrieval service, as indicated in Figure 9-5. The Lexis-Nexis service isn’t cheap—full daily access costs about $70, and full weekly access costs about $130—but the service is unbeatable in its depth and breadth. With Lexis-Nexis, you get full access to all major national and regional newspapers and most business periodicals and publications.

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Figure 9-5

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The Lexis-Nexis home page.

You can also pay a flat-rate subscription to Lexis-Nexis—contact them through their Web site for details. For purposes of this discussion, we assume you’re paying the daily or weekly rate.

Getting Started To use the Lexis-Nexis service, you first need to register by providing personal information such as your name, address, and credit-card billing information. As part of doing this, you also create a user name and password, which you’ll use later to sign on to the site and use its tools. TIP

You’ll want to review the Lexis-Nexis terms-of-use agreement. As with the other fee-based online information services, Lexis-Nexis has strict rules concerning how retrieved information is used and stored.

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The Lexis-Nexis site provides five types of information: company financial information, company news, industry news, news about individuals, and news about products. To begin a search after you sign onto the system, select which news category you want to search. You can also choose to search all news categories by clicking the All News hyperlink.

Researching Financial Information To research news and information in the company financial information news category, follow these steps: 1. Start a search for company financial information. Click the Company Financial Information hyperlink to display the Company Financial Information search form. 2. Identify the company. Enter the company name or a portion of the company name in the Company Name box. If the company is a publicly held firm, you can also enter the company’s stock ticker symbol in the Ticker Symbol box. TIP

Enter both full company names and popular abbreviations. You might even want to try predictable misspellings. Use the OR operator to separate multiple names—for example, you would enter IBM OR International Business Machines to search on both of these terms.

3. (Optional) Provide location information. You can narrow the search for the company by providing location information such as a state or city. To do this, enter the address information in the Location box. 4. (Optional) Provide Additional Terms search arguments. You can include additional search arguments using the Additional Terms box. For example, if you were interested in information sources that talked about Microsoft Corporation’s Excel spreadsheet program and you had already entered Microsoft in the Company Name box, you could also enter Excel in the Additional Terms box. NOTE

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Lexis-Nexis implicitly joins search arguments you enter in the Additional Terms box and those you enter in the other search argument boxes using an AND operator. For example, if you entered Microsoft in the Company Name box and Excel in the Additional Terms box, Lexis-Nexis would find only those sources that use both terms.


5. Describe the sources you want to search. Use the Report Type drop-down list box to indicate which Lexis-Nexis sources you want to search: • SEC 10-K Reports • SEC 10-Q Reports • SEC 20-F Reports • SEC Annual Reports • Proxy Statements • Standard & Poor’s Corporate Descriptions • Disclosure Reports • Hoover’s Company Reports • ABI US Business Directory • Company Intelligence Directory • ICC Financial Analyst Reports • CANCORP Plus • Latin American Company Database • Worldscope • Teikoku Databank • Extel Cards Database NOTE

You can also choose to search all of the sources named in the preceding bulleted list.

6. Describe the time period you want to search. Select a time period from the Date drop-down list box, or enter dates in the From and To boxes. 7. (Optional) Assign a client identification word or number to this search. You can enter a word or number in the Client ID box as a keyword to tie this search and its results together. The word or number you enter in the Client ID box appears on the search results list and on any of the source documents.

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8. Initiate the search. Once you provide the search arguments and specify any search boundaries, initiate the search by clicking the Search button. Lexis-Nexis returns a Document List Web page that lists sources that match your search criteria. To review a source, click its hyperlink. Lexis-Nexis then displays a Web page with the information you requested.

Researching Company Information To research news and information in the company news category, follow these steps: 1. Start a search for company news information. Click the Company News hyperlink to display the Company News search form. 2. Identify the company. Enter the company name or a portion of the company name in the Company Name box. 3. (Optional) Provide Additional Terms search arguments. You can include additional search arguments using the Additional Terms box. LexisNexis implicitly joins search arguments you enter in the Additional Terms box and those you enter in the Company Name box using an AND operator. TIP

Where possible, use the Boolean operators AND, OR, and AND NOT. Use AND when you want sources that include two search terms, use OR when you want sources that include either of the supplied search terms, and use AND NOT when you want to exclude sources that use a term.

4. (Optional) Restrict your search to major stories. To limit your search to only major stories about the company, click the Restrict Search To Major Stories About The Company check box. If you don’t get any sources in your search, you may want to clear this check box. 5. Describe the sources you want to search. Use the Source Material drop-down list box to indicate which Lexis-Nexis news sources you want to search. You can select a variety of sources, including the following: • English Language News options (Previous 90 Days, Previous Two Years, All Years, Major Newspapers, Magazines, Newspapers, Wire Services, and U.S. News) • Dutch Language News

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• French Language News • German Language News • Italian Language News • Spanish Language News • Chicago Tribune • Los Angeles Times • New York Times • USA Today • Washington Post 6. Describe the time period you want to search. Select a time period from the Date drop-down list box, or enter dates in the From and To boxes. 7. (Optional) Assign a client identification word or number to this search. You can enter a word or number in the Client ID box as a keyword to tie this search and its results together. The word or number you enter in the Client ID box appears on the search results list and on any of the source documents. 8. Initiate the search. Once you provide the search arguments and any search boundaries, initiate the search by clicking the Search button. Lexis-Nexis returns a Document List Web page that lists sources that match your search criteria. To review a source, click its hyperlink. Lexis-Nexis then displays a Web page with the information you requested.

Researching Industry News To research news and information in the industry news category, follow these steps: 1. Start a search for industry news information. Click the Industry News hyperlink to displays the Industry News search form. 2. Select the industry. Select the industry from the Industry Type drop-down list box. This box provides more than a dozen industry news categories:

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• Aerospace • Agricultural, fishing, & tobacco • Apparel & textile • Automotive • Biotechnology • Broadcasting & publication • Building materials & construction • Chemicals, plastics & rubber • Computer • Electrical/electronics • Energy & utility • Environmental • Food & beverage • Furniture, fixtures & appliances • Insurance • Library services • Manufacturing & engineering • Medical & health • Mining • Paper & forest products • Pharmaceuticals & cosmetics • Packaging • Real estate • Retailing • Science & instrumentation • Telecommunications • Transportation • Travel, hospitality, & restaurant 248


3. Identify the topic. To identify the news topic you’re interested in, enter the topic name or phrases in the Topic box. Use the Boolean search operators AND, OR, and AND NOT to increase the precision of your search if possible. 4. (Optional) Provide Additional Terms search arguments. You can include additional search arguments using the Additional Terms box. LexisNexis implicitly joins search arguments you enter in the Additional Terms box and those you enter in the Topic box using an AND operator. 5. Describe the time period you want to search. Select a time period from the Date drop-down list box, or enter dates in the From and To boxes. TIP

You can enter a date in the Date From and To boxes using any common date format.

6. (Optional) Assign a client identification word or number to this search. Enter a word or number in the Client ID box as a keyword to tie this search and its results together. The word or number you enter in the Client ID box appears on the search results list and on any of the source documents. 7. Initiate the search. Once you provide the search arguments and any search boundaries, initiate the search by clicking the Search button. Lexis-Nexis returns a Document List Web page that lists sources that match your search criteria. To review a source, click its hyperlink. Lexis-Nexis then displays a Web page with the information you requested.

Researching News About an Individual To research news and information about a specific person, follow these steps: 1. Start a search for news information about an individual. Click the People In The News hyperlink to display the People In The News search form. 2. Identify the individual. Enter the name of the individual you want to research using the Last Name and First Name boxes.

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TIP

Use the OR operator in the Last Name and First Name boxes to deal with multiple spellings of a name. For example, if you were searching for someone whose first name is Stephen, you might want to enter Stephen OR Steven OR Steve in the First Name box.

3. (Optional) Provide Additional Terms search arguments. You can include additional search arguments using the Additional Terms box if the individual generates a high volume of news but you want to look only at news related to a particular topic. Lexis-Nexis implicitly joins search arguments you enter in the Additional Terms box and those you enter in other search criteria boxes using an AND operator. 4. (Optional) Restrict your search to major stories. To limit your search to only major stories about the individual, click the Restrict Search To Major Stories About The Person check box. If you don’t get any sources in your search, you may want to clear this check box. 5. Describe the sources you want to search. Use the Source Material drop-down list box to indicate which Lexis-Nexis news sources you want to search. As when searching for industry news, you can select a variety of news options. 6. Describe the time period you want to search. Select a time period from the Date drop-down list box, or enter dates in the From and To boxes. 7. (Optional) Assign a client identification word or number to this search. You can enter a word or number in the Client ID box as a keyword to tie this search and its results together. The word or number you enter in the Client ID box appears on the search results list and on any of the source documents. 8. Initiate the search. Once you provide the search arguments and any search boundaries, initiate the search by clicking the Search button. Lexis-Nexis returns a Document List Web page that lists sources that match your search criteria. To review a source, click its hyperlink. Lexis-Nexis then displays a Web page with the information you requested.

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Researching Product News To research news and information about a specific product, follow these steps: 1. Start a search for news information about a product. Click the Products In The News hyperlink to display the Products In The News search form. 2. Identify the product. Enter the name of the item you want to research using the Product Name box. Use the OR operator to deal with multiple spellings of a name and possible misspellings. 3. (Optional) Restrict your search to major stories. To limit your search to only major stories about the item, click the Restrict Search To Major Stories About The Product check box. If you don’t get any sources in your search, you may want to clear this check box. 4. Describe the sources you want to search. Use the Source Material drop-down list box to indicate which Lexis-Nexis news sources you want to search. As when researching industry news or news about an individual, you can select from a variety of news options. 5. Describe the time period you want to search. Select a time period from the Date drop-down list box, or enter dates in the From and To boxes. 6. (Optional) Assign a client identification word or number to this search. You can enter a word or number in the Client ID box as a keyword to tie this search and its results together. The word or number you enter in the Client ID box appears on the search results list and on any of the source documents. 7. Initiate the search. Once you provide the search arguments and any search boundaries, initiate the search by clicking the Search button. Lexis-Nexis returns a Document List Web page that lists sources that match your search criteria. To review a source, click its hyperlink. Lexis-Nexis then displays a Web page with the information you requested.

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Caveats About Using Lexis-Nexis Two caveats are in order about using the Lexis-Nexis service. First, despite the unparalleled breadth and depth of the service, we think that you’ll be surprised at all the news information that isn’t available. Major developments and events in your industry, for example, may not be covered—or covered in meaningful detail. So you unfortunately can’t really use Lexis-Nexis to mine for information about many of the things you’re most interested in (what a competitor is doing or has done, the terms of some major acquisition in your industry, detailed information about a person or product, and so forth). A second caveat is this: We suspect that much of the information is less than accurate. For example, the data often lack precision or are out of date. A business directory that lists a company may provide out-of-date information or only report a wide range of sales revenue or employee head counts, for example. And a news article about a firm or some competitor may contain exaggerations. (We know this, by the way, because we’ve carefully checked Lexis-Nexis information sources about our companies and ourselves and found these sorts of errors.) These caveats don’t mean that you shouldn’t use the Lexis-Nexis service. We’ve reviewed and discussed the service here because we think it is a powerful business tool. However, you’ll need to be careful about relying on information provided by the service and consider whether the service is worth the steep price.

The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal provides an online companion to the newspaper at http:// www.wsj.com. The Web site, which you subscribe to for about $60 a year, gives you full online access to the content from the current day’s Wall Street Journal and any paper from the last 30 days. NOTE

If you already subscribe to the print version of either The Wall Street Journal or Barron’s, the online edition of The Wall Street Journal costs less—currently around $30.

Once you register as a subscriber by providing your name, address, and credit card number, you can view the Wall Street Journal Front Page, which is the Web site’s home page, as shown in Figure 9-6. This Web page works like any other. You move to other pages by clicking hyperlinks, which are scattered throughout the Web page and identified in all the usual ways. 252


Figure 9-6

NOTE

The Wall Street Journal Front Page.

The wsj.com Web site sends you an e-mail message with your user name and password. You’ll want to print and probably save this message. You get to pick your user name, but the Web site assigns you a random, nonsensical text string as a password for security.

The wsj.com site is more than just an online version of the printed Wall Street Journal. When you subscribe to wsj.com, you also get five other useful tools: personalized email, personalized journals, company briefing books, access to the searchable 30-day archive, and access to the publications library (for an additional fee). Each of these tools is briefly discussed in the paragraphs that follow.

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Personalized E-Mail You can tell wsj.com to send you e-mail messages on companies you’re particularly interested in. To start this service, click the Your Account hyperlink and then, when wsj.com provides your account page, click the E-Mail Lists & News Alerts hyperlink. Next, using the E-Mail Setup Web form, as shown in Figure 9-7, click the check boxes that correspond to the types of news you want to receive via e-mail messages.

Figure 9-7

The E-Mail Setup Web form.

The e-mail messages you receive, by the way, don’t actually include the full stories (which is good, because otherwise the message would often be too large to be convenient). The e-mail messages provide URLs to stories at the wsj.com Web site. To read the story referenced in your personalized e-mail, click the URL hyperlink.

Personal Journals You can create a customized page of newspaper articles and information blurbs on the companies you watch using the Personal Journal, which is a customized Web page of information culled from the wsj.com site. 254


To set up a Personal Journal, follow these steps: 1. Display the Personal Journal Web form. To display the Personal Journal Web form, click the Personal Journal hyperlink, which is available on the main wsj.com page. If you haven’t yet set up a Personal Journal Web page, the wsj.com site displays the Personal Journal form, as shown in Figure 9-8.

Figure 9-8

The Personal Journal Web form.

2. Create any news folders for your Personal Journal. To create a news folder, click one of the Edit buttons in the News Folder area of the Personal Journal Web form. The wsj.com site displays the News Setup Web form, as shown in Figure 9-9.

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Figure 9-9

The News Setup Web form.

To create a news folder, name the folder using the Name This Folder box in the form’s Step 1 area. Describe the news that should be collected in the folder using the Company, Industry, and Search Word boxes in the form’s Step 2 area. Click one of the Include Articles That Contain option buttons to indicate whether all of the search arguments or just one of the search arguments needs to present in a news source in the form’s Step 3 area. Click one of the Include Articles From These Sources option buttons to indicate where you want to get the news information in the form’s Step 4 area. Once you’ve selected the appropriate buttons and filled in the necessary boxes, click the Save Folder button. The wsj.com site saves your specifications and returns you to the Personal Journal Web form. To create other news folders, repeat these actions. 3. Pick your favorite features and columns. To create a news folder, click the Edit buttons in the Favorites area of the Personal Journal Web form (see Figure 9-8). The wsj.com site displays the Favorites Setup Web form, as shown in Figure 9-10. To identify which regular columns and features 256


you want in your Personal Journal, click the check box that corresponds to the column or feature.

Figure 9-10 The Favorites Setup Web form.

4. Describe any portfolios you want to watch. To create a Portfolio folder, click the Edit buttons in the Portfolio area of the Personal Journal Web form (see Figure 9-8). The wsj.com site displays the Portfolio Helper Web form, as shown in Figure 9-11. To identify which securities you want to monitor, fill in the boxes of the Portfolio Helper form. Use the Type drop-down list box to identify the type of security, the Symbol box to identify the security, and the Shares, Price Per Share, and Purchase Date boxes to describe your current position. You can also use the Note box to collect additional information. Click the Save button to store your portfolio description.

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Figure 9-11 The Portfolio Helper Web form.

To set up other portfolios, repeat these actions. To view a portfolio once you’ve set it up, click the View button in the Portfolio area of the Personal Journal Web page.

Company Briefing Books You can review a company briefing book for a company anytime it’s mentioned in an article. This briefing book provides a thumbnail sketch of the firm’s history, operations, and financial condition. You’ll know which companies have briefing books because if they’re mentioned in an article, they show up as a hyperlink. To view the briefing book, simply click the hyperlink. NOTE

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Briefing books provide seven different types of information: a company backgrounder, a financial overview, charts of the firm’s stock prices, estimates of the firm’s future earnings, news, press releases, and detailed stock price quote information.


Searchable 30-Day Archive You can search an online archive composed of information and articles from the printed Wall Street Journal’s editions, the Dow Jones Newswire, and Barron’s over the last 30 days. To use this searchable index, click the Search hyperlink to display the wsj.com search form, as shown in Figure 9-12.

Figure 9-12 The wsj.com search form.

To search for articles that use a word, term, or company name, enter that word, term, or name in the Search box. Use the Sources list box to specify where you want to look. Optionally, use the Select Date Option buttons to specify the date range you want to search.

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Reviewing the Publications Library In addition to the core features described above, you can also access another information resource from the wsj.com site called the Publications Library. (To do this, just click the Publications Library hyperlink.) The Publications Library works like a business-version of the Lexis-Nexis service. You enter a search term that you want to research using the Publications Library search form, as shown in Figure 9-13, and press the Enter key or click Search.

Figure 9-13 The Publications Library search form.

The Publications Library then builds a list of articles from the Wall Street Journal, other Dow Jones business publications, and major daily newspapers that use your search term. This list includes the newspaper name, article headline, and the first few words of the article. To read an article, click its hyperlink. Each time you click an article’s hyperlink, you pay a small fee (roughly $3 at the time we were writing this).

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Caveats About the wsj.com W eb Site Web We think that in general the wsj.com Web site is a great site. If you read the newspaper, you already know about The Wall Street Journal’s editorial quality, the thoughtful nature of its reporting, and the breadth of the business coverage it supplies. And all of that is good. The complaint we have about the wsj.com site, however, is that it frequently seems to be buggy. We don’t know what the problems stem from that we experienced in viewing pages and navigating the Web site. But we often had trouble getting pages to display or to display in a timely manner.

Summary The fee-based information resources reviewed in this chapter—Dun & Bradstreet, economist.com, Lexis-Nexis, and wsj.com—don’t make sense for all business users. However, these information resources offer depth and breadth that typically isn’t available at the free or ISP-supported Web sites that most of us are accustomed to using. When you need more information and richer information to make really important decisions and perform really important analyses, it is often worth it to spend what may end up being hundreds of dollars on these services.

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Chapter 10

USING FREE INTERNET BUSINESS RESOURCES

Featuring: • Travel Service Web Sites • Investor Information Web Sites • Product Support Knowledge Base Web Sites • ISP Web Sites • Online Business Information Directories

A

ny attempt to provide an exhaustive directory of free Web resources useful to business professionals is doomed. The Web is too deep and too broad. Nevertheless, in a book like this, we want to briefly overview some of the more useful categories of free Web sites for business professionals: travel service sites, investor information sites, product support knowledge base sites, ISP sites (these are free to their subscribers), and business information directory sites.

Travel Service W eb Sites Web For business travelers, the Web provides a rich array of sites that make arranging travel easier. There are online travel agencies, such as expedia.com and travelocity.com. There are airline and hotel Web sites that let you make reservations and check availability. And there are also other business travel information Web sites that can often be useful— especially for the frequent business traveler. In the paragraphs that follow, we briefly discuss and review each of these categories of travel service Web sites. 263

Online T ravel Agents Travel Travel agency Web sites, such as expedia.com and travelocity.com, let you arrange for air travel, hotel lodgings, car rental, and other travel services at any time of the day or night—not just when the travel agent’s office is open. Because the cost to run a Web server is very minimal, an online travel agency Web site should at some point produce lower costs for business and consumer travelers. To use an online travel agency, you simply describe when you want to travel. Figure 10-1, for example, shows the expedia.com home page. You could use this home page’s Express Search buttons and boxes to indicate that you want to find a flight. (You may need to scroll down the window to get to these buttons and boxes.) To describe a flight, you indicate the dates you want to depart and return, the airport you will depart from and the airport you will go to, and the number of people traveling in your party.

Figure 10-1 The expedia.com home page.

After you describe the flight you are looking for, click the Search button. The expedia.com site then finds flights that match your criteria. Figure 10-2 shows a flight list, for example. Typically, the online travel agency Web site lists several flights that 264


match your criteria. To pick a particular flight, or to get more information about the flight, click a hyperlink. In Figure 10-2, for example, you click the Details And Purchase Options hyperlink.

Figure 10-2 The list of flights matching your search criteria.

TIP

Travel agency Web sites also often report on-time percentages, which is especially useful for business travelers.

To purchase online tickets from an online travel agency, you typically provide name and address information and then, of course, a credit card number. NOTE

Online travel agency Web sites like expedia.com let you store your credit card information on your local computer and then reuse this information when you want to purchase tickets online.

You may be able to choose an electronic ticket rather than a paper ticket, and electronic tickets are often most convenient. With an electronic ticket—which is really just an alphanumeric code often consisting of six or eight letters or numbers—all you do is provide the code in place of a ticket. Chapter 10


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The process for reserving a hotel room or a condominium works in the same way as purchasing a ticket for a flight. You tell expedia.com where you need lodging and for how many nights and what dates, and the expedia.com Web site provides a list of accommodations. You pick the accommodation you want, and expedia.com reserves the room or condominium for you. Figure 10-3 shows the Hotels tab of the expedia.com Web site. To make a hotel reservation, click the button that corresponds to the place you want to visit, or click the Search In And Around option button and then enter the name of the town or city you plan to visit. Then you use the Check-In Date and Check-Out Date boxes and the Adults and Children boxes to indicate when you need lodging and for how many travelers. After you provide this information, click the Search button. The expedia.com Web site then returns a list of accommodations that match your search criteria. If you want to reserve a room or a condominium at a particular property, click the Purchase hyperlink.

Figure 10-3 The Hotels tab of the expedia.com Web site.

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NOTE

The Cars, Packages, and Cruises tabs work in the same basic way as the Flights and Hotels tabs. In general, to reserve a car you indicate the dates you need a car and then click the Search button. The expedia.com Web site then lists alternatives from which you can choose by clicking a hyperlink.

The online travel agency Web sites work very well for many people. We use them frequently for both business and personal travel. However, you should be aware of several common annoyances about these sites: • You can often step most of the way through the process of reserving a flight, for instance, only to find the flight isn’t available. (We’ve experienced this frequently with the expedia.com Web site.) • If the airline changes a flight or cancels a flight, you won’t actually know this has happened unless you follow the online travel agency’s Web site instructions for keeping abreast of itinerary changes. (An in-person travel agency may notify you of changes in flight times.) • The deals offered by online travel agency Web sites often aren’t quite as good as those you can get by working directly with a hotel, an airline, or an in-person agent. (We find frequently that we can get better deals simply by calling the hotel or airline directly.) In spite of these minor annoyances, online travel agency Web sites are wonderful tools for arranging travel. Literally, at any time during the day or night you can easily book business or personal travel with a mouse click or two. If you use an electronic ticket, you do get your ticket right from your computer. And you can often book a trip using one of these online travel agency Web sites in less time than you would wait on hold if you called a 1-800 number for an airline or a hotel chain.

Airline W eb Sites Web The major airlines provide Web sites where you can purchase tickets. These sites are easy to use and often offer special low-priced tickets. If you know which airline you want to use—because your choice often offers the most convenient schedules or because you already know it is more economical—you may want to visit the airline Web site directly.

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The only trick to using an airline Web site is that sometimes their URLs are not particularly easy to guess. If you are comfortable using a search service, you can use that tool for finding an airline Web site. TIP

Internet search services are described in detail in Chapter 8.

The popular directories such as Yahoo! also list airline Web sites. Figure 10-4, for example, shows Yahoo!’s list of airlines. Each of the airline names appears as a hyperlink on this Web page. To get to the airline’s site, simply click its name.

Figure 10-4 The Yahoo! directory listing of airline Web sites.

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The Yahoo! directory typically displays a bit of information about the airline on the next page, as shown in Figure 10-5. One of the hyperlinks provided in this Web directory is an Online Reservations hyperlink. When you click the hyperlink, your Web browser is redirected to the Online Reservations area of the airline’s Web site.

Figure 10-5 The Yahoo! Web directory page for Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air.

Figure 10-6 shows the Online Reservations area of the Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air Web site (http://www.alaskaair.com). This site lets you make reservations and buy tickets on both Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air.

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Figure 10-6 The Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air online reservations area.

Other Business T raveler Information Sources Traveler Obviously, the most useful Web resources for business travelers will be the online travel agencies, which let you plan and arrange travel at the airline Web sites. Nevertheless, one other category of Web resources is worth noting here: the Business Traveler Information Web sites. Several Web sites are set up specifically to serve business travelers. If you are a frequent business traveler, you may want to poke around at some of these sites and see whether they have useful information given the type of travel you do.

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www .biztravel.com www.biztravel.com The biztravel.com Web site is an online Web magazine devoted to topics of interest to the business traveler, as shown in Figure 10-7. Recent articles might include discussions of travel planning using wireless Web services while traveling, how to automatically get upgrades to your flight or hotel room, and how to track frequent flyer miles.

Figure 10-7 The biztravel.com Web page.

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www .biztraveler .org www.biztraveler .biztraveler.org The biztraveler.org Web site, shown in Figure 10-8, is published by the National Business Travel Association (NBTA). The NBTA represents more than 2,000 corporate travel managers and travel service providers, and is essentially an association for corporate travel professionals. Their biztravler.org site provides business traveler tips, travel news bulletins (including travel safety bulletins such as those issued by the U.S. State Department), and information about passenger rights and what to do if you have a problem with an airline or hotel.

Figure 10-8 The biztraveler.org Web page.

businesstravel.about.com The business travel area at the about.com Web site works like an online magazine, exploring subjects of interest to business travelers, as shown in Figure 10-9.

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Figure 10-9 The businesstravel.about.com Web page.

www .executiveplanet.com www.executiveplanet.com The executiveplanet.com Web site, shown in Figure 10-10, provides business etiquette information for U.S. business executives traveling to other countries. The site describes business etiquette and culture for the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, and Venezuela.

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Figure 10-10 The www.executiveplanet.com Web page.

Investor Information W eb Sites Web As you might expect, the Web provides thousands and thousands of sites that purport to give you useful information about investing. Perhaps, not surprisingly then, the best place to start any search for investor information is at one of the investor information directory Web sites. The paragraphs that follow identify and briefly describe a few investor information Web directories.

www .100hot.com/directory/business/finance.html www.100hot.com/directory/business/finance.html The 100 Hot Finance Web Sites page lists 100 of the most popular personal finance and investing Web sites as compiled by Go2Net. (The other lists of hot Web sites maintained at Go2Net are worth checking out, too.)

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www .businessdirectory .dowjones.com www.businessdirectory .businessdirectory.dowjones.com The Dow Jones Business Directory Web site emphasizes information about companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Transportation and Utilities indexes.

www .investinginstocks.com www.investinginstocks.com The Investing in Stocks Web directory provides lists of the top 10 Web sites, lists of investment super sites, and links to related topics such as stock market news, investment magazines and message boards, and investment software.

www .investorama.com www.investorama.com The Investorama Web site is probably the best directory of financial Web sites. Investorama.com provides links to more than 14,000 sites.

www .wsrn.com www.wsrn.com The Wall Street Research Net Web site provides links to roughly half a million financial Web sites. The site also provides directory entries on more than 17,000 companies. NOTE

Many of the fee-based Web sites described in Chapter 9 provide useful information for investors doing fundamental analysis. Almost all of the government Web sites described in Chapter 11 provide macro-economic data useful to investors, too.

Product Support Knowledge Base W eb Sites Web Although technology experts such as customer support engineers and network administrators know about the numerous knowledge base sites, many business professionals don’t. That’s too bad, because product support knowledge base sites are provided by almost all the major hardware and software vendors. These knowledge base sites are rich repositories of problem-solving information about their technologies. Figure 10-11 shows the Knowledge Base Search form for Microsoft’s knowledge base archives. To use the search form, select the product or technology you have a question about from the My Search Is About drop-down list box. Then click I Want To Search

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By option buttons to control the search. (If you don’t care how the knowledge-base search engine looks for problem-solving information, don’t worry about these option buttons.) Finally, type your question or keywords in the My Question Is box. After you’ve provided this search information, click the Go button. The knowledge-base search engine then searches through Microsoft’s product support archives looking for problem-solving articles that provide information related to your search.

Figure 10-11 The Knowledge Base Search form.

Figure 10-12 shows the Search Results Web page when the search keyword was specified as Printing. The Search Results page provides knowledge base articles and a brief description. To get more information about a particular problem or troubleshooting issue, click the article hyperlink.

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Figure 10-12 The Search Results Web page.

When you do this, predictably, the knowledge base archive returns an article that discusses a particular problem or troubleshooting issue in more detail, as well as steps you can take to remedy the problem. Figure 10-13, for example, shows the readme file from Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5.

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Figure 10-13 The Internet Explorer 5.5 readme.text knowledge base article.

While Microsoft’s knowledge base archive may be the richest and deepest available, many other hardware and software vendors provide similar archives of troubleshooting and customer support information. Table 10-1 lists the URLs for several other knowledge base archives.

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VENDOR

URL

Adobe

http://www.adobe.com/support/database.html

Apple Computer

http://til.info.apple.com

Compaq

http://www.compaq.com/support/files/knowledge_center.html

Corel

http://venus.corel.com/kbsearch

Dell.com

http://support.dell.com

Gateway 2000

http://www.gw2k.com/support

IBM

http://www.ibm.com/support

Intuit

http://www.intuit.com/support


VENDOR

URL

Macromedia

http://www.macromedia.com/support

Micron PC

http://support.micronpc.com

Microsoft

http://support.microsoft.com

Table 10-1

Useful online knowledge base archives.

Different companies’ knowledge base archives work differently, of course; not all are referred to as knowledge bases. However, if you are comfortable working with search engines and search forms, you’ll have no difficulty tapping into these archives. If you don’t see a particular vendor listed in Table 10-1, don’t worry. You may still be able to find an online knowledge base archive of product support and technical information for them. Visit the vendor’s home page, click the Support link, and then look for a link that points to an online archive of technical support information. Sometimes this information is described or labeled as the “same information that the technical support engineers use.”

ISP W eb Sites Web The Internet service provider, or ISP, Web sites can also provide information of value to business professionals. Now, it is important to note that most of the information that these ISP Web sites provide is targeted toward consumers, and what business information that is available is targeted mostly toward small and home-based businesses. But even so, you may find the popular ISP Web sites, such as America Online (AOL), the Microsoft Network (MSN), and old standbys such as CompuServe, are a good source of business information.

America Online The America Online Web site at http://www.aol.com provides information of interest to business professionals and investors, too. Again, this information is targeted at consumers, small businesses, and individual investors, but you may still be able to use this information in a corporate setting. The Business & Careers Web Center, which you access by clicking the Business & Careers hyperlink on the aol.com home page, displays the Business & Careers page, as shown in Figure 10-14. The Business & Careers Web Center provides information and advice about jobs, careers, job planning resources, business and corporate law, labor law, and so forth. Chapter 10


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Figure 10-14 The Business & Careers Web Center at America Online.

NOTE

The Business & Careers Web Center also provides a job search area. If you are looking for a job or need to research types of jobs, you may find this useful. For more information about using the Internet for recruiting and job searching, see Chapter 18.

Another useful Web Center at the aol.com site is the Personal Finance Web Center, as shown in Figure 10-15. The Personal Finance Web Center provides information and links to resources about investing, borrowing, insurance, banking, taxes, and financial planning. To access the Personal Finance Web Center, click the Personal Finance hyperlink on the aol.com home page.

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Figure 10-15 The Personal Finance Web Center at America Online.

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The Personal Finance Web Center pages provide personal financial planning calculators for estimating amounts such as how much money you will accumulate in a retirement account and what loan payment you will pay for a certain size mortgage.

MSN’ MSN’ss bCentral and MoneyCentral Figure 10-16 shows the bCentral Web site that is part of the msn.com site. Issues of concern to small businesses are the focus of the bCentral Web site. For small and even medium-size businesses—especially those interested in exploiting technology—the site is worth visiting.

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Figure 10-16 The MSN bCentral Web site.

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The bCentral URL is http://www.bcentral.com.

The other area of the msn.com Web site that’s of interest to business professionals is the MoneyCentral site, as shown in Figure 10-17. MoneyCentral provides investment information covering such topics as banking, retirement planning, taxes, insurance, and real estate. The articles start from the assumption that the investments are made by an individual rather than an institution or corporation. Nevertheless, for professional business users, and especially for individual investors, the MoneyCentral site is worth checking out.

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Figure 10-17 The MSN MoneyCentral Web site.

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The MoneyCentral URL is http://moneycentral.msn.com.

Other ISP W eb Site Resources Web Other large ISPs such as CompuServe also offer business information and personal finance information resources. If you use another ISP to connect to the Internet, you should explore the resources it offers in these areas. TIP

You can often visit an ISP’s Web site even if you are not a subscriber. You may be limited in the areas you can access, but even so, the major ISPs’ Web sites often have useful business and investment information.

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Online Business Information Directories Web-based business directories are one other category of free Web resources worth mentioning here.

D-Net The D-Net Web site at http://www.d-net.com is a directory of online directories. Figure 10-18 shows the D-Net home page. To look for an online directory (or a regular offline paper directory), click the Search For A Directory hyperlink. When you do, the D-Net Web site displays another Web page you use to indicate how you want to search: by keywords, by directory name, by directory topic, by publisher, or by directories that accept advertising. After clicking the appropriate button, the D-Net site displays a search form you use to describe your search criteria.

Figure 10-18 The D-Net home page.

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NOTE

Some of the databases available from the D-Net Web site charge for access— others are free. Still others are available only to members of the organization publishing the directory. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to use the D-Net Web site to look for an appropriate online, free, business information directory. You can often find one that matches your requirements.

Financial T imes Business Directory Times The Financial Times Web site at http://www.ft.com provides a useful directory of Web business information resources. The Financial Times Business Directory is not a directory of businesses per se. It is actually a directory of business information resources available on the Web. For the most part, these resources are free. Noteworthy, though, is the fact that to be included in the Financial Times Business Directory, a Web site must meet certain standards of editorial quality. Figure 10-19 shows the home page of the news.ft.com Business Directory. To use the Financial Times Web site, scroll down to the list of business directory hyperlinks at the bottom of the page.

Figure 10-19 The Financial Times Business Directory home page.

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Hoover’ Hoover’ss Online The Hoover’s Online Web site at http://www.hooversonline.com provides business news and access to business information directories, focusing on large, publicly held corporations. If you have dealings with large corporations—perhaps as a vendor, prospective employee, or investor—these directories can provide useful information. Figure 10-20 shows the Hoover’s Online home page. To get to the Web directory, click the Companies & Industries hyperlink.

Figure 10-20 The Hoover’s Online home page.

NOTE

286

The Hoover’s Online Web site has both areas you can access for free and areas that require you to be a member and subscriber. Hoover’s Online—the complete Web site—is available if you use one of the fee-based Web services described in Chapter 9.


Kompass The Kompass Web site at http://www.kompass.com is a directory of businesses. You can use the Kompass search engine to look for a specific company name or product. Or you can look for companies that fit into particular industry classifications and subclassifications. NOTE

The Kompass Web site provides information on 1.5 million companies, 23 million products and services, and almost 3 million executives.

Yahoo! The Yahoo! Business and Economy Directory is also a resource worth noting. This directory, located at http://www.dir.yahoo.com/business_and_economy provides a directory of businesses organized by industry classification and subclassification. Figure 1021 shows the Yahoo! Business and Economy Directory page.

Figure 10-21 The Yahoo! Business and Economy Directory home page.

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To look up a company, click the industry classification. Typically, you also need to click the industry subclassification within the classification. Eventually, however, you reach a page of businesses or organizations. To get more information on a particular business or organization, click its hyperlink to go to the organization’s Web page. TIP

The Yahoo! Directory is also discussed in Chapter 8.

Summary Not surprisingly, the Web provides a rich set of free Web sites to business professionals. Online travel agencies make arranging travel fast and easy. Investor information sites make it possible to make smarter and more profitable financial decisions. Product support sites make it feasible for those of us who aren’t technology experts to solve technology problems. Finally, the business directories available over the Web make it easy to find and research competitors, customers, and vendors.

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USING GOVERNMENT WEB RESOURCES

Featuring: • Bureau of Economic Analysis • Bureau of Labor Statistics • Census Bureau • EDGAR • Federal Reserve • Government Printing Office Access Database • Internal Revenue Service

M

any business people question how much help the government can be, at least in terms of running a business. Ironically, the government’s Web sites can be an enormous help to people who run a business. Many government sites supply deep, rich repositories of information useful for making better business decisions. This chapter, therefore, discusses and describes some of the most useful government Web sites and resources, including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, EDGAR (the Security and Exchange Commission’s site), the Federal Reserve, the Government Printing Office’s access database, and the Internal Revenue Service.

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Bureau of Economic Analysis As is noted at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Web site, the mission of the BEA is “to produce and disseminate accurate, timely, relevant, and cost-effective economic account statistics that provide government, businesses, households, and individuals with a comprehensive up-to-date picture of economic activity.” Not surprisingly then, the BEA gives business people rich information about U.S. economic growth, regional economic development, and the nation’s position in the world economy. The Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site, shown in Figure 11-1, provides Internet users with fast and easy access to most of the BEA’s publications.

Figure 11-1 The Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site.

NOTE

290

The URL for the Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site is http://www.bea.doc.gov.


Information A vailable at the BEA W eb Site Available Web The volume of information available at the BEA is overwhelming. You could spend days sifting through the publications available. You can, however, get a quick overview of the information available. To do this, click the Catalog Of Products hyperlink—which appears on the BEA home page—to display the Catalog Of Products page. When you scroll down the page, you quickly get to a list of the BEA products—which are essentially publications available from the bureau. Many of these publications are only available by ordering a disk or printed publication. However, some publications can be downloaded.

Downloading a BEA Publication To download a BEA publication, follow these steps: 1. Find the publication. Scroll through the list of products on the Catalog Of Products Web page, which includes brief descriptions of the publications. 2. Save the publications file on your local computer. Right-click the publication’s hyperlink, and choose Save Target As from the shortcut menu. When you do this, your Web browser will probably display a File Download box like the one shown in Figure 11-2.

Figure 11-2 The File Download box.

3. Name the publication file. When your Web browser displays the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 11-3, use the Save In drop-down list box to choose a folder location. Leave the initial contents of the File Name box alone; this is the actual name of the publication file. After specifying where you want to save the publication file, click Save. Chapter 11

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Figure 11-3 The Save As dialog box.

Uncompressing a BEA Publication Your Web browser downloads a compressed file when you retrieve a BEA publication. This means that before you can actually do anything with the file, you need to uncompress it. To uncompress a publication file, follow these steps: 1. Open the folder holding the publication. If you’re using a Microsoft Windows operating system, use either the My Computer window or Windows Explorer to display the contents of the folder where you stored the compressed publication file. 2. Open the compressed publication file. Double-click the compressed publication file to open the file. When you do, your computer displays the WinZip self-extractor window, as shown in Figure 11-4.

Figure 11-4 The WinZip self-extractor window.

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3. Select a folder for the uncompressed publication file. Use the Unzip To Folder box to choose a folder location for the uncompressed publication file. Enter the complete path name for the folder in this box. For example, if you want to place the uncompressed publication file in the My Documents folder on your C hard drive, enter C:\My Documents. 4. Unzip the publication file. After you choose the folder location for the unzipped, or uncompressed, publication file, click the Unzip button. The WinZip self-extractor program uncompresses the publication file and places the file or files (often a single compressed publication file uncompresses to several publication files) in the specified folder.

Using BEA Publications Textual portions of the publication are often in a text document. This text document can be opened easily using almost any word processor. Tabular data, however, is often stored in a spreadsheet file format. This spreadsheet data can usually be opened by any popular spreadsheet program. NOTE

Tabular data is actually stored in the .wks spreadsheet format, which is the Lotus 123 file format. However, any spreadsheet program can open a Lotus 123 spreadsheet file. For example, Microsoft Excel and Corel Quattro Pro can both open Lotus 123 spreadsheet files.

The macroeconomic data you get from the BEA Web site is often rough and raw. Nevertheless, this information can be very interesting to business professionals. Looking at overall growth in your industry over the last 10 years, for example, gives a useful backdrop for considering both your own growth and future growth prospects. Looking at the absolute size of your industry, of course, also gives you ideas as to how large you can even grow. Finally, looking at related industries outside of yours may spur useful discussions about opportunities for growth elsewhere.

Bureau of Labor Statistics As described in its mission statement, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the “principle fact-finding agency for the federal government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics. The BLS is an independent national statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates essential statistical data to the American public, the U.S. Congress, other federal agencies, state and local governments, business, Chapter 11


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and labor. The BLS also serves as the statistical resource to the Department of Labor.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, not surprisingly, provides much information related to labor economics, as shown in Figure 11-5. NOTE

The URL for the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site is http://stats.bls.gov.

Figure 11-5 The Bureau of Labor Statistics home page.

Information A vailable at the BLS W eb Site Available Web Perhaps the most useful area of the BLS Web site for business users is its Surveys & Programs area. Click the Surveys & Programs hyperlink (see Figure 11-5) to display the Surveys & Programs Web page, as shown in Figure 11-6. This page lists BLS publications and reports you can view using your Web browser. The Surveys & Programs data fall into six general categories: employment and unemployment, prices and living conditions, compensation and working conditions, productivity and technology, employment projections, and international programs.

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Figure 11-6 The BLS Surveys & Programs Web page.

Another useful area of the BLS Web site is its Publications & Research Papers area (not shown). Click the Publications & Research Papers hyperlink to display the Publications & Research Papers Web page, which provides hyperlinks that let you view online versions of most of the BLS publications. NOTE

The Career Guide to Industries hyperlink leads to an interesting book that describes the jobs available in different industries and the average wages paid. This information might be useful for employers, obviously, but it might also be an interesting tool for students and young people planning careers. The Catalog hyperlink available on the Publications & Research Papers page is another useful resource. Click this hyperlink to display a list of BLS publications.

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Using BLS Information To view information in a particular area, such as employment and unemployment, scroll down to that portion of the Web page. Click the hyperlink that names the BLS survey or program you want to get more information about. For example, looking back at Figure 11-6, you can see the first hyperlink listed is Labor Force Statistics From The Current Population Survey. When you click this hyperlink, the BLS Web site displays a list of publications related to labor force statistics, as shown in Figure 11-7.

Figure 11-7 The Labor Force Statistics From The Current Population Survey Web page.

To read or browse one of these publications, click it. You may need to click your way through several lists of categories, subcategories, and even sub-subcategories of information before you find the publication you want. Eventually, however, you will see a Web page like the one shown in Figure 11-8.

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Figure 11-8 The Usual Weekly Earnings Summary Web page.

Tabular data, which accounts for much of the labor statistics information, appears in a monospace font. Note that this information can be easily imported into a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. To do this, use your Web browser to save the Web page as a text document. Then open the text file using your spreadsheet program. Microsoft Excel automatically starts an import wizard that asks how the text file information should be arranged into rows and columns of table data. Many of the publications and documents available from the BLS Web site are simple text files, which you can read using your Web browser (see Figure 11-8). Some of the BLS publications are .pdf files. A .pdf file format allows publications to be printed the same way they appear in the printed versions of the publication. To view and print .pdf documents, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader. NOTE

You can download Adobe Acrobat Reader for free from the Adobe Web site at http://www.adobe.com.

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Using Adobe Acrobat Reader Assuming you do have a .pdf reader, when you click a hyperlink that points to a .pdf file, your Web browser downloads the .pdf file and then tells your operating system to open the newly downloaded file using Adobe Acrobat Reader. To read the document, simply scroll through the article. To quickly move through the pages of a .pdf document, you can also click the Previous Page, Next Page, First Page, and Last Page buttons. (These buttons appear on the toolbar just beneath the Address box.) To print the document, click the Print tool. To save a copy of the .pdf document, click the Save Copy Of The File tool. Adobe Acrobat also provides other tools for navigating a .pdf document, including Zoom tools and even a Find tool for locating text within the .pdf document.

Census Bureau The Census Bureau, as you probably know, collects and provides demographic data about people and the economy of the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau Web site has links to much of the data that the Census Bureau collects and disseminates. Figure 11-9 shows the U.S. Census Bureau home page.

Figure 11-9 The U.S. Census Bureau home page. 298


NOTE

The URL for the Census Bureau Web site is http://www.census.gov.

Information A vailable at the Census Bureau W eb Site Available Web The Census Bureau Web site provides two categories of information that are very interesting to business users: People and Business. You reach these categories by clicking their hyperlinks on the home page. When you click the People hyperlink, the Census Bureau site displays the Population And Household Economic Topics Web page, as shown in Figure 11-10. This page lists a variety of hyperlinks that lead to rich archives of demographic data. For example, clicking the Computer Ownership And Use hyperlink displays a Web page that describes computer use and ownership in the United States and provides hyperlinks you can click to download documents that give further detailed information on this topic.

Figure 11-10 The Population And Household Economic Topics Web page.

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When you click the Business hyperlink, the Census Bureau site displays the Census Bureau Economic Programs Web page, as shown in Figure 11-11. This page provides links to the Census Economic Briefing Room, which lists press releases and Census Bureau reports on topics such as durable goods, manufacturers, shipments and orders, home ownership, housing starts, and international trading goods and services

Figure 11-11 The Census Bureau Economic Programs Web page.

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The Census Bureau Economic Programs Web page also displays hyperlinks to numerous areas of interest to business managers and professionals. Your best bet is to click a few hyperlinks and explore some of these topics.

Using Census Bureau Publications To read a Census Bureau report, simply click the report’s hyperlink. If you click the Home Ownership hyperlink, for example, you see the Housing Vacancies And Ownership Web page that amounts to a table of contents related to home ownership. To see a particular document, just click the hyperlink.

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NOTE

Many of the documents provided by the U.S. Census Bureau Web site use the .pdf file format. To print, save, or read a document stored in the .pdf format, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is available for free at http:// www.adobe.com.

Using the Census Bureau Search Engine When you click the Search hyperlink, the Census Bureau site provides a search form, shown in Figure 11-12, that lets you search on words and phrases. If the search engine finds documents that use your search criteria, it displays a document list Web page from which you can select documents or Web pages that use the search argument.

Figure 11-12 The Census Bureau Search form.

Using the Census Bureau Subjects Index The Subjects Index, available whenever you click the Subject or Subjects A-Z hyperlink, displays an index of all the documents and resources available on the U.S. Census Bureau Web site. This useful tool is another way you can track down or search for publications or resources for useful information. Chapter 11


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EDGAR EDGAR, an acronym for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system, performs automated collection, validation, indexing, acceptance, and forwarding of submissions by companies and others who are required by law to file forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Figure 11-13 shows the EDGAR home page. NOTE

The URL for EDGAR is http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm.

Figure 11-13 The EDGAR home page.

NOTE

302

Filing companies and individuals may choose to submit their documents to EDGAR using either plain text or HTML. Documents submitted in either plain text or HTML formats are official filings. However, many companies also supply .pdf versions of their documents. Pdf documents are only unofficial copies of the filing. But .pdf documents, as noted in earlier discussions in this chapter, produce high-quality printed documents even from your local computer. (To print a .pdf document, you need a .pdf reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader available for free at the http://www.adobe.com Web site.)


Information A vailable Through EDGAR Available EDGAR doesn’t give you access to all publicly filed documents—only those that are filed electronically. Companies were phased into EDGAR filing over a three-year period ending May 6, 1996. After that date, all public domestic companies have been required to file their quarterly, annual, and other public statements using EDGAR. The Guide To Corporate Filings Web page at the EDGAR site provides descriptions of the most common filings made with the SEC, as shown in Figure 11-14. If you have a question about what document you want, your best bet is to start here. To reach the Guide To Corporate Filings Web page, click the EDGAR Form Definition hyperlink shown on the EDGAR home page.

Figure 11-14 The Guide To Corporate Filings Web page.

NOTE

Scroll down the Web page shown in Figure 11-14 to see the form and form description information.

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Searching the EDGAR Database To use EDGAR to look up publicly filed information on a publicly held company, display the EDGAR Database home page (see Figure 11-13). Click the Search The EDGAR Database hyperlink to display the Search The EDGAR Database Web page shown in Figure 11-15. This Web page doesn’t actually let you begin a search, but it lets you choose the type of search you want to perform: Quick Forms Lookup or WAIS.

Figure 11-15 The Search The EDGAR Database Web page.

A Quick Forms Lookup search works when you know the exact name of the company you want to find information about. A Quick Forms Lookup search doesn’t work if you don’t know the company name, or if you want to look up mutual fund information, because the Quick Forms Lookup form doesn’t provide adequate space to precisely identify mutual funds.

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NOTE

You can’t use the Quick Forms Lookup search to look up mutual fund information because the search form only allows you to enter the first 20 characters of an entity name, and the first 20 characters of many mutual funds are the same because each fund name starts with the fund family name.

A WAIS search looks at header information in the filed documents. A WAIS search works well if you don’t know the exact company name, or if you can’t precisely identify the company or mutual fund name using the 20-character limit constraint that exists on the Quick Forms Lookup search.

Using the Quick Forms Lookup To use the Quick Forms Lookup, click the Quick Forms Lookup hyperlink on the Search The EDGAR Database Web page to display the EDGAR Form Pick Web form, shown in Figure 11-16.

Figure 11-16 The EDGAR Form Pick Web form.

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To begin a search, follow these steps: 1. Select the form. Use the Select The Form drop-down list box to indicate whether you want to look at all forms or just a subset of forms. Selecting All looks for all forms. Alternatively, you can select a specific form, such as 10-K or 10-Q. 2. Identify the company. Use the Enter A Company box to identify the company or mutual fund you want a form for. You can enter up to the first 20 characters of the company name, but you only need to enter enough of the name to uniquely identify the company. 3. Select a range of filing dates. Specify the range of filing dates you want to search by clicking one of the entries in the What Date Range list box: Now, Last Week, Last Two Weeks, Last Month, or Entire Database. NOTE

The Enter A Company and What Date Range boxes don’t show in Figure 11-16. You need to scroll down the form in order to see them.

4. Start your search. After you’ve identified the form, the company, and the filing date range, click the Submit Choices button. The EDGAR database then uses your search criteria to locate any forms that match. Assuming the EDGAR database does find forms that match your search criteria, it displays the search results using a Results Of EDGAR Form Search Web page, as shown in Figure 11-17.

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Figure 11-17 The results of an EDGAR search.

5. Select the form you want from the results list. Review the list of forms that match your search criteria. When you find the form you want, click the appropriate hyperlink in the Format column. Typically, your Web browser will open a text document with the form information. You might also have the option of opening an HTML version or even a .pdf version of the form.

Using WAIS Search When a Quick Forms Lookup search won’t work, you must search the EDGAR archives using a WAIS search. A WAIS search looks at header information for form filings in the EDGAR database. Typically, you need to use a WAIS search for mutual funds because mutual fund names are so similar within a fund family. To perform a WAIS search, click the Search The EDGAR Archives hyperlink on the Search The EDGAR Database Web page (see Figure 11-15). When you do, the Search EDGAR Archives form is displayed, as shown in Figure 11-18. To search for information about a particular file—such as a company, individual, or mutual fund—enter the name of the company, individual, or mutual fund in the Search box. Then press the Enter key. Chapter 11


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Figure 11-18 The Search EDGAR Archives form.

A search results list is displayed at the bottom of the Search The EDGAR Archives Web page. Review the list, and if you see the form you want, click its hyperlink. Then open the file form using your Web browser. NOTE

308

The Search EDGAR Archives form, which is what you use to perform a WAIS search, allows you to include Boolean operators in your search argument. The Boolean operators are AND, OR, NOT, and ADJ. The AND operator lets you combine two terms so that the search engine finds only forms that use both the terms you specify. The OR operator lets you join two terms so that the search engine finds forms that use one or both words. The NOT operator lets you specify that forms using a particular term should be excluded. The Adjacent operator, ADJ, lets you ensure that your search only finds forms in which one word follows another word—or stated another way, that the second argument you enter is adjacent to the first argument.


Federal Reserve The U.S. Federal Reserve System Web site provides information about the activities of the Federal Reserve System and access to much of the data that the Federal Reserve develops and disseminates. Figure 11-19 shows the Federal Reserve System home page. As it notes, the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, manages the nation’s monetary policy, supervises and regulates banking, monitors the nation’s financial system, and provides financial services to the U.S. government and other public agencies.

Figure 11-19 The Federal Reserve home page.

NOTE

The URL for the Federal Reserve Web site is http://www.federalreserve.gov.

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Information A vailable at the Federal Reserve W eb Site Available Web The list of hyperlinks along the right edge of the home page summarizes the information available at the Federal Reserve Web site. Many of these hyperlinks are self-explanatory, single-page discussions or single-page tables of contents. The Press Releases hyperlink, for example, links to a list of press releases, and this list provides another set of hyperlinks you use to get actual press releases. Obviously, your level of interest in the information provided by the Federal Reserve Web site depends on what industry you are in and the responsibilities you have. That said, much of the macroeconomic information provided at the site is very good reading— especially for anybody involved in the banking industry. • The Testimony And Speeches hyperlink, for example, leads to a Web page that provides a list of hyperlinks to testimony and speeches by people like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. • The Monetary Policy hyperlink leads to a page that lists, describes, and provides hyperlinks to federal reserve monetary policy reports, including the Beige Book. • The Beige Book Web page doesn’t actually provide an online version of the Beige Book, but it provides a list and calendar of Beige Book reports. You can click a Report hyperlink, however, to retrieve an actual Beige Book. • The Banking System hyperlink leads to a page that provides hyperlinks to detailed information about financial holding companies, large commercial banks, minorityowned banks, and so on. • The Research And Data hyperlink leads to a page providing a catalog of Federal Reserve Board statistics, surveys, reports, staff studies, working papers, and Federal Reserve Board articles—information often not available elsewhere.

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Using the Federal Reserve Information Many of the reports available for downloading from the Federal Reserve Web site are available in either simple text files or .pdf files. A simple text file can be printed by any text editor or word processor. A .pdf file needs to be printed by Adobe Acrobat Reader, as noted in the sidebar “Using Adobe Acrobat Reader.”

Government Printing Office Access Database One relatively unknown government Web site that is extremely valuable is the Government Printing Office (GPO) Access Database site, as shown in Figure 11-20.

Figure 11-20 The Government Printing Office Access Database home page.

NOTE

The URL for the Government Printing Office Access Database Web site is http://www.access.gpo.gov.

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Information A vailable at the GPO Access Database Available Web Site The GPO Access Database Web site gives you online access to probably every government publication that is actively being printed and is available online. This means that you can use the GPO Web site to get publications from any of the other Web sites discussed in this chapter, such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, or the Internal Revenue Service—as well as documents published by other government agencies.

Searching the GPO Access Database To use the GPO Access database, scroll down until you get to the search form area of the home page, as shown in Figure 11-21. Then enter the search terms that will uniquely identify the publication in the Search For box. You can also use the Maximum Records Return box to specify how many documents the search engine should return. After you provide this information, click the Search button.

Figure 11-21 The Search Form area of the GPO Access Database Web page. 312


When the GPO Access search engine finds government publications that match your search terms, it lists them in a Search Results page. You can then choose whether you want to open an HTML version of the publication, a .pdf version of the publication, or a summary of the publication displayed in HTML format by clicking the appropriate hyperlink.

Using Complex Search Criteria The GPO Web site’s Search Terms box accepts AND, OR, NOT, and ADJ logical operators. These search term arguments work the way you expect—as long as you already have some search service experience. The GPO Access Web site search engine also supports more complex searches, as described in the following list: • You can use quotation marks as the functional equivalent to the adjacent Boolean operator within a search query. For example, if you want to look for something related to the government printing office, you could search both on the phrase “government printing office” and on the phrase government ADJ printing ADJ office. Both search arguments would return the same results. • You can create complex search arguments by using multiple Boolean operators. A complex search argument could be used to look for documents that include references to “Department of Education” AND “bilingual education” AND “grants.” • You can use parentheses to nest your Boolean logic just like Boolean logic in Microsoft Excel. For example, you could perform a search on (bilingual OR ESL OR “second language”) AND (education OR curriculum). • You can use the asterisk symbol (*) as a wild card. For example, if you wanted to look up all words with “Congress” as its root you could type Congress*. The search engine would then look for anything that began with the word “Congress”, such as Congressional or congressperson. • The GPO search engine employs a stop word list. It lists words that are not indexed in the database or can’t be used in a search, including AND, IS, IT, OR, SO, THE, and many others. (Stop word lists are described for each of the search engines. Click the Helpful Hints For Searching hyperlink, which is displayed in multiple places throughout the site.)

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Using the Publications List Although the GPO Access Search is probably the easiest way to find a document, you can also find documents by looking at the list of online databases maintained by the GPO Web site. NOTE

Some older documents also use the .tif file format. The .tif file format is a graphics format—essentially, a .tif file is a picture of the original document. As a result, .tif images aren’t included in the index and therefore won’t be returned in search results lists. You might still find a .tif document, however, if you don’t locate a document by using a search engine but rather find it from a list of documents.

To use this simple list—which works like an index—click the Site Contents hyperlink that appears on the GPO Access Database Web page. A list of the categories of publications available from the GPO Publications Web site is displayed, as shown in Figure 11-22. To find a document, scroll through the list.

Figure 11-22 The Site Contents Web page.

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Internal Revenue Service One other government Web site deserves mention here, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Digital Daily Web site, as shown in Figure 11-23. Although the Digital Daily site is tailored for consumers, not businesses, it is still exceedingly useful to anybody in business. Using the IRS Web site, you can retrieve printable versions of IRS publications and forms.

Figure 11-23 The Internal Revenue Service home page.

NOTE

The URL for the Internal Revenue Service Web site is http://www.irs.gov.

To retrieve publications and forms from the IRS Web site, scroll down to the bottom of the home page to get to the area of hyperlinks at the very bottom. Then click the Form And Pubs hyperlink. When you do, the IRS Web site displays a catalog of publications and forms, as shown in Figure 11-24. You pick the category of forms or publications you want—typically by clicking either the Forms And Instructions hyperlink or the Publications And Notices hyperlink.

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Figure 11-24 The Forms And Publications Web page.

The IRS Web site displays another Web form, shown in Figure 11-25, that provides a list box of forms, instructions, and publications that you can download. To choose a form for downloading, click it with your mouse. You can download multiple forms by holding down the Ctrl key as you click. After you click or select the forms you want to retrieve, click the Review Selected Files button. The IRS Web site displays a Web page that lists the forms that you selected. To download one of these forms, right-click the Forms hyperlink and choose either Save Target As to save the document onto your local computer or Print Target to print the document.

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Figure 11-25 The Web page that lists forms you can download.

NOTE

The IRS provides four file formats: .pdf, PCL, PostScript, and .sgml text. Probably the most common format is .pdf, and it is the one you’ll want to use if you have a copy of the .pdf reader Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you have a printer that supports Hewlett-Packard Printer Control Language, known by the abbreviation PCL, you can download a copy of a form stored in the PCL file format. Similarly, if you have a printer that supports the Adobe PostScript printer language, you can download a PostScript version of the document. If you download either a PCL or PostScript version of the document, you need to use your operating system to print the publication file. You typically do this by copying the PCL or PostScript file from your disk to your printer. (Refer to your operating system documentation for information on how to do this.) You can also use the .sgml text file format if you want to print just the textual portion of the instructions or forms. The .sgml text format doesn’t provide a form, however. It provides only the textual instructions.

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Summary The government Web resources discussed in this chapter provide business Internet users with rich, deep information sources. It is not an exaggeration to say that you will find it profitable to more carefully explore how each government Web site may be useful to you in your career and in your business.

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Chapter 12

USING WIRELESS WEB AND E-MAIL SERVICES

Featuring: • What to Expect • Cell Phones • E-Mail-Capable Pagers • PDAs • Laptops

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ireless Internet access is a technology that allows you to send and receive e-mail as well as perform limited Web browsing using a cell phone, a pager, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), or a cellular modem with a laptop computer. The wireless Internet experience varies greatly based on the type of device you choose, but it can be very useful to people who work away from the office or home. This chapter briefly describes and reviews these services.

What to Expect Convenience is the outstanding feature of wireless Internet access, but in all other aspects, the service isn’t up to the level of standard wire-based Internet access.

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The coverage and reliability for wireless Internet devices is usually identical to the digital cellular coverage. So in large metropolitan areas you may experience good coverage, but then encounter little or no service in outlying areas and rural regions. Even within the zone of coverage, however, there are often areas and times when you won’t be able to make a connection, especially within buildings. The cost of wireless Internet access is much higher than that of land-based services. One of the least expensive services is Palm.net, at $9.99 per month for a small number of e-mails and information transfers. Unlimited access generally runs $40 to $70 per month, depending on the device and the company. Compare this to dial-up 56Kbps access that runs about $20 per month for unlimited access, or broadband access that starts at $40 to $60 per month for 256Kbps and faster unlimited connections. Wireless Internet devices also have decreased functionality for e-mail and Web browsing. All or most wireless devices can’t display anything other than plain text (therefore you should send only short, plain text e-mails to people with wireless access). Similarly, very few wireless devices can browse normal Web sites. Instead, they must use pages designed specifically for the device. Those that can browse the Web have slow connections (9600Kbps, 14.4Kbps, or 19.2Kbps), making Web pages download very slowly, and they may also have small screens, which results in a lot of scrolling. TIP

If you use a device that can display full Web pages with images, you can dramatically improve the speed in which pages load by disabling the display of images in your Web browser.

Despite these disadvantages, devices with wireless Internet access are extremely convenient. You can carry most devices in a purse or pocket and use them to access the Internet from almost anywhere in town. Typically, the devices aren’t designed solely as Internet devices, which can partially offset their marginal Internet capabilities.

Cell Phones Digital cellular phones that include wireless Internet capabilities can make acceptable and relatively low-cost devices for infrequent e-mail and Web use, but they are at their best when used in conjunction with another device, such as a laptop or PDA. The advantages of using a cell phone to wirelessly access the Internet depend on convenience and cost. For the many people who already carry a cell phone, there is no need

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to carry extra devices. The additional cost for a cell phone with Internet capabilities is also low or nonexistent. Moreover, the per-month additional charge for wireless Internet access is typically low, ranging from free (for basic services) to $20 per month for more complete service. Despite the cost and convenience of cell phones, they’re really not very good Internet tools. All content appears on a small screen that can display only 5 to 30 words at a time, often with no graphics capabilities. Web access is usually limited to several built-in “Web sites” that you can access, but there is no way to view general Web sites. In addition, these special Web sites are generally slow, limited in capability, and difficult to navigate and enter text in. E-mail messages usually can be sent to your phone using only a special Web page or e-mail address (although some phones can receive standard e-mail). Additionally, e-mails received by your cell phone cannot display images or formatted text. Moreover, entering text using the number pad is very slow. Each letter typically requires a couple of keystrokes, making them a challenge to use for sending e-mail. NOTE

If your e-mail account supports forwarding messages to other e-mail addresses, you could forward the messages sent to your primary e-mail account to your cell phone.

Although cell phones by themselves are not very efficient at using the Internet, some cell phones can be used to provide laptops or PDAs with adequate wireless Internet access. The connection speeds are acceptable, typically 14.4Kbps to 19.2Kbps, and the cost is low, since you pay for connection time as if it was a normal cell-phone call. However, connecting the cell phone to your PDA or laptop can be awkward. The setup usually requires a special adapter on the cell phone and a modem on the laptop or PDA. NOTE

You need to have a normal dial-up account in order to use your cell phone with a PDA or laptop.

E-Mail-Capable Pagers E-mail-capable pagers arguably provide the best access to your e-mail of any wireless device. They are a great solution for people who are primarily concerned with always being in touch with their e-mail and less concerned about creating e-mail.

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The advantages of e-mail-capable pagers, such as the Motorola PageWriter or the Research In Motion BlackBerry, are immediate access to e-mail, cost, and convenience. There’s no need to periodically check for messages because your e-mail is received immediately, and you’re notified by a buzz or alarm, just like a normal page. The devices cost from $170 to around $400, have monthly fees that start at $20 per month, and their battery life is extremely long. Since the devices use the pager network to send and receive messages, coverage is much better than any other wireless Internet access—you can use them anywhere that you can receive a page. Unfortunately, e-mail pagers are generally useless for composing messages and using the Web. You can send plain text messages by typing them on a tiny keyboard built into the pager, but this is awkward and slow. As with cell phones, e-mail and Web content (when available) is displayed as text-only and requires a lot of scrolling. Pagers with Web capabilities have an even more limited selection of sites that can be accessed than do cell phones, with no ability to browse normal Web sites.

PDAs Person Digital Assistants (PDAs) provide a compromise between cost, convenience, and functionality. These devices usually fall into one of two categories: devices based on the Palm operating system and devices using Microsoft’s Pocket PC operating system. TIP

Both Palm and Pocket PC devices can connect to the Internet using a standard telephone line if you purchase an add-on modem. You can then use any dial-up account to get Internet access.

Palm OS Devices Palm OS devices, such as those by Palm Incorporated and Handspring, are a good choice for people who want to read and create e-mail on the go as well as do limited Web browsing. Palm devices with built-in wireless Internet capabilities, such as the Palm VII, have a number of advantages over other devices, primarily ease of use and relatively good email functionality. Composing messages is easier than on any other device lacking a fullsize keyboard thanks to Palm OS’s good handwriting-recognition program. The Palm VII is the first PDA to include wireless connectivity out of the box, making it extremely easy to configure. The Palm OS is also simple and easy to use overall, and the e-mail and the included “Web clipping” applications are Spartan but effective. The costs are 322


moderate, with the Palm VII costing around $400 and wireless access ranging from $10 per month for basic access to $45 per month for unlimited access through Palm.net. TIP

When using an external modem, Palm devices can access normal Web sites using ProxiWeb, a third-party Web browser available for Palm devices, provided you have a normal dial-up account.

Although Palm devices do a respectable job with a number of Internet tasks, they still have limited functionality. Without additional software, the Palm VII can only send and receive messages using a single Palm.net e-mail account. Additionally, formatted text, images, and attachments aren’t supported, as shown in Figures 12-1 and 12-2.

Figure 12-1 Checking e-mail on a Palm VII.

Figure 12-2 Reading e-mail on a Palm VII. Chapter 12


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The display of most Palm OS devices is small, with a very low 160x160 resolution (compared to the lowest resolution supported by PCs—640x480), which leads to a lot of scrolling. Web browsing can only be done on certain sites by using built-in or downloadable “Web clipping” applications—other Web sites won’t work, (see Figure 12-3).

Figure 12-3 Using a Web clipping application on a Palm VII.

TIP

You can use third-party applications to send and receive mail on any POP, IMAP, or Hotmail account, although the reliability may vary.

Microsoft Pocket PC Devices Microsoft Pocket PC-based devices, such as Compaq’s iPaq H3650, provide the best Internet functionality of any standalone wireless device, and have admirable e-mail and Web browsing services. The better services, however, come at a higher price and mean both shorter battery life and increased complexity. Pocket PC e-mail is supported using any POP or IMAP mail account and can open Microsoft Word, Excel, and HTML attachments. Composing new mail is easy using handwriting recognition or a built-in keyboard, depending on the type of device you have. Pocket PC devices can display any Web site using the built-in Pocket Internet Explorer Web browser, making it possible to get information from anywhere on the Web. The

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resolution is also much higher and more colorful than comparable Palm OS devices— 320x240 with 4,096 or 65,000 colors, compared to the Palm VII’s 160x160 grayscale display. The increased functionality provided by Pocket PC devices comes at a price and means extra complexity, however. Most Pocket PC devices cost at least a hundred dollars more than Palm OS devices. In addition, few Pocket PC devices have built-in wireless Internet capabilities. To get Internet access, you must buy a wireless modem and pay a monthly fee for access (around $40 per month for unlimited access) or use a compatible digital cell phone. NOTE

Getting a digital cell phone to work with a Pocket PC device can be tricky. Check out http://www.pocketpc.com for more information.

Laptops The most fully featured of the wireless Internet devices, laptops are the most economical wireless option (provided you already own the laptop). Laptop owners who need full Internet access only need a compatible cell phone to complete the setup. The advantages of using a laptop for wireless Internet access are the complete support for all aspects of the Internet and the relatively low cost. Anything you can do on a wired connection you can do on a laptop with a wireless connection. If you already have dialup Internet access and a digital cell phone that works with your laptop, you can use the Internet wirelessly for only the cost of your phone’s airtime. Otherwise, you can buy a wireless modem and pay $20 to $50 per month for access. The disadvantages of using a laptop are size and simplicity. Laptops are much bigger and heavier than any other wireless Internet device, and while using a wireless modem is simple, connecting to the Internet using a cell phone hooked up to a laptop can be a trying experience. What’s more, using a laptop as a wireless device means you actually have two pieces of hardware to carry around—the laptop and the cellular phone.

Summary If you need the Web or e-mail to do your work and you frequently work outside the office, you probably want to acquire a wireless Internet device. Admittedly, wireless Web and e-mail services suffer from limitations, but they can be powerful tools for people who don’t work at a desk.

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Part 3


In This Part

Chapter 13 Setting Up a Web Site Using FrontPage

329

Chapter 14 Publishing PowerPoint Presentations to the Web

365

Chapter 15 Setting Up a Web Store

405

Chapter 16 Setting Up an Intranet

421

Chapter 17 Publishing an E-Mail Newsletter

433

Chapter 18 Using the Internet for Recruiting and Job Searching

449

Chapter 19 Setting Up and Using Online Banking

475

Chapter 20 Setting Up and Using Online Investing

501

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Chapter 13

SETTING UP A WEB SITE USING FRONTPAGE

Featuring: • Learning How Web Pages Work • Developing a Web Strategy • Setting Up Your Domain • Collecting and Creating Digital Content • Creating Your Web Pages • Testing Your Web Site • Publishing Your Web Site • Publicizing Your Web Site

N

o business discussion of the Internet is complete without coverage of Web publishing. Accordingly, this first project provides a fast-paced discussion of the eight basic steps required to Web publish successfully.

NOTE

Two other books published by Redmond Technology Press describe these steps in more detail and in the context of specific Web-authoring tools: Effective Executive’s Guide to FrontPage Web Sites and Effective Executive’s Guide to Dreamweaver Web Sites.

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Step 1: Learning How W eb Pages W ork Web Work The first step that business users will want to take is learning how Web pages work, that is, in terms of the actual mechanics. Understanding the basic structure of the Web provides useful context for thinking about Web publishing. Fortunately, the mechanics of Web publishing are surprisingly simple. A Web page, which is what you create when you Web publish, is simply a text document with special codes in it that tell a Web browser how to format and display the contents of the page. In addition to the special formatting, Web pages can also contain embedded images— which show up in the page onscreen but are stored separately on the server—and links (hyperlinks) to other pages. NOTE

A Web site consists of a collection of Web pages connected by hyperlinks.

Introducing HTML Code HTML is the tool that Web developers use to create the Web pages that make up a Web site. Although Web-authoring tools allow people to easily work without touching a line of HTML code, it helps to see how pages are actually built. Knowing a little bit about HTML code will also help you to have a better idea about what someone you hire to perform HTML editing and coding is actually doing. To begin, let’s look at a simple sentence in HTML code. For example, every programmer’s first assignment is to create code that displays the phrase “hello world,” so let’s do that in HTML.
hello world

This is a complete Web page. It’s made up of two tags, which are the basic building blocks of an HMTL document. The first tag, , states that the document is an HTML document and marks the beginning of the Web page. The second half of this tag, , comes at the end of the document and signifies the end of the page. The second tag,
, signifies a new paragraph. The actual paragraph in this case is simply “hello world,” and the paragraph ends with the second half of the paragraph tag,
.

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TIP

All HTML tags begin with a left angle bracket (). They usually begin and end similarly to the and
tags— the end of the tag is the same as the beginning, except for the addition of a slash (/). For example,
closes the
tag, ending it.

Now let’s try to decipher something a little more complex. The next page includes an image and a hyperlink. Figure 13-1 shows what this page looks like in a Web browser. Here’s the code for it:

hello world

Figure 13-1 A simple Web page displayed in a Web browser.

Notice that the code includes an additional paragraph, which contains the tag. This is the inline image tag (which means it is an image displayed in a Web page instead of an image that you can download), and it works like this. The tag starts with ). Notice also that in the middle of the “hello world” paragraph there is now a hyperlink. The hyperlink tag starts with and ends with , and in between are the attributes of the hyperlink and the text to which the hyperlink is attached. In this case, the only attribute is the href attribute (which is the URL of the hyperlink). You can use the href attribute by typing href= and then entering the URL to use, enclosed in quotes. The tag is partially closed by the right angle bracket (>) following the href attribute, but don’t let this fool you. This is so that the text to which the hyperlink is actually attached, world, isn’t thought of as another attribute. The hyperlink tag actually ends after this text with the tag. NOTE

There is no http://www.mycompany.com/ included in the tag to identify the location of the image, but this is an important omission. Because the URL given is missing the first part (http://www.mycompany.com/), Web browsers assume that it should start in the same directory as the current Web page. This is highly desirable because it allows you to move the entire Web site to a different location (say, from a local folder to your Internet Web site) and still have these links work.

Most Web pages are no more complex than the example just shown in Figure 13-1. Most Web pages, in fact, simply provide text, images, and hyperlinks. Of course, in real life, a Web page would provide considerably more text, several graphic images, and probably numerous hyperlinks. But, boiled down to their very essence, most Web pages are as simple as the Web page shown in Figure 13-1. One final comment concerning HTML: If you create this same simple page using a Web-authoring tool like, for example, Microsoft FrontPage, you will see some additional HTML codes, or tags. Frequently, a Web-authoring tool sets up a more complex page, including header information that isn’t displayed (using the tag) and the title of the Web page (using the tag), delineates the body of the page (using the tag) and provides some additional information about the page’s contents using meta tags (<meta>). Meta tags provide information to search engines and use the <meta name=“keywords”> tag so that search engines can more easily and accurately index the contents of a Web site.

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New W eb Page T echnologies Web Technologies In addition to HTML pages, a number of new technologies have been developed for Web pages. Even if these technologies don’t apply to your Web site initially, it’s good to know that if you need something more sophisticated than that provided by your Web-authoring tools, the capability exists. The following list describes relevant Web page technologies and what they do. • Dynamic HTML introduces movement and the ability to react to a user’s actions to Web pages. For example, text may highlight when a user moves the mouse over it. • JavaScript, Java, and ActiveX are technologies that provide a way of performing complex tasks within a Web page and can even function as full-featured programs. These technologies are complicated—and using them is best left to a professional Web developer. • CGI scripts is a technology used on some Web servers to provide server-based features such as visitor counters and discussion groups. • XML stands for Extended Markup Language. XML provides a way of giving detailed content information about a Web page, allowing for more meaningful searching and information gathering.

Step 2: Developing a W eb Strategy Web Developing a good Web strategy essentially means thoughtfully answering three important questions: why does it make sense to have a Web site, what makes for good Web content, and how should a Web site be developed? Fortunately, none of these questions needs to be particularly difficult to answer, as the paragraphs below explain.

Why Does It Make Sense to Have a W eb Site? Web Although a great deal of exuberance surrounds the Internet and especially the Web, it’s fairly easy to identify and describe the handful of reasons why it makes good business sense for an organization to have a Web site: the reasons include advertising, publishing, information collection, and transaction processing.

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Advertising The Web lets you create powerful advertisements and publicity for a very modest cost. The quickest way to visualize this is to think of your Web site and its Web pages as substitutes for enhanced versions of any telephone directory advertising you do now. It’s not an exaggeration to say that anything you can do in a directory listing or advertisement, you can do better and more cheaply using a Web page. You can also change and update your information more frequently as well. TIP

The Web really levels the playing field for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. A small business or nonprofit organization can create a Web site as good or better in many ways than a larger company’s Web site without a large amount of expense or time, giving it an unprecedented ability to compete and communicate.

Publishing Many organizations are de facto publishers. For example, if your business creates and distributes brochures, newsletters, product or service literature, or similar items, you are actually publishing. The Web provides a convenient way to complement or even replace this paper-based publishing. Developing material for publication on the Web doesn’t cost any more than developing equivalent material for paper publishing. But with the Web, you don’t have the costs of printing or mailing. Furthermore, with the Web, you can more quickly update your information.

Information Collection In addition to the advertising and publishing advantages that the Web offers to organizations, the Web also offers the ability to collect information from the people for whom you advertise and publish. You can put forms right on a Web page to collect information from the visitors to your site. For example, you might gather names for a mailing list, get feedback from customers, or take in sales orders.

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Transaction Processing One further advantage of the Web that is of great value is the opportunity for transaction processing. As an extension of the Web’s information collection ability, transaction processing lets you use the Web as a virtual store, salesperson, or distribution facility. NOTE

Chapter 15 discusses in more detail the work involved in setting up a Web site that includes transaction processing.

Using the Web for transaction processing is considerably trickier than using it for advertising or publishing. Obviously, your Web pages need to list and describe the products you sell. But practically speaking, you need to do more than simply list products or services. Good Web stores have the following features: • Information about product availability and about the lead times for ordering items that aren’t immediately available. • A variety of ways to track down your products and services so that they are easy to find and buy. • A shopping cart feature that lets customers build a list of the items they want. • A checkout feature that lets customers easily order all the items in their shopping cart. (It’s during this checkout process, of course, that customers provide their credit card numbers and shipping instructions.) • A non-Web way for resolving problems the Web store can’t handle, such as lost or damaged goods. NOTE

Regardless of what you think about Amazon.com, you should visit their site (http://www.amazon.com)—even if you compete with them (perhaps especially if you compete with them). They’ve done an impressive job of providing numerous paths to find their products and different ways to search through their inventory. For example, they have several different bestseller lists for Microsoft Excel books, each listing books in a different order for a different group of Excel readers. We strongly suspect their several bestseller lists of Excel books, each really an alternative path to the same products, boost their sales of Excel books because they make it more likely someone will find one of them.

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What Makes for Good W eb Content? Web No matter what you choose to use your Web site for—advertising, publishing, information collection, or transaction processing—three main features differentiate effective sites: useful content, easy navigation, and aesthetic appeal.

Useful Content More than anything else, useful content is the single most important feature of an effective Web site. Useful content brings visitors back repeatedly. If your site is the only place, or the best place, or the first place where someone can get needed information, you are providing useful content.

Easy Navigation Although good content is the most important feature of an effective Web site, good content needs to be supported and enhanced by good site layout. Not only should visitors be able to easily find what they’re looking for but the organization of Web pages and hyperlinks should also give visitors a clear idea of the site’s contents at a glance from the home page.

Visual Appeal Aesthetics is very important for Web sites, but it is also the part of Web site creation that is most overemphasized by many businesses. Professional artists and programmers are hired to create custom interfaces using trendy technologies, and altogether too much time, money, and resources are spent making sites look sophisticated instead of filling them with good content. A flashy site may grab the attention of visitors, but a clean and simple site can be just as effective (or more so), and much less expensive to create and maintain. Complex effects and graphics can also make a site slow to download and confusing to use—not to mention that sophisticated Web page programming can be incompatible with older browsers, along with some handheld devices and standalone Internet appliances.

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How Should a W eb Site Be Developed? Web As you might imagine, more than one organization has stalled trying to decide how to develop a Web site. For this reason, we recommend that you consider employing a bulletin-board methodology for developing your Web content. By this, we mean that you could develop the content for your Web site in much the way that the content for the bulletin board in your coffee room or at your local market is developed. NOTE You should spend a small amount of time planning your site’s structure, even if you use a bulletin board approach. Your site structure doesn’t have to be perfect, but taking an hour or so to plan how you want to structure content on your site can help keep your site from degenerating into chaos.

Following a bulletin-board methodology, as you find or create some appropriate Web content, you simply pin the content to the bulletin board—or post the content to your site. When content needs to change, you update the content or replace it. If content needs to be removed, you remove it, or unpin it, from the bulletin board. This bulletin-board methodology is somewhat opposite of the strategy taken by larger companies, which is to treat a Web site like a software product—something that needs extensive research, development, and testing before it can be rolled out. The advantage of this large-system-development approach is that the site usually hits the pavement running strong, which is important for the IPO-focused high-tech companies of today’s business world that can get tens of thousands of visitors their first day online. However, the software product methodology doesn’t work as well for smaller businesses and organizations because it delays and may even kill the project if the resources expended in developing the site so burden the project that it never gets completed. Accordingly, we suggest that you think about a Web site as something that’s constantly under construction, where you post content as it’s created or updated, and where you revise as needed, thereby letting your site grow and become more polished naturally, almost organically. Since smaller companies probably won’t be immediately generating the huge amount of traffic that larger companies can often get as soon as their sites go live, they’re free to create a site that may initially be less-than-perfect, and then slowly expand and refine it. In summary, we suggest that you think about your Web site as looking more like an electronic bulletin board than a software product.

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Step 3: Setting Up Y our Domain Your Before you can begin constructing a Web site, you need to lay a foundation by acquiring a domain name and choosing a company to host your site.

Picking a Domain Name Picking a domain name is a small step in the creation of a Web site, but in many cases your domain name is at least as important as the name of your business. Your domain name identifies your site, and by extension, your business or organization. You actually have two choices to make in picking a domain name: You need to pick a host name, and you need to pick a top-level domain.

Picking a Host Name Several points should be considered when picking a domain name. First of all, you want your domain name to be descriptive of your business or organization. Your first choice is your business’s name, but in some instances you might choose a domain name that’s based on your business’s purpose instead. For example, it might be much better for a business named Vladimir Berkowitz Faucets, Inc. to select the www.greatfaucets.com domain name instead of www.vladimirberkowitzfaucets.com. Second, your domain name should be easy to remember and spell. While a name like www.rhythm.com may be short and easy to remember, some people will have trouble spelling rhythm, potentially eliminating a large number of visitors. Perhaps something like www.beat.com would be a better choice. Third, short domain names are far preferable to long ones, although not if the name is difficult to remember. This is particularly important since most of the desirable short domain names have already been taken. It may be tempting to abbreviate your domain name to shorten it, but do this only if the abbreviation doesn’t make the name harder to remember.

Picking a T op-Level Domain Top-Level Besides the domain name itself, you also need to choose which top-level domain to use, such as .com or .net or .org. By far the most popular top-level domain to use is .com. Since this is the top-level domain most people will look under first, we recommend that businesses look for a .com domain name. The .net domain is more appropriate for ISPs, Web hosting companies, and other Internet technologies companies. Nonprofit organizations should probably use the .org top-level domain, although depending on the 338


nature of the organization you might also consider registering your domain name with a .com top-level domain. Once you’ve come up with some ideas for domain names, it’s time to check for their availability. Because a large number of domain names are registered every day, make a list of alternative domain names in case the domain name you want is already taken. Then either go to any registrar’s Web site (Network Solutions is the original, and most expensive, registrar at http:// www.networksolutions.com) or go to http://www.betterwhois.com and enter your domain name idea in the box provided, as shown in Figure 13-2.

Figure 13-2 Checking out a potential domain name at the betterwhois.com Web site.

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Although most companies will naturally choose a valid domain name, there are a few restrictions on domain names to keep in mind. Domain names are case insensitive; so don’t spend time thinking about what letters to capitalize. Also, you can use only letters and the hyphen character; but a hyphen can’t start or finish a domain name. Lastly, the domain name can be a maximum of 67 characters long, not including the www. and the top-level domain (.com, .net or .org).

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Choosing a W eb Hosting Service Web Choosing a company to host your Web site can be a bewildering experience. With thousands of Web hosting companies, each usually offering several different hosting plans, it takes knowledge and a certain amount of patience to choose a Web hosting company. In general, however, you want to look at which features the company offers for its price and the reliability and quality of the company’s service. The following list provides summary descriptions of the features that are often available, along with information you can use to determine which ones are relevant for your business. • Virtual Domains/Domain Hosting. The Web hosting company you choose must support virtual domains or domain hosting if you want to be able to use your own domain name (which you do). • FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions. If you plan on using FrontPage to create and manage your site, then you want your Web hosting company to support FrontPage Server Extensions. FrontPage Server Extensions allow you to easily publish your site without using cumbersome tools such as FTP or the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard. They also provide server-based tools that can be indispensable when creating a Web site for an organization, such as the support for forms, discussion groups, and Web site search capability. • Disk Space Allotment. Most businesses have small sites, and generally don’t have trouble fitting comfortably in the 25MB of Web space provided by even the most barebones Web hosting plans you might look at. If you plan on having a large number of images, audio, or video files on your site, however, disk space allotment becomes an important issue. You may want to opt for a hosting plan that offers 100MB, 200MB, or unlimited disk space. • Database Support and Active Server Pages. If you want to use a database on your Web site and dynamically create pages based on data from the database (this is what Active Server Pages are), your Web hosting company needs to support both databases and Active Server Pages. (Setting up a database on your site is a difficult task, although it is something you could hire a consultant to do, after which your business or organization could then maintain it in-house.) • Subdomains. Some Web hosting companies allow you to create subdomains for your Web site, such as support.yourcompany.com or events.yourcompany.com. If your

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company has separate divisions that want their own sites, subdomains are a costeffective solution, since you don’t have to pay additional registration fees for them. • Mailing Lists, List Servers, and Majordomo. Depending on your business or organization, you may want to start an e-mail mailing list. A number of methods exist for creating mailing lists, so if you think this might be a capability you need, consider finding a Web hosting company that includes some sort of mailing list capability at little or no extra cost. • Data Transfer Limitations. Some Web hosting companies have a limit on how much data can be transferred per month. Every time someone views a page on your site or downloads a file, that visitor is transferring data from your site. Similarly, when you upload new pages or files to your site, you’re also transferring data. If your site goes above its limit (because of lots of visitors or large file downloads), you’re charged extra. • SSL (Security). Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a way of encrypting data that is transferred to and from a Web site, and it is typically used for Web stores that process credit card transactions. As such, it is an important feature if you plan to set up an online store. • Technical Support. All Web hosting companies provide technical support for any problems with publishing your Web site, Web site availability, e-mail, and so forth. However, the type, quality, and availability of this support will vary. Not all companies provide toll-free technical support phone numbers; not all companies provide 24-hour, 7-day-a-week (24/7) technical support. • Web Server Speed. The speed of a Web server is fairly difficult to ascertain from reading promotional material on a company’s Web site. Nevertheless, to be thorough, you probably want to ask several questions: how much bandwidth is available, how many sites does the Web server host, and how fast is the server? You might also ask for the URLs of other Web sites stored on the same server and then visit those sites. • Web Server Reliability. Even more important than Web server speed is the reliability of the server. To assess Web server reliability, most people rely on the uptime percentage, which is something that can easily be measured. Most organizations aim for 99.9 percent uptime (roughly 9 hours of downtime a year).

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Where to Find a W eb Hosting Company Web With the thousands of Web hosting companies that you can choose from, narrowing your list of candidates to a reasonable number can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Several useful resources exist, however, to point you in the right direction. TIP

Choosing a Web hosting company isn’t a permanent decision. You can easily switch companies at almost any time (although you might choose to sign up for a one-year contract to avoid setup fees). So don’t waste too much time trying to find “the one.” If you later locate a better one, switch when your contract is up.

Microsoft’ eb Presence Provider W eb Site Microsoft’ss Locate A W Web Web Located at http://www.microsoftwpp.com, the Microsoft Locate A Web Presence Provider Web site shown in Figure 13-3 allows you to perform a search for a Web hosting company that is a Microsoft registered host for FrontPage Web sites. This is probably the best place to search for a Web hosting company if you plan on using FrontPage 2000 to build your site.

Figure 13-3 Microsoft’s Locate A Web Presence Provider Web site. 342


DN Resources The DN Resources site at http://www.dnresources.com has a special Hosting section that lists sites that provide a list of Web hosting companies. It’s a little confusing, since each site shows a different list of Web hosting companies. Once you sort it out, however, it can be a good place to come up with companies to possibly host your site.

Local Computer Papers If you’re looking for a local Web hosting company, check out any local computer papers or the technology section of your local paper for ads from local companies. You can also check the Yellow Pages under Internet.

Signing Up for Service After deciding on a domain name, locating a Web hosting company, and selecting the appropriate hosting plan, you need to sign up for the actual service. The details of the signup process are different for every company, so you’ll need to ask the Web hosting company for instructions and help.

Step 4: Collecting and Creating Digital Content Once you pick a domain name and sign up for Web hosting, you’re ready to collect and create your digital content. In any business or organization already using computers, this work is easier than you might suspect.

Collecting Existing Digital Content Your business may already have a large amount of digital content that can be used on a site with only a minimal amount of work. When we say digital content, we mean any content that can be opened using a computer application such as a word processor or an image-editing program. This includes data on hard drives, your local network, the Internet (though be careful about copyrights), floppy and Zip disks, CD-ROMS, and so forth. To use existing digital content (which comes in many types), you first need to locate it, and, if necessary, convert the content to an appropriate format for later importing into your Web-authoring tool. (This tool might be FrontPage, for example.) Just about any kind of digital content you have can be adapted for use on the Web:

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• Word processor documents (.doc, .txt, .wpf ) such as project reports, manuals, company objectives, newsletters, and notices to customers created with a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, AppleWorks, or Corel WordPerfect, can be a big reservoir of content. • Microsoft PowerPoint presentations (.ppt), lecture slides, or demos, might be great additions to your site. • Spreadsheet documents (.xls) might also be good content for your site, provided the data relates to your site’s purpose and target audience. This could include financial information, analyzed data from technical companies, or statistical data from tests. • Digital images (.jpg, .gif, .png, .fpx) are a staple of any Web site. This includes logos or graphics. • Flyers, brochures, or other computer-created content stored in some sort of computer format (perhaps created using Microsoft Publisher or Adobe PageMaker) are also excellent sources of content for a site. • E-mails can often be a rich source of content for a Web site, although you must use special care when using e-mail conversations. Special messages sent out to customers can be placed in a Web page for users who didn’t receive the e-mail, customer questions and answers can be integrated into a Frequently Asked Questions page, or visitor comments can be placed on a Feedback page (usually with names removed). • Existing Web pages might seem an obvious source, but if your business or organization already has Web pages it has created for one reason or another, you should probably evaluate how useful they would be on your new site. • Sound files and/or video files (.wav, .au, .mp3, .mpg, .avi, .mov) are usually very large and should generally be avoided, but you might find audio and/or video files that would be perfect for your site. Use discretion with these files because of their large size and the slow speed of most visitors’ Internet connections.

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Creating New Digital Content Not all content for your Web site is going to be available in digital format. Some of it will exist in print form and yet more will need to be created from scratch. In general, the new content falls into two categories: images and documents. Images are usually created by using a digital camera, a scanner, or an art program of some sort. Documents are generally created from scratch by using a word processor or spreadsheet program, although some companies will give in to the urge to scan printed documents that aren’t already available in digital format.

Digital Images There are several ways to create new digital images for use on a Web site. Photographs can be scanned into the computer using a scanner, imported using a Photo CD picture disk or online image processing service, or they can be taken using a digital camera and directly imported into the computer. Digital images can also be created in the computer using an art program.

Documents Documents are the other half of the new content equation, and, unfortunately, not every document that belongs on your site is going to already exist, or at least not in digital form. If you can’t find a digital version of content that you want for your site, retyping the document may become a necessity. However, in special circumstances you may also be able to scan the document and use an optical character recognition (OCR) program. Although OCR programs have greatly improved and are now quite useful, unless you have a long document that needs to be placed in its entirety on your site, it’s usually faster to retype a document than it is to scan it, run it through the OCR program, and then correct the mistakes.

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TIP

OCR programs are standalone programs that convert a scanned document into text that can be used in a word processing program or Web page editor. They can provide an easy way to digitize existing, typewritten content, but these programs do produce errors in the scanned documents. Therefore, we recommend that you carefully evaluate the amount of time involved in correcting scanned documents before relying heavily on OCR programs.

Creating New Documents When creating new content for use on a Web site, you can take specific steps to make the content import into your Web-authoring tool more easily and more elegantly: • Create any large amounts of text you want to use on your site using Microsoft Word or another word processing program, and then either save the document in the appropriate format for importing into your Web-authoring tool or save it directly as an HTML document that the Web-authoring tool can then edit. It’s much easier and more efficient to create and edit content of any substantial length in a dedicated word processor. • Avoid using complex formatting or graphics in documents. These generally don’t import accurately into a Web-authoring tool. An exception to this rule is when the program used to create the content has special HTML output capabilities that enable it to handle complex formatting or documents. However, these exported pages may prove difficult to edit, so test out this capability before you rely on it extensively. • Before creating a large amount of content with a particular application, test out how well the content can be imported by your Web-authoring tool or exported to HTML from the application. Knowing the limitations of the process beforehand can save a lot of time and money in the long run. • Save new documents in a central content folder with a useful filename that allows everyone working on the site to easily identify the document.

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Step 5: Creating Y our W eb Pages Your Web The precise steps you take to create your Web pages depend on the Web creation or Web-authoring tool that you’ve selected. In general, you use a wizard to create a set of blank Web pages and then add the text and images that you’ve already collected.

Starting with a Wizard Most of the popular programs provide wizards that step you through the process of creating blank Web pages. FrontPage works this way, for example. Using FrontPage’s Web wizards is an efficient way to rapidly create a Web site, and they are especially useful if you don’t have a clear idea of how your site should be structured. When you use a FrontPage wizard, FrontPage creates many of the essential pages for your Web, based on the information you type into the various screens. Figure 13-4 shows the wizard dialog box that asks which pages should be created for the site.

Figure 13-4 Selecting pages to include in your Web.

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The FrontPage wizard also provides other dialog boxes that you use to enter your company’s name and address, telephone numbers, and e-mail addresses. Typically, a wizard also lets you choose a design or coordinated look for your site. Although these Web pages will need some modifications and you’ll still need to insert your own content, they can streamline the process of creating your initial pages.

Importing T ext Text Despite the multimedia emphasis of the Web, text is still the heart of most good Web pages. Besides being a clear and concise means of communicating to your visitors, text also downloads very quickly, can be indexed by search engines, and is usually easier to create than more visual forms of content. To insert text into your Web page, follow these general steps: 1. Position the cursor where you want to insert the text. Your Web-authoring tool will probably insert the entire contents of the file you specify at the current location of the cursor, so place the cursor somewhere suitable. 2. Choose the command to insert the file. Different Web-authoring tools have different names for this command. In FrontPage, you click the Insert menu and then click File. 3. Identify the file. When prompted by the Web-authoring tool, identify the location and then the file you want to insert. 4. Select the file you want to import, and click Open. The Web-authoring tool should import the text into your Web page. You can move text by dragging, or you can move text by cutting and pasting. To move text by dragging, select the text and hold down the mouse button as you drag the text to its new location. If you want to copy the text rather than move it, simply hold down the Ctrl key while you drag the text to its new (duplicate) location. Moving and copying text by dragging takes some getting used to at first—especially if you are sitting in an airplane and doing it on a laptop computer. But it is actually a pretty handy method after you have become comfortable with it. If you want to copy

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and move text with menu commands instead, you use the Edit menu’s Cut, Copy, and Paste commands. To move text by using commands, select the text, click the Edit menu, and then click Copy (if you want to copy the text) or Cut (if you want to move the text). Then position the cursor at the exact location where you want to move or copy the text, click the Edit menu and click Paste.

Entering and Formatting T ext Text Enter text exactly as you would in a normal word processor. Click in the location where you want to add text, and then type your text. Many Web-authoring programs include toolbars of clickable buttons that you can use to format your text as you enter it.

Creating Hyperlinks To create a hyperlink, you generally first select the text or image, and click the Hyperlink toolbar button. The Web-authoring tool will often display a dialog box like the FrontPage Create Hyperlink dialog box, as shown in Figure 13-5.

Figure 13-5 Creating a hyperlink.

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To create the hyperlink, select the file to which you want to link or type the file’s address in the URL text box. To make a hyperlink to an e-mail address, click the envelope icon in the Edit Hyperlink dialog box and then enter the e-mail address in the dialog box that is displayed. TIP

Creating effective hyperlinks can be an art unto itself, but in general, all you need to do is make the linking text short and descriptive. There is no need to include the words click here—this instruction is implicit. For example, use widgets instead of click here for widgets.

Inserting Images Typically, the easiest way to insert an image into a Web page (if you’re using FrontPage) is to find the image in the Folders list and then drag it where you want to position it in your Web page. If that technique doesn’t work, your Web-authoring tool probably has an Insert Picture command you can use.

Step 6: T esting Y our W eb Site Testing Your Web Your company probably won’t need to perform the exhaustive testing that large e-commerce sites must go through when rolling out a new site, but testing your Web site before publishing it can result in a more effective site, as well as fewer complaints from visitors. Testing generally looks at three areas: hyperlinks, Web browser compatibility, and usability.

Verifying Hyperlinks Your Web-authoring tool may provide a command for checking external hyperlinks for validity. FrontPage, for example, provides a Verify Hyperlinks button on its Reporting toolbar. If your program has such a feature, we recommend that you use it before you publish your pages to the Internet.

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Testing Y our Site in Dif ferent Browsers Your Different The easiest way to test your site in several browsers is to open each Web browser and enter the local address of your site in the Address or Location box, as shown in Figures 13-6, 13-7, and 13-8. For example, if your FrontPage Web site is named wwwidgets2 and is stored on a Web server on your local network named WKS1, you would enter http://wks1/wwwidgets2 to open the site.

Figure 13-6 A Web site as it appears (properly) in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.

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Figure 13-7 The same Web site, differing slightly in Netscape Navigator 4.7.

NOTE

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Test your site with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. If you have access to computers running older versions of the browsers or a different browser, such as Opera, test your site in these browsers, too. Testing on Macintosh and information appliances (such as WebTV) is usually easiest to do after your site has been published to the Internet.


Figure 13-8 The same Web site in Opera 4, appearing identical to Netscape.

After opening your site in a couple of browsers, spend a few minutes testing all the links and examining each page. Is the layout consistent on all the browsers? Does the browser display the fonts properly? Do all the features work as expected? Make notes on which pages have problems, and then go back into FrontPage and see whether you can fix them. (To change the compatibility options for FrontPage, click the Tools menu, click Page Options, and then modify any elements that don’t display properly.)

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Usability T esting Testing In addition to testing for broken links and browser incompatibilities, you will find it informative to perform some degree of usability testing. Here are some recommendations for simple usability tests: • Recruit people who aren’t involved in the Web site project to test your site. The feedback of your customers or other people in your target audience can be invaluable in evaluating the effectiveness of your site. For very small businesses, even recruiting family and friends to test your site can generate important feedback. • Develop some purposeful tasks for your testers to perform, and then watch how they accomplish them. You might use tasks such as “Find the company contact information” or “Find the product information for product x.” If you need to interject and help the testers, your site might need more work. • Pay special attention to the navigational structure of your Web site. How well can users locate information using your site? • Test your Web site at a variety of resolutions. We recommend that you test your site at 640x480 (a low resolution) and at 1024x768 (a typical high resolution). • If you decide to publish your site immediately, perform the testing after it is published. A short user survey on your Web site can also be a valuable way of gathering feedback on the effectiveness of your site. NOTE

If your site contains online ordering capabilities, it is very important to thoroughly test your system no matter what the size of your company or Web site.

Step 7: Publishing Y our W eb Site Your Web When you’re ready to make your Web site available to the general public on the World Wide Web, you need to publish it to the Internet. Typically, publishing your Web to your Web hosting company’s Web server is an easy step. All that really needs to happen is that the HTML documents and any another necessary files (such as images) need to be copied to the Web server. Many Web-authoring tools, including FrontPage 2000, provide built-in support for publishing to Web servers. For example, in FrontPage, all you need to do is click the

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Publish Web toolbar button and then fill out the Publish Web dialog box, as shown in Figure 13-9.

Figure 13-9 The Publish Web dialog box.

NOTE

To use the Publish Web dialog box shown in Figure 13-9, enter the location where you want to publish your site (most likely your domain name, for example, www.mycompany.com, or perhaps ftp://www.mycompany.com) in the Specify The Location To Publish Your Web To box. Then click the Publish button. When the Name And Password Required dialog box appears, enter the name and password you use to administer your Web site (on your Web hosting company’s Web server, not on your local Web server) and then click OK.

Step 8: Publicizing Y our W eb Site Your Web In order for your Web site to succeed, you need to publicize it. There are a number of ways to publicize your site, both on and off the Internet. The online methods include search engines, online advertising, newsgroups, and mailing lists. Offline methods include placing links on all print material your business or organization creates, Yellow Pages ads, and newspaper ads.

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Submitting Y our Site to Search Engines and Directories Your Since most people locate a Web site using a search engine or a directory, the most important step you can take to publicize your site is to submit it to the top search engines and directories. Although this process takes some time, it is very important. Although you might be tempted, avoid using a search engine submission service. These services usually offer to submit your site to hundreds of search engines for a sum of money—sometimes with recurring fees. Since the vast majority of searches are conducted on only a handful of search engines, this level of submission is superfluous. In addition, submission firms usually don’t submit your site to directories, or if they do, they do an inadequate job of it. Take the time to submit to search engines and directories yourself—it’s worth it. Search engines automatically crawl (explore) the Web, examining Web sites and adding the relevant information from each site into their search databases. Directories such as Yahoo! take descriptions submitted by Web site authors and use human editors to review the submissions. The editors then create a hierarchical, topic-based directory out of the Web sites submitted that visitors can either browse by topic or perform a search on. Hybrid search engines are usually search engines that also contain a human-created directory. Editors create the directory by looking at the search engine’s results, the actual Web sites, and sometimes sites that are submitted by site authors to the hybrid directory. The type of search engine or directory determines how you’ll submit your site. Crawlerbased search engines generally request only your Web site’s URL, as shown in Figure 13-10. The search engine then automatically visits your site, determines the content of your site, and adds it to the search engine’s database.

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Figure 13-10 Submitting to a crawler-based search engine.

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Although search engines generally look into your Web site for what content is contained on pages other than your home page, this isn’t always reliable, and it’s prudent to submit your two or three most important pages separately to each search engine. But limit yourself to two or three pages; submitting too many pages to the same search engine can actually hurt your site.

Directories require a somewhat larger amount of effort during submission. First, visit the directory (such as Yahoo!) and perform some searches for content similar to your Web site. Second, take note of the kinds of sites that are returned in the search results and the categories under which they’re listed. It’s very important with directories to find the most specific and appropriate category for your Web site, so do some exploring.

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(Your site may belong in multiple categories. If this is the case, make a note of each one.) Third, read the directory’s Site Submission Tips or the equivalent page. This will tell you exactly the procedure the directory wants you to follow when submitting your Web site. Most require that you navigate to the category under which you want to list your site, and then click the Suggest A Site link. Fourth, in the actual submission form, as shown in Figure 13-11, submit the title of your Web site (generally your official business or company name), your site’s URL, and a 25-word-or-less description of your site.

Figure 13-11 Submitting to Yahoo!’s directory.

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Make your site description more than just a series of keywords. It should be a succinct, well-written summary of what visitors will find on your site.


Table 13-1 lists search engines and directories that we recommend you submit your site to, their URLs, and their type. SEARCH ENGINE

URL

SEARCH ENGINE TYPE

AltaVista

http://www.altavista.com

Hybrid using Open Directory and LookSmart

AOL Search

http://www.search.aol.com

Hybrid using Open Directory

Direct Hit

http://www.directhit.com

Crawler-based, modified by popularity

Excite

http://www.excite.com

Crawler-based

Go (Infoseek)

http://www.go.com

Hybrid

Google

http://www.google.com

Crawler-based, modified by popularity

HotBot

http://www.hotbot.com

Hybrid, with results from Direct Hit and Open Directory

LookSmart

http://www.looksmart.com

Directory

Lycos

http://www.lycos.com

Hybrid, using Open Directory

MSN Search

http://www.search.msn.com

Hybrid, using LookSmart

Netscape Search

http://www.search.netscape.com

Hybrid, using Open Directory

Northern Light

http://www.northernlight.com

Crawler-based

Open Directory

http://www.dmoz.org

Directory

WebCrawler

http://www.webcrawler.com

Crawler-based

Yahoo!

http://www.yahoo.com

Directory

Table 13-1

The major search engines and directories.

Online Advertising In addition to submitting your Web site to search engines and directories, a number of other methods are available for advertising on the Web. Some of these are fairly effective in increasing the number of visitors to your site, and some are probably a waste of time and money. In the following sections we offer some recommendations on which methods to consider and which to ignore.

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Purchasing Banner Ads The most obvious method of online advertising is the banner ad. Banner ads are the ubiquitous (and often disregarded) rectangular ad boxes that adorn most Web sites. In general, we recommend that you avoid paying for banner ads. They require too much time and effort to create, cost money, and are limited in their ability to draw visitors to your site.

Link Exchanges One of the best methods of advertising online is to get other sites to link to your site, creating what’s known as a link exchange. This method is cost-effective (free) and can also increase your ranking in search engines that pay attention to the number of links to a particular Web site. You can establish links to your site in the following three ways: • Use a Link Exchange service that allows you to exchange links with other random sites. • Join a Web ring of sites that are similar to your own. • Contact sites personally and inquire about exchanging links. Using a Link Exchange service usually doesn’t work well for most businesses and organizations. This is because the site that ends up linking to yours inevitably has nothing in common with your site’s purpose, so it is unlikely to generate visitors who are interested in viewing your site. Web rings devoted to a topic covered by your site are an effective means of generating traffic to your site. The way a Web ring works is that sites with a common topic contact each other, decide to set up a Web ring, and then pay to place a banner ad for the Web ring on their home pages, as shown in Figure 13-12. This banner ad is usually configured with automatically updated links to other sites in the Web ring. By joining the Web ring, your site becomes accessible through these links and is also listed in the Web ring’s directory. The site at http://www.webring.com is a good place to look if you are interested in joining a Web ring.

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Figure 13-12 A Web site with a couple of Web ring ads.

Another method of establishing links to your site is to manually identify Web sites useful to your visitors with which you can exchange links. Once you’ve identified sites that cover similar or related topics, contact the sites’ Webmasters about setting up a link exchange. Predictably, one way to convince a site to exchange links is to place a link to their site on your site, send them an e-mail informing them of this, and then suggest that they link to your site as well.

Using Newsgroups to Gain Exposure Newsgroups in general aren’t the best place to publicize a Web site. Newsgroup participants usually react negatively to ads placed on newsgroups, and the dynamic nature of newsgroups ensures that anything you post will stay up for only a couple of weeks before getting archived or deleted.

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Creating a Mailing List As described in Chapter 5, mailing lists are a voluntary form of bulk e-mailing that allow you to easily send out mail, such as a newsletter or an update, to a large number of people. Sending regular e-mails about your Web site or company to visitors who have joined your mailing list is an effective way of reminding visitors about your company and also featuring new or changed parts of your site. This increases the chances that they will visit your site again. Make sure that what you send via your mailing list is valuable content to subscribers. Otherwise, your subscribers will delete the message or unsubscribe from your list. This content can include tips, how-to sections, product specials, and new additions to your site. Always include instructions for unsubscribing to the list with every message you send. TIP

If you are interested in creating a mailing list yourself, you can find out about the process at http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8d/owner/owner.html. This page at the L-Soft site provides a manual for creating a mailing list with Listserv. If you want to add your mailing list to the Liszt site, go to http:// www.liszt.com/submit.html.

You can handle mailing lists using three different types of mailing programs: a standard mail program, a standalone bulk mail program, or a server-based mailing list program. Refer to the suggestions found in the “Mailing List Etiquette” sidebar in Chapter 5 before you get too far along. TIP

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Many businesses will find that Web-based mailing list providers such as eGroups.com and Listbot (http://www.listbot.com) are a better solution than the traditional Listserv and Majordomo programs. Additionally, many of these Web-based list servers can be used for free, provided you don’t mind having ads inserted in your messages.


Offline Publicizing You can get so caught up in publicizing your Web site online that you forget about the more traditional channels of publicity, such as company publications, phone books, and newspaper ads, and traditional marketing methods, such as speaking engagements. Any time that you draw attention to your business or organization, you’ll increase the number of visitors to your site—provided that you make it clear to your audience how to find your site. Generally, you publicize your Web site in the same way that you would publicize your business, but in addition to (or possibly instead of ) providing a phone number as a contact method, list your URL. Many people consider the Web their preferred source of information, so any time you want to provide people with a way of obtaining additional information about your business, list your URL.

Summary Web publishing isn’t as complicated as you might think. In many cases, the Web simply becomes another tool your business can use for sharing information. To make the process as efficient and fast as possible, it helps to break down the work into eight discrete steps: learning how Web pages work, developing a Web strategy, setting up your domain and server, collecting and creating digital content, creating your Web pages, testing your site, publishing your site, and then publicizing your finished Web site.

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Chapter 14

PUBLISHING POWERPOINT PRESENT ATIONS PRESENTA TO THE WEB

Featuring: • Creating a Web Presentation • Designing the Look of Your Presentation • Publishing a Presentation to the Web • Viewing a Presentation on the Web

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icrosoft PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation tool used throughout the global business community, is also a handy tool for creating Web presentations. Any PowerPoint presentation, for example, can easily be turned into a Web presentation. And, because PowerPoint supplies easy-to-use wizards, with PowerPoint almost anyone create professional-looking Web presentations. This chapter explains how you do this, starting off by describing how to create PowerPoint presentations suitable for the Web, how to publish a presentation to the Web, and finally how to view a presentation over the Web.

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Creating a W eb Presentation Web PowerPoint isn’t difficult to use—even if you’ve never worked with the program before. To create a presentation—any presentation, not just a Web presentation—you take three basic steps: 1. Create a list of the slides you want to present. 2. Add objects to the slides. 3. Design the look of your slides and slide objects by adding special formatting and special effects. The paragraphs that follow explain these steps. Before we get to that information, however, we want to provide a brief introduction to PowerPoint for the benefit of any readers who aren’t familiar with this tool. If you are familiar with it, skip ahead to the section “Using the AutoContent Wizard to Create an Outline.”

A Quick Primer on PowerPoint PowerPoint provides tools and prefabricated slides that you can use to build a presentation you want to give. The slides in a presentation can look like the one shown in Figure 14-1 and contain only text. But slides in PowerPoint can also easily show other objects such as tables, as shown in Figure 14-2; charts, as shown in Figure 14-3; organization charts; drawings and pictures; and even clip art.

Figure 14-1 A PowerPoint slide that shows only text.

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Figure 14-2 A PowerPoint slide that shows a table.

Figure 14-3 A PowerPoint slide that shows a chart.

PowerPoint, as mentioned earlier, is not a difficult program to use. What it helps you do is actually very simple. Nevertheless, you will benefit from the very start by understanding several key terms.

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Slide A slide is the basic building block that you create using PowerPoint. The items that you see in Figures 14-1, 14-2, and 14-3 are slides. If you were giving a slide show using a 35mm slide projector, for example, and you created your slides using PowerPoint, what you see in these three figures would be what you display on a screen or wall. In a Web presentation, slides appear as individual Web pages.

Presentation A presentation consists of the slides you’ve created to show together at the same time. For example, the slides in Figures 14-1, 14-2, and 14-3 might be a presentation. A presentation is also (from PowerPoint’s perspective) a document file. What is stored on your hard disk or on a removable disk, such as a floppy disk or Zip disk, is actually the presentation file.

Text Text is the most common element you’ll use on your slides. The slide shown in Figure 14-1, for example, simply uses text to introduce the presentation and the presenter to the audience. Figure 14-2 showed a table, which is simply a grid of rows and columns with text in the cells, or squares, of the table. Text can also appear in a bulleted list as well. Figure 14-4 shows a simple slide that uses a bulleted list.

Figure 14-4 A PowerPoint slide that shows a bulleted list. 368


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You enter and edit text in PowerPoint in the same way that you enter and edit text in most other programs. Entering and editing text in PowerPoint, for example, works the same way it does in Microsoft Word.

Placeholders In PowerPoint, you enter text and any other items into an area of a slide called a placeholder. A chunk of text, for example, goes into a text placeholder. A picture, table, or chart also goes into a placeholder. Placeholders amount to boxes, or areas, that you use to affix things to a slide. You can almost think of them as being like glue. Figure 14-5 shows the PowerPoint Program window, which we’ll talk about in just a few paragraphs. But note that the window shows a slide with a placeholder for entering a chunk of text to title the slide and another placeholder for entering a bulleted list.

Figure 14-5 A slide with placeholders.

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Objects In addition to text, as just mentioned, you can place other items on a slide. PowerPoint calls these items objects. For example, the chart shown in Figure 14-3 is an object— a chart object, to be precise. But slides can include wide variety of objects. Anything that you can create or store on your computer can probably be turned into an object and then placed on a PowerPoint slide. Objects can be chunks of documents you create using other programs like Microsoft Word or Excel, little images or pictures that are stored as files on your hard disk, or even items like organization charts and drawings that you create with PowerPoint’s many applets. NOTE

PowerPoint supplies several small programs, called applets. The applets are essentially miniature programs that are built into the larger PowerPoint program. PowerPoint includes the Microsoft Graph applet, for example, which lets you create charts and graphs. The Microsoft Organization Chart applet, also available from within the PowerPoint program, lets you create organization charts.

Using the AutoContent Wizard to Create an Outline The easiest way for new PowerPoint users to create an outline is by using the AutoContent Wizard. To use the AutoContent Wizard to create your outline, follow these steps: 1. Start the AutoContent Wizard. As you start the PowerPoint program, PowerPoint opens the dialog box shown in Figure 14-6. To create a presentation using the AutoContent Wizard, click the AutoContent Wizard option button and then click OK to start the AutoContent Wizard.

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Figure 14-6 The PowerPoint dialog box.

To start the AutoContent Wizard after you’ve already moved past the first dialog box, click the File menu and then click New. When PowerPoint opens the New Presentation dialog box shown in Figure 14-7, click the General tab, click the AutoContent Wizard selection, and then click OK.

Figure 14-7 The New Presentation dialog box.

2. Begin the AutoContent Wizard. When you start the AutoContent Wizard, PowerPoint opens a dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-8, introducing the AutoContent Wizard. Click Next.

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Figure 14-8 The first information dialog box that the AutoContent Wizard displays.

3. Select the type of presentation you want to create. When PowerPoint opens the AutoContent Wizard dialog box shown in Figure 14-9, click the option button that best describes the general category of presentation you want to create. This dialog box provides several buttons and category combinations: General, Corporate, Projects, Sales/Marketing, and Carnegie Coach. When you click an option button, the AutoContent Wizard displays a list of prefabricated presentations within that category. You select one of these presentations—really they’re just partially structured presentations—by clicking it. Click Next to continue.

Figure 14-9 The dialog box that the AutoContent Wizard uses to ask you about what type of presentation you want to create.

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When you are working with the AutoContent Wizard dialog box shown in Figure 14-9, be sure to explore the presentations in each of the five categories—or at least do this the first few times you use the AutoContent Wizard. The AutoContent Wizard supplies a rich set of thoughtful, well-structured presentations, and especially as you are starting out, you can benefit by using these presentations as models for your own.

4. Select the presentation style. When PowerPoint opens the AutoContent Wizard dialog box shown in Figure 14-10, use it to tell the AutoContent Wizard how you’ll deliver your presentation. If you are going to publish your presentation to the Web—this could be an Internet Web site or an intranet Web site—click the Web Presentation option button. Click Next to continue.

Figure 14-10 The dialog box that the AutoContent Wizard uses to ask you about how you’ll share your presentation.

5. Provide general information about the presentation. When the AutoContent Wizard opens the dialog box shown in Figure 14-11, use the Presentation Title box to name your presentation. Optionally, use the Footer box to provide a footer that will appear at the bottom of each of the slides you create. If you want the footer to include the date the presentation was last modified, or updated, and the number of the slide, click the Date Last Created box and the Slide Number box.

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Figure 18-11 The dialog box that the AutoContent Wizard uses to ask you for general information it will place on each slide.

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You might use the footer to name the presenting organization. You might also use the footer to record a copyright notice or a confidential notice.

After you’ve finished filling in the boxes and clicking the check boxes in the last AutoContent Wizard dialog box, click Next and then click Finish. After you click Finish, the AutoContent Wizard creates a rough outline of your presentation and opens the presentation using its Normal view, as shown in Figure 14-12. The Normal view includes the outline of the presentation (this appears in the pane along the left edge of the PowerPoint Program window. The Normal view also shows the selected slide in the main pane of the PowerPoint Program window. You’ll be able to identify the slide because you’ll see your presentation title on the slide. If you chose to enter a footer, you’ll also see this information at the bottom of the slide.

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Figure 14-12 The Normal view showing an outline created by the AutoContent Wizard.

After creating a rough-cut outline for your presentation, you next modify the outline so that it matches your presentation requirements. This is the time when you add slides, add and edit slide text, and remove any unneeded slides. How you do this is described in the following section.

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Working on Y our Outline Your If you are comfortable using any Microsoft Windows program, and especially if you have used and become comfortable with another Microsoft Office program such as Word, you’ll have little trouble working with outline text. In fact, you may want to skip this discussion and move ahead to the section “Adding Objects to Your Slides.” However, if you are not all that comfortable working with the Windows programs or other Office programs, you may want to quickly review the following paragraphs. They describe how text editing and outline manipulation works in PowerPoint.

Entering and Editing T ext Text You enter and edit text in the Outline pane in the same way that you enter and edit text in other programs. To begin entering text, click at the point where you want to enter the text. Windows moves the insertion point to the exact location where you clicked with the mouse. Anything you then type gets entered at the insertion point. By default, PowerPoint inserts text as you type. You can, however, overwrite text. To do this, press the Insert key. The Insert key is a toggle switch. By pressing the Insert key, you toggle between the text insertion mode and the text overtype mode. If you want to edit text, you generally select the text you want to edit by clicking and dragging. Then you replace the selected text by typing the correct text. You have a variety of ways to select text. You can click at the first character you want to select and then drag the mouse to the last character you want to select. If you want to select an individual word, double-click the word. If you want to select an entire line, click the area in front of the line, just in front of the bullet, or the slide icon. But note that if you select a slide title line of text, you’ll also select the bulleted text. To delete text, select the text, click the Edit menu, and then click Clear. Or select the text, and press the Delete key.

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Moving and Copying T ext Text You can move text by dragging, or you can move text by cutting and copying. To move text by dragging, first select the text. Then point to the text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag the selected text to its new location. If you want to copy the text rather than move the text, simply hold down the Ctrl key while you drag the text to its new (duplicate) location. If you want to copy and move text with menu commands instead, use the Edit menu’s Copy, Cut, and Paste commands. To move text by using the moving commands, first select the text, click the Edit menu, and then click Copy (if you want to copy the text) or Cut (if you want to move the text). Position the insertion point at the exact location where you want to move or copy the text, click the Edit menu, and then click Paste. The Standard toolbar that PowerPoint supplies provides Copy, Cut, and Paste buttons. You can use these buttons in place of the Edit menu’s Copy, Cut, and Paste commands. NOTE

If you’re not sure which toolbar buttons are which, point to the buttons along the Standard toolbar. Any Microsoft Office application displays a pop-up box that names the button you are pointing to.

One confusing feature of Office 2000 programs is that menu commands and toolbar buttons don’t always appear. Office 2000 programs customize the toolbar and the menus based on commands you are likely to use or have used in the past. Note, however, that if you keep a menu open, Office programs such as PowerPoint typically add all of the hidden commands. NOTE If you don’t want PowerPoint to hide infrequently used menu commands, click the Tools menu and click Customize. When PowerPoint opens the Customize dialog box, click the Options tab, and then clear the Standard And Formatting Toolbars Share One Row check box and clear the Menus Show Recently Used Commands First check box.

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Using the Outlining T oolbar Toolbar If you are going to do much work with a PowerPoint outline, use the Outlining toolbar. The Outlining toolbar provides several useful buttons you can click to make outlining easier. To display the Outlining toolbar, click the View menu, click Toolbar, and then click Outlining. Figure 14-13 shows how the PowerPoint Program window looks with the Outlining toolbar displayed. The Outlining toolbar button appears along the left edge of the Outline pane.

Figure 14-13 The PowerPoint Program window with the Outlining toolbar.

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When you point to an Outlining toolbar button with the mouse pointer, PowerPoint displays the button name in a pop-up box. Use this trick if you are not sure which button is which.

Reading from top to bottom, the first two buttons on the Outlining toolbar—the Promote and Demote buttons—are for promoting or demoting outline text. To promote outline text, simply select the text and then click the Promote button. (The

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Promote button is the arrow that points left.) If you promote bulleted text, it moves up to the next higher level—probably to the level of a slide. To demote text, predictably, select the text and click the Demote button. (The Demote button shows an arrow pointing right.) If you demote a slide title, the slide title becomes bulleted text on the preceding slide. PowerPoint allows you to have bulleted text within a bulleted text list. In other words, you can have bulleted text under a bulleted text item. Although this is technically feasible, slides really don’t provide enough information for this level of detail. Typically, this sort of information should be spoken information that you provide as you are talking about the slide. The Move Up and Move Down Outlining toolbar buttons let you move text up and down. To move a line of text up, select the text and then click the Move Up button. (The Move Up button shows an arrow pointing up.) To move text down, select the text and then click the Move Down button. (The Move Down button shows an arrow pointing down.) If you move bulleted text up or down, you simply rearrange the bullet points. However, if you move slides up and down, you rearrange the order of the slides in the presentation. The Collapse and Expand buttons allow you to show more outlining detail or to hide outlining detail. To hide the lower levels of an outline—those levels below the slide title level—select the portion of the outline you want to hide. Then click the Collapse button. (The Collapse button shows a minus sign.) If you later want to expand the previously collapsed portion of the outline, select the previously collapsed lines of the outline. Then click the Expand button. (The Expand button shows a plus sign.) The Collapse All and Expand All buttons are located beneath the Collapse and Expand buttons on the Outlining toolbar. When you click the Collapse All button, PowerPoint collapses the entire outline so only the slide titles show. If you collapse the entire outline using the Collapse All Toolbar button, click the Expand All button to later restore the outline.

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The Summary Slide button is the second to the last button on the Outlining toolbar. When you click the Summary Slide button, PowerPoint adds a summary slide to your outline. To use this toolbar button, position the insertion point at the very end of your outline and then click the Summary Slide button so that your Summary Slide is added to the end of your presentation. The Show Formatting button is the last button on the Outlining toolbar. When you click the Show Formatting button, PowerPoint shows the text using the text formatting that PowerPoint is using on the slides. The Show Formatting toolbar button is a toggle switch, so if you click it again, PowerPoint hides the text formatting.

Spell-Checking Y our Outline Your After you finalize your outline, it’s a good habit to check your spelling. Remember that your outline text appears on your slides, so the easiest time to check your spelling is when you complete the outline. To check your spelling, click the Tools menu and click Spelling. If no misspellings are discovered, a message box tells you that the spelling check is complete, as shown in Figure 14-14.

Figure 14-14 The Spelling Is Complete message box.

If one or more spelling errors are found, PowerPoint opens the Spelling dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-15. PowerPoint uses the Not In Dictionary text box to identify the word that appears to be misspelled. To fix the spelling, type the correct spelling in the Change To box or select one of the words in the Suggestions list box. PowerPoint fills the Change To box initially with possible correct spellings.

Figure 14-15 The Spelling dialog box. 380


Once you or PowerPoint has entered the correct spelling in the Change To box, click the Change button to correct the misspelling. Or, if you want to change the spelling everywhere it appears in the outline, click the Change All button. If the word is not really a misspelling, click the Ignore button to ignore the single occurrence found, or click the Ignore All button to ignore every occurrence in the outline. If you are using words that are correctly spelled but are not in the spelling dictionary— this may be the case if you are clicking the Ignore or Ignore All buttons—click the Add button to add the word to the custom spelling dictionary. You typically add words such as people’s names and specialized business or industry terms to the custom spelling dictionary. If the Spelling command identifies a misspelling but doesn’t identify the correct spelling using the Suggestions box, you can try to get additional suggestions. To do this, enter another guess at the spelling in the Change To box and then click the Suggest button. PowerPoint will use the word you entered in the Change To box to look for other suggested spellings.

Saving and Later Opening Y our Outline Your After you create your outline, make editorial changes, and then check its accuracy and spelling, you save the outline and the presentation of which it is a part. To do this, click the File menu and click Save. PowerPoint opens the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-16.

Figure 14-16 The Save As dialog box. Chapter 14


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To save your presentation, click the Save In drop-down list box to choose a folder location for the presentation. Then use the File Name box to give your presentation a name. After identifying the appropriate folder location and naming the presentation, click Save. PowerPoint saves your presentation in the specified location using the name you provided. To later open your outline, click the File menu and click Open to display the Open dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-17. Use the Look In drop-down list box to identify the folder location of the presentation. Then double-click the presentation in the list beneath the Look In drop-down list box.

Figure 14-17 The Open dialog box.

Adding Objects to Y our Slides Your After you outline your content, you typically add objects to your slides. Objects are simply tables, pictures, charts, and other graphical elements that you use to communicate your message.

Adding a T able Table A table is a grid of columns and rows. The cells that make up the table—a cell is the intersection of a column and row—can contain text, number values, or even pictures. Tables are powerful tools for organizing information—especially quantitative information like financial data.

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To add a table to a slide, follow these steps: 1. Select the slide. Using the Normal view, you can select the slide in several different ways. One way is to click the slide in the Outline pane. If you do this, PowerPoint displays the slide in the Slide pane. PowerPoint also selects the slide title in the Outline pane. You can also select a slide by clicking the scroll bar along the right edge of the Slide pane. As you do this, PowerPoint pages through the slides of your presentation. Click above the scroll marker to page up. Click below the scroll bar marker to page down. NOTE

You can also drag the scroll bar marker to move back and forth through the slides of your presentation and click the arrow buttons at either end of the scroll bar to move forward and backward one slide at a time.

2. Tell PowerPoint you want to insert a table. After you select a slide to which you want to add a table, click the Insert menu and click Table to open the Insert Table dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-18.

Figure 14-18 The Insert Table dialog box.

3. Describe the table size. Table size is determined by two simple quantities: the number of columns in the table and the number of rows in the table. In the Number Of Columns box, specify how many columns are needed. In the Number Of Rows box, specify how many rows are needed. Click OK to add the table to the open slide, as shown in Figure 14-19.

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Figure 14-19 The empty table.

4. Fill the table with information. Double-click a table cell to enter the edit mode (after you first create a table PowerPoint displays the Draw Table tool that you can use to add columns or rows) Then enter information in the individual cells to fill the table. Figure 14-20 shows a filled table.

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Figure 14-20 The filled table.

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You can also use the Edit menu’s Cut, Copy, and Paste commands as well as the toolbar Cut, Copy, and Paste buttons to move text and even pictures or clip art into the cells of a table you just inserted.

5. Resize the table as needed. To resize the table, click it to select it and then drag the selection handles that appear at the corners of the table and at the midpoints of each of the sides of the table. NOTE

After you’ve sized a table, you can resize the columns and rows of the table’s interior by clicking and dragging the interior row and column borders.

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6. Move the table as needed. To move the table, click it to select it, point to the outside border of the table that shows the thick selection border, and then drag the table to the correct location. 7. Format the table as needed. When you insert a table in a slide, PowerPoint adds or opens the Tables And Borders toolbar. You can use this toolbar’s buttons and boxes to change the format of the table.

Adding a Picture You can add pictures to slides to add visual impact to your presentation. These pictures can come either from the ClipArt Gallery that comes with PowerPoint or from images you’ve collected and stored on your computer or network. NOTE

Microsoft Office and PowerPoint come with a rich library of clip art. This library includes photographs, line drawings, and even videos.

To add a clip art object to your slide, follow these steps: 1. Tell PowerPoint you want to add clip art. Click the Insert menu, click Picture, and then click ClipArt to open the Insert ClipArt window, as shown in Figure 14-21.

Figure 14-21 The Insert ClipArt window showing clip categories.

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2. Find the clip art category. Click the category icon that appears to match a piece of clip art you’re looking for. If you are looking for a business image, for example, you might click the Business category. PowerPoint displays the clip art within the selected category using the Insert ClipArt window. Figure 14-22, for example, shows a portion of the business clip art that PowerPoint supplies.

Figure 14-22 The Insert ClipArt window showing business clip art.

3. Select the image and add it. Scroll through the images displayed in the Insert ClipArt window to find the one you want to use. To add an image to your slide, right-click it to display the shortcut menu, as shown in Figure 14-23, and then click Insert. PowerPoint adds the clip art to your slide.

Figure 14-23 The Insert ClipArt window’s shortcut menu. Chapter 14


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If you’re not going to add another image, close the Insert ClipArt window by clicking its Close button. To add another image, repeat steps 2 and 3. 4. Move the image to its correct location. You can move a clip art image by dragging it. You can resize a clip art image by first selecting it and then dragging the selection handles. Moving and resizing a clip art image isn’t difficult. If you have questions, simply experiment by pointing, clicking, and dragging the mouse pointer. You can add pictures such as photographic images to a PowerPoint slide. The only prerequisite is that the picture file must be stored someplace on your computer or network that you can access. To insert a picture on a slide, follow these steps: 1. Tell PowerPoint you want to add a picture. Click the Insert menu, click Picture, and then click From File to open the Insert Picture dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-24.

Figure 14-24 The Insert Picture dialog box.

2. Identify the location of the picture. Use the Look In box to identify the folder location of the picture. You’ll see the image listed in the list box beneath the Look In box. 3. Insert the picture. You can insert the image by clicking its filename and then clicking the Insert button, or simply double-click the filename. 388


4. Move the image to its correct location. As is the case with clip art images, you can move the inserted picture by dragging it. You can also resize the inserted picture by first clicking it and then dragging the selection handles on the corners and sides of the image. After you insert a clip art image or picture on a slide, PowerPoint adds the Picture toolbar to the PowerPoint Program window, as shown in Figure 14-25.

Figure 14-25 The Picture toolbar.

The Picture toolbar provides tools you can use to change the selected clip art image or picture, as described in the following list: • The Insert Picture From File button lets you insert a second picture. This button is equivalent to the From File command on the Picture submenu. • The Image Control Picture toolbar button displays a list of image-editing options that you can choose from. Just experiment to see what effect they have. • The More Contrast and Less Contrast buttons increase the contrast of the picture. • The More Brightness and Less Brightness buttons darken or lighten the picture image. • The Crop button may let you crop a portion of the image. • The Line Style button displays a menu of lines you can use for an image border. • The Recolor Picture button may let you recolor the image—although this won’t be possible with all images. • The Format Picture button displays a dialog box you can use to change elements of the picture, such as its brightness, its contrast, and other characteristics. • The Set Transparent Color button lets you remove color from an image. Just click the button and then click the color you want to make transparent. • The Reset Picture button resets the picture to its original condition.

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Adding a Chart PowerPoint comes with a charting tool called Microsoft Graph, which enables you to produce charts that you can then use on your PowerPoint slides. To add a chart to a slide, follow these steps: 1. Tell PowerPoint you want to add a chart. Click the Insert menu and then click Chart to open the Data Sheet window and add a placeholder in the center of the slide that is displayed. Figure 14-26 shows how this looks before you begin making changes.

Figure 14-26 The Data Sheet window as it first appears.

2. Describe the data that you want to plot in a chart. Use the first column for the data series names. Use the first unnumbered row of the data sheet for the data category names. Use each numbered row for a data series. After you enter the data values, data series names, and data category names information in the data sheet, you can close it. Microsoft Graph uses the data sheet in-

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formation to redraw the graph shown in the placeholder. Figure 14-27 shows how the chart looks on a slide before you begin making changes.

Figure 14-27 A chart object on a slide.

3. Specify the chart type. Microsoft Graph initially plots your data in a three-dimensional bar chart, but Microsoft Graph supplies more than a dozen types of charts. To choose or review the chart types available, first verify that the Chart Object is selected (if it isn’t, click it to select it). Click the Chart menu and click Chart Type to open the Chart Type dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-28. Select a chart type from the Chart Type list box, and then select a chart subtype by clicking one of the pictures to the right of the list box. After you’ve selected a chart type and subtype, click OK to make your change.

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Figure 14-28 The Chart Type dialog box.

4. Customize the chart as necessary. Click the chart object to select it. Click the Chart menu, and then click Chart Options to open the Chart Options dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-29. The Chart Options dialog box lets you customize the chart in almost any way imaginable.

Figure 14-29 The Chart Options dialog box showing the Titles tab.

Click the Titles tab to add text to the chart object to label the chart and the chart axis. Click the Axes tab to specify whether you want an axes on the chart—and if you do, how the axis should be drawn. Click the Gridlines tab to add or remove horizontal and vertical gridlines to your chart. Click the Legend tab to specify whether 392


you want a legend. Click the Data Labels tab to indicate whether data markers should be labeled with the actual values they are supposed to plot. Finally, click the Data Table tab to add a data table to your chart. (A data table shows the actual plotted values in a table—not unlike the data sheet from which the plotted data comes.)

Adding an Organization Chart PowerPoint comes with another mini program called Microsoft Organization Chart. You can use this tool to add organizational chart objects to slides. To add an organization chart to a slide, follow these steps: 1. Tell PowerPoint you want to add an organization chart. Click the Insert menu, click Picture, and then click Organization Chart to start the Microsoft Organization Chart program and display the Microsoft Organization Chart window, as shown in Figure 14-30.

Figure 14-30 The Microsoft Organization Chart window.

2. Label the organization chart. Click the Chart Title placeholder, which appears at the top of the window, and type the title you want to use. Note, though, that you may not want any chart title at all if the slide title gives the same information.

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3. Describe the organization structure. Each of the boxes in the organization chart represents a position. Some positions are manager positions and some positions are subordinate positions. While the Microsoft Organization Chart program initially creates a rough guess of your organizational structure, you need to update this organizational structure to reflect reality. You do this by removing any unneeded boxes and adding new boxes. • To add a subordinate position, click the Subordinate button and then click the box that represents the subordinate’s manager. For example, if you want to add a fourth subordinate to the Manager box, click the Subordinate button and then click the Manager box. • To add a co-worker to a position, click the Co-Worker toolbar button and then click the position that has the co-worker. There are actually two Co-Worker buttons. One button adds a Co-Worker box to the left of the existing box you click, and the other button adds a new Co-Worker box to the right of the box you click. • To add a manager, click the Manager toolbar button and then click the Position box that is managed by the manager. • The Organization Chart toolbar also supplies an Assistant button. You can use the Assistant button to add an Assistant Position box to some other Position box. NOTE

The buttons you use to add subordinates, co-workers, managers, and assistants aren’t difficult to use, and your best bet is simply to experiment with them. To remove an Organization Position box, click it, click the Edit menu, and then click Cut or press the Delete key.

4. Describe individual positions. Click a Position box. After it becomes a text box, enter the position information you want. Typically, you type the name of the person filling the position in the first line and you type the person’s title in the second line. You can also include a line or two of comment or general information. You can edit this Position box text in the same way that you edit text anywhere else. Continue describing the other positions. Figure 14-31 shows a simple but completed organization chart.

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Figure 14-31 A simple organization chart.

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Use the View menu commands to resize the image on the organization chart.

5. Return to PowerPoint and your slide. Close the Microsoft Organization Chart program and return to PowerPoint by clicking the File menu and clicking Exit And Return. PowerPoint closes the program and returns you to the slide. When Powerpoint asks if you want to update the object in the presentation, click Yes. The slide now shows a copy of the organization chart you just created. NOTE

The Microsoft Organization Chart program includes numerous options you can use for customizing organization chart objects. The Styles menu displays a menu of pictures that show the various organization chart styles you can use. The Text menu displays five commands that let you format the text inside the Position boxes. The Boxes menu displays commands you can use to change the appearance of the selected Position box or boxes. The Lines menu provides three commands that let you change the thickness, style, and color of the lines used to connect the Position boxes.

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Designing the Look of Y our Presentation Your It’s possible that your presentation’s slides will already look the way you want them after you create your outline and add any objects. When you create a new presentation using PowerPoint, you base your presentation on an existing design template—which may give you just the look you want. When you want to change the look of your presentation, however, you can do so in a variety of ways, as briefly discussed in the paragraphs that follow.

Using a Design T emplate Template PowerPoint supplies design templates that provide a color scheme that is used for all the presentation’s slides: the title master slide, which shows how your title slide looks; a slide master slide, which shows how the non-title slides in your presentation look; and a set of auto layouts. An auto layout is just a slide that includes one or more object placeholders. You can choose a design template in two ways. First you can select a design template before you begin creating your presentation. When you start PowerPoint, the first dialog box lets you indicate whether you want to create a new presentation using the AutoContent Wizard, a design template, or a blank presentation. Second, you can apply a design template to an existing presentation. If you indicate you want to create a new presentation using a design template, PowerPoint opens the New Presentation dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-32. The Design Templates tab will be open, and what you can do is select one of the design templates from the list provided. The Design Templates tab provides a Preview box you can use to see what the design template looks like. After you find the appropriate design template, click OK.

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Figure 14-32 The New Presentation dialog box.

If you want to use a design template for an existing presentation, or if you want to change the design template for a presentation, click the Format menu and click Apply Design Template to open the Apply Design Template dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-33. This dialog box works in a fashion very similar to the Design Templates tab of the New Presentation dialog box (see Figure 14-32).

Figure 14-33 The Apply Design Template dialog box.

To change the design template used for the open presentation, select one of the design templates from the list box that appears. Use the Preview area next to the list box to see what the selected design template looks like. After you locate the design template you want, click Apply.

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Customizing the Master Slides Changing the design template used for a presentation represents the most fundamental customization you can make to the appearance of your presentation. The next most farreaching change you can make is to alter the master slides used to create the individual slides in your presentation. A master slide, essentially, is just a blueprint for creating the individual slides. You can make a variety of changes to a master slide, and thereby to all of the slides in your presentation. First, however, you need to display the master slide. To display a master slide, click the View menu, click Master, and then click either Slide Master, Title Master, Handout Master, or Notes Master. When you are changing the appearance of your presentation, you work with Slide Master (which specifies how the individual slides in your presentation look) and Title Master (which specifies how the first title slide in your presentation looks). After clicking either Slide Master or Title Master, PowerPoint opens the appropriate master slide. Figure 14-34 shows the Slide Master view in the PowerPoint Program window. This slide master shows object placeholders and the font styles used.

Figure 14-34 The Slide Master view. 398


Changing the Background You can change the background used for each of the slides based on the master slide simply by clicking the Format menu and clicking Background. When you do, PowerPoint opens the Background dialog box, which you can use to select a background fill and fill effects.

Changing the Color Scheme You can change the eight-color character scheme used for a presentation by clicking the Format menu and clicking Slide Color Scheme. When PowerPoint opens the Color Scheme dialog box, use the Standard tab to select an alternative color scheme or to change individual colors in the color scheme.

Changing T ext Formatting Text You can change the font, font style, point size, and other font specifications for the slides in your presentation by clicking the Format menu and clicking Font. To use this command, first display the master slide and then click the text object you want to change. After you’ve done this, click the appropriate Format menu command or toolbar button.

Formatting an Object In addition to the customization described in the preceding paragraphs, you can also change the appearance of most objects you place on PowerPoint slides. With very few exceptions, you can change any object you place on a PowerPoint slide. To do this, rightclick the object you want to change and choose Format Placeholder or Format Object from the shortcut menu. PowerPoint opens a Format dialog box (the name varies depending on what you right-clicked) that looks similar to the one shown in Figure 14-35.

Figure 14-35 The Colors And Lines tab of a Format dialog box—in this case, the Format AutoShape dialog box. Chapter 14


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The Web tab lets you specify some text replacement for a graphic object. You use the Web tab when you are publishing a PowerPoint presentation to the Web. By specifying text replacement for an object, you allow someone who doesn’t have a Web browser capable of displaying graphics images to still be able to see your presentation’s information. The Format dialog box generally includes several other tabs as well, including a Colors And Lines tab that lets you specify the fill color that should be used for the object or placeholder; a Size tab that lets you size the object by providing its height and width; a Position tab that lets you specify the location of an object by using text boxes and dropdown list boxes; a Picture tab that lets you crop a picture image and make modest changes to the image’s color, brightness, and contrast; and a Text Box tab that lets you specify how text should be anchored inside a text placeholder box and what internal margins PowerPoint should use for positioning text inside the placeholder. The Text box tab also provides check boxes you can use to specify how text should wrap inside the placeholder, how to resize the placeholder if the text is too large to fit, and even to rotate text inside a placeholder.

Using the Formatting T oolbar Toolbar After you’ve become comfortable working with the Format menu, and particularly the Format menu’s Font command and Bullets And Numbering command, you’ll want to explore the tools provided by the Formatting toolbar, as shown in Figure 14-36.

Figure 14-36 The Formatting toolbar.

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Typically the Formatting toolbar is positioned just below the Menu bar.

The Formatting toolbar provides several boxes and numerous buttons you can use to quickly choose some formatting option. For example, if you select some text and click the button with the large “B” on it, you boldface the selected text. Other Formatting toolbar buttons let you make further specifications, control text alignment, change text into a bulleted or numbered list, and so forth. You won’t have any problem figuring out what various buttons do by experimenting to see their effects. If you make a mistake or use a button that has an effect you don’t want to keep, simply click the Undo button, which appears on the Standard toolbar. 400


Publishing a Presentation to the W eb Web As long as you have the ability to store files on a Web server, you can publish a PowerPoint presentation to that Web site. After you do this, anyone with the ability to view the Web site can view the slides in your presentation. After the presentation has been published to the Web site, the PowerPoint slides become, in essence, Web pages. To publish a PowerPoint presentation to a Web site, follow these steps: 1. Open the presentation. Open the presentation you want to publish. If you have more than one presentation open, verify that the presentation you want to publish is the active presentation. 2. Tell PowerPoint that you want to publish the presentation to the Web. Click the File menu and click Save As Web Page to open the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-37.


3. Describe how PowerPoint should create the Web pages. Click the Publish button to open the Publish As Web Page dialog box, as shown in Figure 14-38.

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Figure 14-38 The Publish As Web Page dialog box.

Use the Publish What buttons in the Publish What area to indicate whether you want to publish the complete presentation or just a range of slides. Use the Browser Support buttons to indicate for which Web browser you want to publish the presentation. To describe what you want to publish and the browser you want to support, use the Publish A Copy As area to specify where you want to publish the presentation. Enter the pathname you want to use in the File Name box. The pathname includes the drive letter, the folder name, any subfolder names, and the filename. If you don’t know the pathname, click the Browse button to open the Publish As dialog box. This dialog box lets you work with the familiar Save In box and Save In list box to identify the location you want to use for the Web pages. 4. Publish the Web pages. After you describe where you want to publish the Web pages, click the Publish button. PowerPoint then creates an HTML, or Web page, version of your presentation and saves it in the specified location.

Viewing a Presentation on the W eb Web To view the Web version of the PowerPoint presentation, simply open the Web page, or HTML document, that PowerPoint creates. Figure 14-39 shows how a PowerPoint presentation looks after it has been published as a Web page. 402


Figure 14-39 A PowerPoint Web page.

In the frame along the left edge of the Web browser window, PowerPoint displays a list of the slides in the presentation. This list is actually a list of hyperlinks. Click a hyperlink to display the slide in the main portion of the Web browser window. In a small frame below the actual slide frame, the Browser window also shows your speaking notes. If you publish the PowerPoint Web page to a Web server that’s connected to the Internet, you will be able to view the PowerPoint presentation from any other computer that’s connected to the Internet. This means, of course, that another option you have for delivering your presentation is by having people view the Web pages with their Web browsers.

Summary As we’ve shown in this chapter, any PowerPoint presentation can be easily turned into a Web presentation. The real work—as with all Web publishing—involves the creation of good, interesting, rich content. After you’ve created and refined this content, however, you can publish a presentation to the Web simply by choosing a command and providing a handful of information. Chapter 14


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Chapter 15

SETTING UP A WEB STORE

Featuring: • What Is a Web Store? • Setting Up a Non-interactive Store • Setting Up a Simple Interactive Store • Reviewing the Other Web Store Options

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n a short chapter like this, we can’t describe everything you need to know to set up a large, successful Web store. Some parts of the Web store development process go way beyond the skills of even the most sophisticated business professional. But even so, we can describe how you or a co-worker can add a simple Web store to your Web site.

What Is a W eb Store? Web Regardless of whether we are talking about the local corner market or a large Web store, a store and its staff perform only four basic activities: • Display the items for sale. • Show which items are available for immediate purchase and which must be ordered. • Answer questions from customers about items. • Arrange for customers to purchase or, if necessary, backorder items. Very small stores and large stores are required to do these four tasks. (Obviously, large stores do more of all four things and with far greater sophistication.) 405

A Web store and its staff perform the same four tasks—except using a Web site rather than a physical, brick-and-mortar location. A Web store displays items for sale, shows which items are in inventory and which must be backordered, answers (or should answer) questions from customers, and arranges for customers to purchase or backorder items. Web stores like amazon.com, for example, usually do a good job of displaying items for sale. All they need to do is create a Web page for each product they sell, as shown in Figure 15-1, and then provide an easy-to-use search engine so that shoppers can find products.

Figure 15-1 The amazon.com Web page for another book from Redmond Technology Press, the MBA’s Guide to Microsoft Excel 2000.

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The Web-buying experience is in many ways inferior to the brick-and-mortar experience because the shopper can’t physically examine the product. A buyer can’t thumb through a novel, try on a pair of shoes, or test-drive a car, for example.


Web stores also make it easy for people comfortable with computers to use the Web to order an item. Figure 15-2 shows an amazon.com order form. Essentially, a shopper completes this form and clicks a button to place his or her order.

Figure 15-2 The amazon.com order form.

Web stores don’t do everything that a regular brick-and-mortar store does, and sometimes they don’t do things as well as a brick-and-mortar store. In a brick-and-mortar store, you know whether a product is in stock simply by looking at the shelf; if you have questions about a product, you can ask a salesperson.

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Using an Inventory Database An inventory database allows a Web store’s pages to access this database to report on stock availability. Most of the sophisticated and all of the large Web stores use inventory databases. We suggest that, at least at first, you consider doing without this enhancement. Adding an inventory database feature to a Web store requires the help of a professional Web store developer, which is expensive. And the feature often doesn’t deliver the benefits that it promises. What we know about bookselling, for example, is that the large Web bookstores (see Figure 15-1) only hint at stock availability. If amazon.com provides the availability description, “Usually ships in 24 hours,” that reportedly means the book is stocked at amazon.com. But the availability description, “Usually ships in 1-2 days,” actually means that amazon.com’s principal distributor had inventory yesterday. The bottom line is that the often unreliable nature of inventory reports coupled with the large up-front cost involved makes Web stores with integrated inventory systems impractical for most businesses.

Setting Up a Non-Interactive W eb Store Web The easiest Web store to set up is a simple non-interactive site. This site needs only to describe the items you’ll be selling and tell customers how to contact you to place their orders. To describe the items you sell, set up a Web page for each item. Chapter 13 shows how to set up Web pages. (That chapter also explains preparation necessary to begin posting Web pages to a Web server, including registering for a domain name and signing up for Web hosting.) Figure 15-3 shows a page from the Redmond Technology Press Web site that describes an item for sale.

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Figure 15-3 A page from the Redmond Technology Press Web site.

To tell customers how to contact you, all you really need to do is provide contact information: a telephone number, a fax number, or even a mailing address. Figure 15-4 shows an order information page from the Redmond Technology Press Web site.

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Figure 15-4 A page of ordering information at the Redmond Technology Press Web site.

A non-interactive Web store only does our first task of retailing, that is, showing which items are for sale. But especially for small-volume Web stores, this approach might be the best. TIP

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A non-interactive Web store or a simple interactive Web store (described in the next section) might work well for retailers who already operate a brickand-mortar location. Such a Web store operates as a virtual kiosk, generating easy, extra sales each year.


Setting Up a Simple Interactive W eb Store Web If you don’t require a shopping cart feature, an interactive Web store doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need to do is create a Web form that collects order information from customers and then have the Web store send this information to a person who will fill and process the orders. NOTE

A shopping cart aggregates orders from a shopper, allowing the person who needs several items to grab everything they need and then “check out” just once. Adding a shopping cart to a Web store requires the services of a professional developer or an e-commerce provider.

Creating an Order Form Creating a Web page order form isn’t difficult—especially if you’re familiar with how Web forms work because you’ve used them at other Web sites. To build a Web order form with Microsoft FrontPage 2000, for example, start FrontPage 2000 and follow these steps: 1. Start the Form Page Wizard. Click the File menu, click New and then click Page to open the New dialog box, as shown in Figure 15-5. Click the Form Page Wizard icon.

Figure 15-5 The New dialog box.

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2. Specify the categories of information you want to collect with the form. The Form Page Wizard opens dialog boxes as shown in Figure 15-7, that ask what kind of information you want to collect using the form. Indicate that you want to collect a category of information such as account information or ordering information using the dialog box shown in Figure 15-6.

Figure 15-6 The Form Page Wizard dialog box that asks what categories of information you want to collect.

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3. Describe the specific information you want to collect. The Form Page Wizard opens a dialog box that provides option buttons and check boxes that you use to indicate what boxes and buttons you want added to the form.

Figure 15-7 The Form Page Wizard dialog box that asks you to identify the specific information you want to collect.

If you want to collect more than one category of information, repeat steps 2 and 3 as needed.

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4. Create the draft form. Click Finish to create a draft version of the form, as shown in Figure 15-8.

Figure 15-8 The draft order form.

5. Add ordering instructions to the form. Add ordering instructions to the form by typing them into the area above the ordering information boxes. 6. As necessary, edit any of the other button or box descriptions so they better fit your Web store activities. Figure 15-9 shows a final version of a simple Web order form.

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Figure 15-9 The finished Web order form.

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Much of the text already on the Web order form may not need to be edited, but note that at the very bottom of the Web order form, FrontPage includes some boilerplate text that’s supposed to name the author of the form and the organization publishing the form. You will need to edit this information.

7. Specify how to transmit orders. Right-click the form, and choose Form Properties from the shortcut menu to open the Form Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure 15-10.

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Figure 15-10 The Form Properties dialog box.

Use the Send To button and boxes to indicate how the Web server should transmit order information: • To have order information stored in a private directory, or folder, on the Web server, enter the pathname of the directory, or folder, in the File Name box. • To have order information sent via e-mail, enter an e-mail address in the E-Mail Address box. NOTE

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Your credit card processing agreement may specify how you must process credit card orders. You might, for example, be required to transmit credit card information using encryption. In this case, you can’t use e-mail messages to send order information. You’ll have to store order information on the Web server. You’ll also have to store at least the order form on a secure Web server so that order information gets encrypted before it’s sent. For more information about how this works, ask your ISP.


8. Specify any special formatting for the form results. Click the Options button in the Form Properties dialog box to open the Options For Saving Results Of Form dialog box, as shown in Figure 15-11. You can use this dialog box’s tabs to control how the information is stored or e-mailed. In Figure 15-11, for example, you can specify that all e-mail orders use the subject “Web Store Order.”

Figure 15-11 The Options For Saving Results Of Form dialog box.

9. Add the order form to the Web site. Save the Web page to your Web server (click the File menu and click Save), and then add hyperlinks to your existing Web pages so that customers can reach the order form.

Filling Out the Order Form When a customer decides to order an item, he or she clicks the order form hyperlink that leads to the Web order form page, as shown in Figure 15-12. To order an item, the shopper fills in the blanks and then clicks the Send button.

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Figure 15-12 The example Web order form.

When the customer sends the order information to the Web store, depending on how you’ve told the Web store to process the form results, one of two things happens: • The Web store sends an e-mail to the Web store e-mail Inbox with the order, shipping, and billing information. • The Web store creates a text file on your Web server with the order, shipping, and billing information.

Processing an Order Form Mechanically, an e-mail-based system would simply require someone to perform the duties of a shipping clerk. These duties would include the following: 1. Checking the e-mail Inbox or the Web server order file for orders. 2. Printing e-mail order messages or the contents of an order file to use as pick lists. 3. Fulfilling orders using the pick lists. 4. Forwarding a copy of the pick list to the person performing the billing duties. 418


The simple system described here doesn’t aggregate orders automatically the way a shopping cart does. But with low order volumes—a few orders a day—these deficiencies might not matter. A reasonably alert shipping clerk would be able to combine items being shipped to the same address.

Reviewing Other W eb Store Options Web The two Web store options described in this chapter are easy to implement. But as we’ve noted several times, you can become considerably more sophisticated in the way you set up a Web store by tying it to an inventory database that provides stock availability information and by setting up a shopping cart system so customers can easily purchase multiple items. If you want to implement a more complex Web store—one that uses these sorts of features—you have two other choices: • Contract with an e-commerce provider such as BigStep.com, FreeMerchant.com, Store.Yahoo.com, or JumboStore.com. You can visit these e-commerce providers’ Web sites for more information, but these companies will help you create Web stores that include a shopping cart system. • Build your own Web store from scratch by hiring developers. This approach can get you exactly what you want, but it comes at a price. We’ve heard people say you can do this for as little as $10,000. We think the minimum is probably several times this amount if you want something that’s more unique than what an e-commerce provider will sell.

Summary The work required to build a Web store goes beyond the skills of many business professionals. But simple Web stores can be surprisingly easy to set up and can often provide better service than the big Web retailers. For this reason, we think simple Web stores are something that many businesses should consider. They can be profitable—especially if they’re developed and run by retailers who already understand their customers.

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Chapter 16

SETTING UP AN INTRANET

Featuring: • Is an Intranet Right for Your Business? • Planning Content • Setting Up Your Intranet

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n a business, an intranet is an internal network that uses Internet technology to support real business applications and to provide departmental, interdepartmental, and companywide communications solutions. To see how an intranet works, let’s look at a real-life example—how Taco Bell communicates with its franchises. Historically, the cost of communicating between Taco Bell corporate headquarters and 2,800 franchised stores was increasing. Each week, employees at headquarters spent numerous hours assembling, photocopying, and mailing information packages to the franchises. Sometimes these packages contained 1,500-page operations manuals, but also franchised stores needed to receive recipes and information about new marketing programs in a timely manner. In one unfortunate lag time, franchises received the tiein to the Spanish-speaking Chihuahua several days after “Quiero Taco Bell” became a household phrase. Taco Bell needed to speed information dispersal and at the same time cut the cost of transporting paper around the world.

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By setting up an intranet, Taco Bell corporate now posts all the paper documents that once had to travel through the mail to a network Web server by saving these documents in a Web folder. Overnight, the Web site is rebuilt to include new documents, and franchisees view this information the next morning at their site using a standard Web browser. The documents they see online are nearly identical to those they would have received in the mail. Once Taco Bell decided on an intranet, the site was up and running in a couple of weeks. The company is projecting annual savings of about $350,000, which includes former costs for distributing newsletters and faxes, for sending bulletins, for training and franchise administrations, and, of course, for printing and mailing those 1,500-page manuals. Technically speaking, the Taco Bell installation is an extranet, which uses the Internet and special security to allow the franchisees at remote locations to access the corporate intranet. But you get the picture.

Is an Intranet Right for Y our Business? Your How do you know if your business organization could benefit from an intranet? Well, if your company distributes massive amounts of paper, such as Taco Bell was doing, you should look into it. Employee directories, medical benefits descriptions, product specifications, user manuals, price lists, marketing collateral, financial reporting systems, and policies and procedures are all excellent candidates for intranet publication. You should also consider an intranet if your business is involved in any of the following processes: • Consolidating information from multiple data sources. Do your customer service representatives need to access customer information, order history, product information, and enter sales orders while talking with a customer on the phone? Consider how having all this information in one place will speed the transaction as well as enhancing its accuracy. • Communicating and collaborating with people who are geographically separated. Do you have field offices that need daily up-to-date access to company information, and do the employees in those offices need daily contact with the home office? Internet services such as conferencing and e-mail can also be part of an intranet.

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• Finding or requisitioning information or products. Do your employees need to find and order supplies? Using an intranet for this process allows online access to catalogs and other reference material, saves trees by using an online order form, and reduces personnel costs. • Running a legacy client/server or mainframe application. Converting these programs to intranet applications makes them available to all those who need them, not just those able to access the out-of-date hardware and software. If all this is starting to sound like a good idea for your business, the next step is to look at the financial implications and then think about how to plan your intranet’s content. Although creating a business plan is beyond the scope of this book, we will give you one bit of data that can help with financial planning: One recent study showed that a typical corporate intranet investment is achieving an ROI well over 1,000 percent and that the typical payback period is within six to twelve weeks.

Planning Content The kind of content you’ll place on an intranet depends on the business processes you want to replicate. A typical intranet, though, will include the following basic types of pages. • A home page. The home page is the starting point for your intranet, as it is the starting point for a site on the Internet. In general, the home page should be short and to the point, should indicate the main focus of your intranet, and contain links to all the most important content on your site. It should include navigation aids that clearly indicate how a user gets to the information he or she is seeking. At the bottom of your home page, include a copyright statement, the date the page was last revised, the e-mail address and phone number of the person in charge, and the physical address of your organization. Although your home page need not include all the flash and glitz associated with lots of Internet home pages, it could include zippy features if that is in keeping with the culture of your organization and you have the technical expertise to add them. • A table of contents (TOC). A simple TOC can go a long way in making it easy for users to locate information quickly. This is similar to a book’s TOC. All the user has to do is click a link in the TOC to go directly to that page.

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• A technical support page. This page can include instructions on how to perform basic intranet tasks (such as how to store new documents) and troubleshooting steps that help users identify and solve specific problems. Some organizations use their intranet as a help desk. Users complete and submit an online form that details technical problems they’re experiencing. • A press release page. At first blush, this may seem silly, but think about it. How many times have you been the last to find out the latest, most important news about your company? You will, of course, want to have pages for the various departments in your organization. A human resources page is a wise first step. Human resources staff spend countless hours answering routine, repetitive questions such as, Which options are available in the health plan? A human resources page could well include the following: • Information about health and benefit plans and enrollment forms. • Information on employee stock purchase plans. • A list of internal employment opportunities. • Frequently asked questions about the company. • The employee handbook. • The employee telephone directory. • Employee surveys. • An organization chart of the company. • The company newsletter. • Employee classifieds. An intranet also provides a secure point for collecting and publishing financial information. A page for the finance and accounting department might include the following information, with access limited in certain cases to those with a need to know: • Reports. • Corporate policies and procedures related to finance and accounting. • Historical budget data, as well as projected and actual spending. • An inventory of current assets

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• Expense report forms. • Payment and status information for customers and vendors. • Payroll information. Both the human resources department and the accounting department might want to set up their own internal intranets to manage information that needs to be secured even from prying eyes within the company. TIP

Intranets are also being widely used for training. In Chapter 14, we looked at how to set up a PowerPoint presentation on the Web—an excellent intranet training vehicle.

As you might expect, sales and marketing groups are using intranets effectively to boost productivity and reduce costs. Here are some of the ways: • The sales force can download product demonstrations and sales presentations as well as recent sales and quota information. • Employees, customers, and business partners can access price lists, catalogs, brochures, and data sheets. • Market information, such as competitive analysis and trends, gleaned from the Internet is published on the sales and marketing page. • Sales teams can collaborate. In this section, we’ve given you only a glimpse of the possibilities. You’ll find numerous case studies and how-to articles on the Internet. Use your favorites search service to search on “intranet.”

Setting Up Y our Intranet Your To set up an intranet, you need Web server and Web browser software as well as a program with which to create Web pages. Chapter 3 discusses the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser, and Appendix A discusses the Netscape Navigator Web browser. Chapter 13 showed you how to set up a Web site using Microsoft FrontPage. In this section, we’ll look at a couple of Web servers—those that are included with Microsoft Windows. Many other intranet development tools are available, and you’ll find a description of them at http://idm.internet.com/tools.

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Using Windows 2000 Professional and Internet Information Services Internet Information Services (IIS) is actually a collection of programs that you can use to create an intranet. It is part of Windows 2000 Professional, but it is not installed by default when you install the operating system. To install IIS, follow these steps: 1. Open Control Panel. Click Start, click Settings, and then click Control Panel. 2. Open the Add/Remove Programs applet, as shown in Figure 16-1. Click Add/Remove Programs.

Figure 16-1 The Add/Remove Programs window.

3. Start the Windows Components Wizard, as shown in Figure 16-2. Click Add/Remove Windows Components.

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Figure 16-2 The Windows Components Wizard.

4. Install Internet Information Services. In the Components lists, click the Internet Information Services (IIS) check box, and then click Next. When the wizard finishes installing the services, click Finish. To take a quick look at what you just installed, open Internet Explorer, and in the Address bar, type http://hostname where hostname is the name of your computer. If you have not yet created a home page, you’ll see the page shown in Figure 16-3. The IIS documentation opens in a separate browser window.

Figure 16-3 A message about IIS. Chapter 16


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When you installed Windows 2000 Professional, Setup created a default Web site and a default FTP site. You can publish Web pages on both. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Create a Web page. Follow the steps in Chapter 13 to create a Web page, and then save it as Default.htm or Default.asp. 2. Copy your Web page into the Web publishing folder. Setup created the \Inetpub\wwwroot folder in which to store your Web pages. Copy your Web page to this folder. TIP

By default, IIS will recognize your home page only if it is named default.htm. If your home page is named index.htm, it won’t display properly.

To view your newly created page, open Internet Explorer and in the Address bar type http://hostname where hostname is the name of your computer.

Using Windows 98 and Personal W eb Server Web Personal Web Server is a desktop Web server that you can use to create an intranet. Windows 98 includes Personal Web Server, but before you can use it, you need to complete some additional setup. To do this setup, you’ll need your Windows 98 CDROM. Insert the CD-ROM in its drive, and then follow these steps: 1. Start the Setup program. Click Start, and then click Run to open the Run dialog box, as shown in Figure 16-4. In the Open box, type X:\add-ons\pws\setup.exe, and press the Enter key. (Replace X with the letter for your CD-ROM drive.) You’ll see the opening Setup screen, as shown in Figure 16-5. Click Next.

Figure 16-4 The Run dialog box.

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Figure 16-5 The opening Setup screen.

2. Select an installation type. You have three choices: Minimum, Typical, and Custom. Select Minimum if you’re running short on disk space. Select Typical if you want all the Minimum component, documentation, and additional components. Select Custom if you are an advanced Web site developer. In these steps, we’ll describe the Typical installation. When you click Typical, you’ll see the screen shown in Figure 16-6.

Figure 16-6 Selecting a Web folder.

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3. Specify a Web publishing directory. By default, Windows sets up the \Inetpub\wwwroot folder. If you want to specify a different directory, enter its path name or click Browse to find it. Click Next. Completing the installation will take a few minutes. When it’s finished, click Finish or press the Enter key. Reboot your computer so that the new settings can take effect. To display the documentation for Personal Web Server, click Start, click Programs, click Accessories, click Personal Web Server, and then click Product Documentation. You’ll see the screen shown in Figure 16-7. Click the Microsoft Personal Web Server topic to find instructions on how to publish a Web page.

Figure 16-7 Documentation for Personal Web Server.

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You can publish a Web page in two ways: • By copying the page from its current folder into the \Inetpub\wwwroot folder. • By using the Publishing Wizard. To use the Publishing Wizard, click the Publish icon on your desktop to open the Personal Web Manager, which is shown in Figure 16-8. Click Publishing to start the Publishing Wizard, which is shown in Figure 16-9. Before you can begin to publish other pages, you’ll need to create a home page. Follow the instructions on the screen, and then restart the Publishing Wizard. It will walk you through the steps to publish other pages.

Figure 16-8 The Personal Web Manager.

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Figure 16-9 The Publishing Wizard.

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You can also publish pages to an intranet using FrontPage. Chapter 13 describes the process.

Summary In this chapter, we introduced you to intranets and discussed the various ways you might use an intranet in your business. We also showed you how to use the programs that come with Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98 to set up an intranet. This chapter doesn’t tell you everything you need to know to set up an intranet, but it does provide some information that can help you decide whether an intranet would be a good solution for your business needs.

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Chapter 17

PUBLISHING AN E-MAIL NEWSLETTER

Featuring: • Will a Newsletter Help Your Business? • Getting Started • Publishing Methods • Guidelines for Producing an Award-Winning Newsletter

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e’ve pointed out at least a couple of times earlier in this book the importance of a Web site for a business, and publishing on a Web site certainly gets the lion’s share of attention in the marketplace these days. But we think businesses should also consider publishing an e-mail newsletter. An e-mail newsletter is much like its paper counterpart, but it has three major advantages: • It costs less to produce and distribute. • It’s delivered faster. • It can support a firm’s Web site and build traffic (since it’s easy to include hyperlinks in the newsletter text). In some ways, an e-mail newsletter is a more efficient way to reach your intended audience. For example, if you put information on your Web site about new services or new products, people will find out only when and if they visit your Web site. If you put such information into a regularly delivered e-mail newsletter, you place that information into the hands of people who have already said they want to receive it and in a timely fashion. 433

NOTE

An e-mail newsletter is sometimes called an ezine, short for electronic magazine, and technically an ezine can be a newsletter or a magazine that is distributed by e-mail, on a Web site, or both.

Will a Newsletter Help Y our Business? Your One way to find out is to subscribe to some business newsletters for a while, see what they are like, and see how they work. At many commercial Web sites, you’ll see a box to check to indicate that you’d like to receive the company’s newsletter. You’ll also find a list of business newsletters at http://www.topica.com. On the home page, which is shown in Figure 17-1, click the More Newsletters link, and then on the next page, click the Business link to see a list.

Figure 17-1 Finding business newsletters at the Topica site.

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A lot of e-mail newsletters start out as small, perhaps in-house communications tools, such as an employee newsletter or a newsletter that’s distributed to the sales force. Those targeted at potential or current customers or clients can grow large quickly, and if you are thinking about using an e-mail newsletter as a marketing tool, you will need to be willing to invest some time and make a commitment to the project. Some marketing experts think an e-mail newsletter is a great marketing tool in a time when, as we discussed in Chapter 7, most of us are opting out of databases that mean telemarketing calls at the most inappropriate hour of the day and tons of junk e-mail. An e-mail newsletter epitomizes the concept of permission marketing. Everyone who subscribes to your newsletter has done so on purpose and expects to read about your ideas, products, and services. In addition, e-mail newsletters are a great way to create brand awareness for your company, product, or service. From the consumer’s point of view, e-mail newsletters are advantageous for a couple of reasons: • They get information they want without having to search for it. • They get only the information they want, and the information is current. An e-mail newsletter can also serve as a general forum that a community of professionals can use to share information. We participate both as readers and writers in several newsletters that discuss the business of writing and technology publishing, for example.

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Getting Started If all this interests you and you are on the verge of opening your word-processing program to compose number 1 of volume 1, hang on a minute. As with all business projects, you need to do some planning first. Here are some questions to ask and answer before you get started: • Who is your target audience? • What is the specific topic of your newsletter? • How often will you distribute it? • Who will write it? • Who will edit it? • Who will respond to e-mail messages you receive as a result of your newsletter? • Will you publish your newsletter as plain text or in HTML as a Web page? • Will you attempt to publish it yourself or will you outsource this task? • If you work in a corporation, have resources of time and money been allocated that you can access for this project? As we mentioned earlier, publishing an e-mail newsletter involves a commitment to the project. Distributing a great first edition and then not following up with regular publications will just about totally defeat your purpose. And, speaking of purpose, define it at the outset. To be successful, a newsletter needs to meet its audience’s expectations. For example, if you commit to keeping your existing customer base updated on the latest products and services with a newsletter, your rating on their confidence meter will plummet if they see a TV commercial about the product before they get your newsletter. Before you distribute your first newsletter, be sure that the answers to the above questions are feasible in your organization. If you intend to write the newsletter yourself, be sure that you really, really have the time or will make the time. In fact, put together a written plan, distribute it to anybody who will be involved, and get their commitment to the project.

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Before we move on to look at some of the distribution methods, we need to discuss the format in which you produce your newsletter. You have two choices: plain text or HTML. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, all e-mail programs can read plain text, but not all can read Web pages, which is what you create when you compose in HTML. Without question, a newsletter composed as a Web page is the most attractive. Figure 17-2 shows a plain-text newsletter, and Figure 17-3 shows a newsletter created in HTML.

Figure 17-2 A plain-text newsletter.

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Figure 17-3 A newsletter that looks like a Web page.

Which format you choose depends in part on the kind of distribution method you choose, and we’ll look at those in the next section. If your organization has a Web site, check with the Webmaster about placing a link to your newsletter on the home page, as well as the means for subscribing to it. You’ll also want to link from your newsletter to your company’s Web site.

Publishing Methods How you go about publishing your newsletter depends primarily on the number of subscribers, but it also depends on how much time you’re willing to devote to the process, how comfortable you are with the technology, and, of course, your budget.

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Publishing with Outlook Express The easiest, most straightforward way to publish an e-mail newsletter if you have no more than, say, 100 subscribers is to use Microsoft Outlook Express. If you have Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, Windows ME, or Windows 98, you already have Outlook Express on your system. You simply use Address Book to set up your distribution list, as described in Chapter 4. You will have to manually add and remove subscribers, of course, because Outlook Express is not list-management software. We suggest that you also set up a separate identity for sending your newsletter and for receiving e-mail from your subscribers. For example, if we set up an identity for Redmond Technology Press and send out the newsletter using this identity, all subscribers know right away the source of the material. In addition, we’d know that all email sent to this identity concerned the newsletter. (For details about establishing and using identities in Outlook Express, see Chapter 4.) Using Outlook Express, you can create your newsletter in plain text or in HTML, as discussed in Chapter 4. With some effort, you could create it in plain text for the subscribers whose e-mail programs can’t read HTML, and then reformat it as HTML for the others. If you are creating a newsletter to be distributed to a group of employees, for example, your sales force, using Outlook Express to distribute it may be ideal. All your “subscribers” will also have Outlook Express, and you can easily create an attractive piece using the HTML formatting features. To simplify the work of identifying e-mail newsletter recipients, you can create a distribution list. A distribution list simply lists e-mail addresses. When you tell Outlook Express to send an e-mail message (like your newsletter) to the distribution list, Outlook Express sends the e-mail message to all the e-mail addresses on the list. If you want to keep the identities of your newsletter recipients secret, enter the distribution list name in the Bcc box of the Outlook Express New Message window. Outlook Express will show the e-mail addresses to you, but not to the people receiving the message. NOTE

For more information about creating distribution lists, working with the New Message window, and the Bcc box, refer to Chapter 4.

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Publishing with a List-Hosting Service Another easy way to distribute an e-mail newsletter is to use a list-hosting service on the Web. Some, such as Topica, are even free. Topica manages subscriptions, generates statistics, and backs up your material. The catch is that your newsletter will carry advertisements. For details on how to post your newsletter at Topica, go to http://www. topica.com. A popular fee-based list-hosting service is Dundee Internet Services at http://www. dundee.net/isp/email.htm. Figure 17-4 shows this page. This service claims to have the capacity to host anything from fewer than 25 subscribers to more than a million and uses Lyris Email List Server software, which we’ll look at in the next section. For details about this service provider, click the E-Mail List Services Overview link and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Figure 17-4 The Dundee Internet Services page.

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For information about other list-hosting services, use one of the search services described in Chapter 8 and search on “list-hosting services”.


Using List-Management Software If your list of subscribers grows too large to manage with a program such as Outlook Express and you prefer not to use a list-hosting service, you can investigate installing list-management software on your system and managing the program yourself. If you work on a corporate network, you’ll want to discuss this with your system administrator, of course. If you’re running a home office or operating a small network in your business, we suggest that you contact a technical consultant to help you set up listmanagement software. Two well-known and popular programs are Listserv and Lyris. For information about Listserv, go to http://www.lsoft.com, whose home page is shown in Figure 17-5. According to this site, Listserv is the dominant e-mail list manager in use today. For information about Lyris, go to http://www.lyris.com. Figure 17-6 shows the Lyris home page. Lyris is the software used by many list-hosting services.

Figure 17-5 The Listserv home page.

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Figure 17-6 The Lyris home page.

Guidelines for Producing an A ward-Winning Award-Winning Newsletter Determining whether an e-mail newsletter is a good idea for your business and then figuring out the best way to distribute it are both critical path items when you’re thinking about publishing a newsletter. But neither task is as important as the editorial process and the content of your newsletter. As we were exploring Web directories of business newsletters, we came across the following blurb: “Tightly written and edited. A 3-minute read each week.”

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In our opinion, this tag line describes the perfect business newsletter—no words are wasted in the writing; the newsletter has been edited for spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice, organization, and format; and you can glean its valuable information in about the same amount of time it takes to read the column on the business page of your daily newspaper. In our collective experience as writers, editors, managers, and publishers, the best advice we can give you is to establish an editorial process that complies with publishing standards and stick to it. TIP

A good e-mail newsletter should probably be a maximum of 1,000 words.

Adhering to the Editorial Process The first step in the editorial process is to determine the focus of your newsletter and then give it a title. If you’re creating a newsletter for your sales force, your audience determines the focus and the content. If you’re creating a newsletter for your employees, the audience still determines the focus though it broadens. The title of your newsletter should be appropriate for its audience, which may well be influenced by the corporate culture. In any case, the title should be descriptive of the content.

Create an Outline The next step is to think about content, not just for the first publication but perhaps for the quarter or even the year, especially if you expect to publish monthly. We suggest creating an outline with the major points being the focus for each publication and the minor points being the two or three headings in each issue. Yes, what Ms Cooper made you do before you began writing a term paper still applies. All good publications start with an outline. Here’s the beginning of an outline for a newsletter to the sales force that will be published monthly. Roman numerals identify the major subject matter for each issue, and the capital letters identify the sections for the issue.

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I. Welcome to the ABC E-Letter A. Our purpose B. Our schedule C. How you can contribute II. Understanding Quotas and Bonuses A. How quotas work—who sets them, who monitors them, how to achieve them B. How bonuses are determined C. Salesperson of the month D. Answering your questions III. New Products and Services A. Products and services to introduce this quarter B. Sales retreat scheduled C. Salesperson of the month D. Answering your questions And so on. As you can see, continuity is established by running some sections in every issue, and interest is maintained by creating one or two special sections for each issue. Obviously, if a major corporate event occurs, such as a reorganization or the purchase of a subsidiary, for example, you can adjust your outline and cover that topic instead. But creating and maintaining an outline gives you the following advantages: • Your newsletter is focused and flows logically. • Because you know ahead of time, you can begin to gather any needed information well in advance. • You avoid last-minute sleepless nights wondering what you’re going to put in the newsletter tomorrow. • You can ensure that in the course of the newsletter’s regular publication schedule that you’re covering all the pertinent information.

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Do the Writing If you’ve created your outline in a word processor or a text editor, you can simply open it and get started. All the rules for writing well apply, and in this section we’ll review some of them. Use active voice. Why? Because it’s more direct and alive. Passive voice is used by those who don’t want to take responsibility for what they’re writing, and, indeed, the first part of this sentence is in passive voice. Here’s another example: The selection of the new CFO was made public. This sentence raises some questions: Who did the selecting? Who made it public and how? A more alive and more informative sentence: The board of directors selected the new CFO and then announced their choice during this morning’s news conference. The paragraph is the basic unit of composition. It begins with a topic sentence and then proceeds to elaborate on that. Especially, when you’re writing for the computer screen, keep paragraphs short, and format chunks of text that are manageable when the reader is scrolling through your newsletter. Don’t use complicated words when simple ones will do nicely. Example: The widget has fallen into desuetude. Desuetude is a perfectly good word, and you’ll find it in the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but chances are just about zero that your readers are going to know that it means “disuse.” Use only as many words as necessary. A particularly annoying example is the use of the phrase “the fact of the matter is.” You never need to include this phrase; the “fact” stands on its own and is the reason you are writing the sentence in the first place. Choose words that are specific to your subject matter and that will attract your audience. If you are writing about a technical topic for a nontechnical audience, always explain a technical term in context. Never begin a sentence with “There is” or “There are” if you can find a noun or a pronoun and a strong verb to do the job. For example, which is the stronger sentence: “There are a number of people who agree with you” or “A number of people agree with you”?

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These are only some of the handy devices you can use to maintain the dynamic nature of your e-mail newsletter. They aren’t difficult to remember, and using them will make you a better communicator of the written word. You’ll find variations on them as well as many more in a tiny book that has become a classic since it was first published in 1935—The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White. The most recent edition was published in 1995 and is available at bookstores on- and offline. The 85 pages that compose this book constitute what should be the daily companion of anyone who writes.

Send Y our Newsletter to an Editor Your Everybody needs an editor, and the more you write and the longer you write, the more you will find this to be a necessity. You can, and should, spell-check your document, and if the program in which you are creating your newsletter has one, run its grammar checker. Neither, however, take the place of an editor. For example, if you type for when you mean four, the spell checker won’t see it as a mistake. And if you begin three sentences in a row with “There are,” a grammar checker might or might not call your attention to this. You might also want to give your newsletter a read-through before passing it on to an editor. Here are the editor’s tasks: • Correcting spelling. • Correcting grammatical mistakes. • Fixing punctuation. • Querying you if he or she can’t understand a sentence or a paragraph. • Pointing out any statement that could be factually incorrect. • Tightening your words and making suggestions about better word choices. • Suggesting something that you might want to include. • Noting any useless repetition. • Applying any house style rules if your organization has a style guide. NOTE

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A house style guide is a list of rules that specify the distinctive treatment of words, how organizational entities are to be treated in print, trademarks, and so on.


If you can’t find a person in your organization with these skills, you can obtain the services of a professional. Many editors work on a freelance, per hour or per assignment basis, and you can find them through an editorial agency or even on the Internet, using the tips in Chapter 19. The most efficient way to work with an editor is to work online. Whether someone within your organization will do the editing or you contract for the services of a freelancer, you can send your newsletter file to the editor as an attachment to e-mail. He or she can then open it in a program such as Microsoft Word and turn on the Track Changes feature, which keeps your original but displays all the editorial changes and queries in a different color and indicates insertions and deletions. When you get the file back, it’s easy to see who did what when. You can then accept or reject the changes, finalize your document, and distribute it.

Final Formatting Whether you distribute your newsletter as a plain-text file or as a Web page, you need to ensure that what your subscribers see on the screen is readable and attractive. Here are some suggestions for formatting a good-looking plain-text newsletter: • Visibly separate the sections using characters, symbols, or blank lines. • Use a monospaced font so that readers with older e-mail programs can read your newsletter easily. • Set off URLs by enclosing them in angle brackets (< >) and include a link to the home page of your Web site if you have one. Here are some tips for formatting a newsletter in HTML: • Don’t add animation and sound to the page, which will detract from your message rather than enhancing it. • Use colors and different fonts sparingly, and don’t use a black background against which text must contrast. Light text on a dark screen background is very difficult to read, and a bunch of different-colored objects detract from the content. • Separate sections by placing the heading in a larger size font and perhaps in boldface. Keep all body text in the same size and type of font. • Keep your newsletter all on one page, and include a link to the home page of your Web site, if you have one. NOTE

For information about how to create Web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, see Chapter 13. Chapter 17


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Creating a Publishing Schedule Whether you decide to publish weekly, monthly, or quarterly or on some other schedule, establish the publication date—the day and the time of day that your newsletter is sent out to subscribers—and work backward to determine how much time you need to allot to each stage of the process. After you do the first couple of issues, you’ll be able to reasonably estimate how long the writing takes. In general, build in a day for the editing, and build in a day for the final formatting. Neither task will take that long, but you need to allow for the unexpected. If you are using Outlook Express or a similar program to distribute your newsletter, allow some time in your personal schedule for the manual adding and deleting of subscribers, or assign that task to someone who can handle this task for you. If you’re creating a newsletter that will be distributed internally to only a finite number of employees, this will not be a Herculean task. But if your list grows, managing subscribers manually can become a time sink that you want to be prepared for.

Summary In this chapter, we’ve looked at a rather simple way to stay in touch with departmental employees, customers, potential customers, and professional colleagues—an e-mail newsletter. You can use it to enhance the effectiveness of your Web site, and you can use your Web site to publicize your newsletter. This chapter gives you the information you need to get started and includes some nontechnical guidelines that you can use to publish a newsletter that not only contains valuable information for your subscribers but also sends a professional, attractive message about you and your business.

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Chapter 18

USING THE INTERNET FOR RECRUITING AND JOB SEARCHING

Featuring: • Recruiting on the Internet • Job Searching on the Internet

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f you’re looking for employees in the traditional way, that is, by posting job openings in newspapers, in trade magazines, in print newsletters, and so on, these days you’re going to still be searching long after the best candidates are working away in their new positions. And if you’re looking for a job by searching through the weekend classifieds of your local newspaper, the position you want may well be filled before you’ve even had time to fax your résumé. The reason: the world of online recruiting and job searching has exploded. In mid-2000, America’s Job Bank, which is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Labor and the state-operated public Employment Service, had more than 2 million registered job seekers and some 1.5 million job postings on their site at http://www.ajb.dni.us. And America’s Job Bank is only one of hundreds of online recruiting sites. One survey estimates that about 98 percent of all U.S. companies are currently recruiting online. In this chapter, we can’t begin to cover all the many facets of online recruiting and job searching, but we can give you some tips and point you toward a wealth of resources.

TIP

If you’re primarily interested in finding a job online, skip this first section and go to “Job Searching on the Internet,” which is the last section in this chapter. 449

Recruiting on the Internet Why recruit on the Internet? Because it’s cost-effective, it’s fast, and it’s far-reaching. • Placing a large ad in a major metropolitan newspaper can cost thousands of dollars; posting a job opening at CareerSite.com Recruiter (http://www.careersite.com) is free for small- to medium-size businesses. Even the sites that charge employers a fee are usually more cost-effective than advertising in print media. But the trade-off is probably time, which is also money. You will need to check e-mail messages, review résumés (maybe many more than previously), create job postings, manage job postings (for example, removing them when they are filled), and so on. • When you post a job on the Internet, it can be viewed in a matter of seconds, and you could begin receiving responses in a matter of minutes. • Print media circulation is minimal when compared with the millions and millions of Internet users worldwide.

Posting a Job Opening Your first step is to create an electronic job posting. The format and the method for submitting a job posting depend on the site, and you’ll typically find instructions by clicking Help or perhaps a Post A Job link. Regardless of how you post a job or even where, the most important aspect is the posting’s content. According to professionals in the human resources field, a good electronic job posting will contain most, if not all, of the following information. Keywords and category. As you can see in Figure 18-1, at Monster.com (http:// monster.com) a job seeker can search by location, job category, and keyword. The site’s search engine can pick up the location from your contact information, but you’ll need to specify the job category and the keywords. The job category you specify should be one of those in the site’s list of categories. Keywords are important because these are the terms that a potential employee is most likely to enter when searching through job postings. Keywords are typically a subset of terms that are usually used to describe the job in a certain category. For example, if you are posting a job for a benefits administrator in your human resources department, you might enter Excel, 401(k), ERISA laws, COBRA, and so on. If you’re recruiting a computer programmer, you might enter the specific languages needed in the position.

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Figure 18-1 Job categories at Monster.com.

Job title. This entry seems obvious, but it can be tricky. If you make the title too general, your posting will never find its way into the proper hands; if you make it too specific and technical, the position may sound too specialized even to appropriate candidates. Some companies use job titles that are well understood within that organization but are not commonly understood even within that particular industry. For example, one of us once had the title of Deputy Editor for a reference publication. This particular job title is not common today within the publishing community, and were we to post an opening for it on a Web site, we’d probably change it to something such as Supervising Editor or Managing Editor. WARNING Be sure that the job title is correct in both the posting and in the offer letter. We once worked in a department in which someone was hired with the official title of Assistant Accountant when it should have been Accounting Assistant. Issues arising from this mistake haunted the department for the duration of the employee’s tenure.


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Salary. Whether to include a salary range in a job posting is an issue that has been the subject of heated debate among human resources professionals for a long time, and the debate continues when it comes to electronic job postings. One recent study of recruiting Web sites, however, indicated that including the pay rate or range resulted in a higher response rate—sometimes as much as three times the rate for a similar posting that did not include salary information. Some companies don’t post salary information because their pay rates are not competitive. If you’re not sure about your rates and want to compare them with national rates or with rates in your geographical area, your industry, or with organizations of comparable size, go to Wageweb (http://www.wageweb.com). Wageweb is an online salary service that provides data on some 170 positions. You can view national rates for free, but a fee is charged for the other most specialized figures. Figure 18-2 shows the Wageweb home page.

Figure 18-2 Salary comparisons are available at Wageweb.

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Company profile. This is a one- or two-paragraph section that explains who your company is, what you do, and where you are located. Although job searchers can hunt down information about your business on the Internet, as we discussed in Chapter 8, including a company profile in your job posting saves them time and keeps at bay those résumés of people who have no interest in your mission. Some job postings store this information so that it can be retrieved by clicking a link that’s something like Learn More About XYZ Corporation. Job description. The job description should be as specific as possible and should reflect the expectations of the current manager or supervisor for the position. Here are some items to consider including: • Whether the position is part-time, full-time, contract, in-house, seasonal, and so on. • The working hours. • Whether travel is required. • Duties and responsibilities. • Specific skills required, such as particular software programs, knowledge of multiple languages, and the like. • Reporting structure. • Management responsibilities, if any. JobDescription.com is a site that, for a fee, will help you write job descriptions. Figure 18-3 shows part of a sample job description at this site. For others, go to http://www.jobdescription.com.


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Figure 18-3 Find sample job descriptions at JobDescription.com.

Qualifications. In this section, list requirements such as education level and years of experience. Be sure that you are in compliance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Location. Be sure to specify where the work will be performed. If you are recruiting from a corporate office but the person will be working overseas or at a branch office, potential candidates should know this before they apply for the job. Benefits. In a competitive job market, this may be the most attractive feature of your employment opportunity, and you want to publicize it. Include provisions such as 401(k) packages, childcare programs, healthcare options, stock options, diversity efforts, and the like. Contact information. Throw in everything and the kitchen sink if you want to reach the widest range of potential employees—e-mail address, physical address, Web site URL, fax number, and phone number. Some companies also include specific instructions about how to submit a résumé. An excellent example is the Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington. We found the following instructions at the bottom of a recent job posting: 454


• Boeing uses an electronic résumé handling system that requires résumés to be submitted in plain text format (without lines, bullets, formatting, or special characters). • To submit your résumé by e-mail, send it to [email protected]. Include the requisition number listed in this job posting in your résumé, and send your résumé in the body of the e-mail message, not as an attachment. • To use our online résumé builder, go to our Online Resume builder at http:// www.boeing.com/employment/resume.html. • To submit your résumé by mail, send it to [name and address of the company]. Include the requisition number and follow the format instructions to maximize the scanability of your résumé. In the last half of this chapter, we’ll look in more detail at the implications of some of these instructions. The point here is that Boeing is providing a tremendous amount of help to those who want to respond to this job posting. If you want to get the maximum results out of your online job postings, you’ll do the same, regardless of whether you currently have access to an online résumé builder. Always include precise submission instructions.

Posting a Job at Monster .com Monster.com As we mentioned earlier in this section, the precise way that you submit an electronic job posting depends on the site. At Monster.com, you complete an online form. In mid-2000, the fee for each posting was $275, which maintained the posting for 60 days. Here are the steps for completing the form: 1. Select a category and a location from the drop-down lists. 2. Select an option button that corresponds to the job level: Internship, Entry Level, Mid Career, Executive. 3. Enter the job title (a maximum of 40 characters). 4. Enter the job description and contact information. 5. Select a position type: Full Time, Part Time, Permanent, Contract. 6. Enter salary information.


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7. Enter contact information in the fields provided: Contact Name, Company Name, E-Mail Address, Street, City, State, Zip Code, Phone Number, Fax Number. 8. Enter billing information. You can select to be billed or to pay by credit card. 9. Click the Preview button to check out your posting. When prompted, submit the posting.

Finding Résumés Now, you have a couple of choices. You can sit back and wait for résumés to amass in your inbox, or you can proactively search out résumés. At Monster.com, for example, you can purchase access to the database of some 3.9 million résumés and search by keyword, job function, industry, geographic location, date of posting, and so on. CareerShop.com, shown in Figure 18-4, is another recruiting site that provides ways to broaden your search for employees.

Figure 18-4 The CareerShop.com recruiting site. 456


Purchasing a standard membership package at CareerShop.com gives you the following benefits: • You can post as many job listings as you want. • Your job listings are cross-posted to some 100 job boards and newsgroups, including America’s Job Bank, Career Monthly, CareerPlacer.com, Excite, and Yahoo!. • You can search a database of more than 350,000 résumés and save your search criteria. • Search agents match your job postings to the database of résumés, and only the best matches are sent to you throughout the week via e-mail. Typically, you pay a fee to post a job at an online recruiting site, and job seekers can post their résumés for free. Resume.com works in reverse—for free, you receive résumés daily that have been filtered by discipline and geographic location. You can then contact the job seeker directly by e-mail. For details, go to http://www.resumeblaster.com; the recruiter page is shown in Figure 18-5.

Figure 18-5 Recruiter Headquarters at ResumeBlaster.com.


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Other W ays to Publicize Y our Job Openings on the Ways Your Internet If your company has a Web site, include a page that advertises job opportunities and put a link to it on the home page. Cisco Systems, the giant corporation that produces networking products, has used this idea to great advantage. In a recent year, Cisco received 81 percent of its résumés and hired 66 percent of its employees via the Internet. Cisco’s home page includes a HotJobs@Cisco link that takes you to the Cisco Employment Opportunities page, which is shown in Figure 18-6. You can search the job openings by keywords, an area of interest, and location. You can then click a job title to display a description and contact information.

Figure 18-6 Hot jobs at Cisco Systems.

If you publish an e-mail newsletter, be sure to include job openings and contact information.

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And don’t forget some of the traditional techniques that you can leverage in addition to your Internet postings. Every day we hear radio announcements about employment opportunities and the URL where listeners will find more information.

More Internet Recruiting Resources We mentioned at the outset of this chapter that we couldn’t begin to give you a comprehensive guide to everything you should know or that is available about recruiting on the Internet and that we’d point you toward some resources. Table 18-1 lists and describes some additional, well-respected fee-based recruiting sites. SITE

URL

DESCRIPTION

CareerMosaic

http://www.careermosaic.com

You can search more than 700,000 résumés.

Headhunter.net

http://www.headhunter.net

You can post and cross-post jobs and search a database of some 800,000 résumés by date posted, job category, location, or experience.

NationJob Network http://www.nationjob.com

E-mails your job postings to matching job seekers in a database of 500,000 subscribers.

Net-Temps

http://www.net-temps.com

Cross-posts job listings to more than 500 other sites. Its name notwithstanding, this is not a site for only temporary positions.

Yahoo!Careers

http://recruiter.yahoo.com

You can search tens of thousands of résumés and post jobs to Yahoo! and other top recruiting sites.

Table 18-1

Top recruitment sites.


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Table 18-2 lists and describes some sites that provide valuable information about online recruiting. SITE

URL

DESCRIPTION

HR Bookmark

www.hrbookmark.com

Posts your jobs to numerous Web sites for free and has links to the top free résumé banks, as well as the latest news about Internet recruiting.

Interbiznet Bugler

www.interbiznet.com /interbizbugler

An electronic newsletter devoted to online recruiting.

Recruiter’s Network

www.recruitersnetwork.com

A site established by the Association for Internet Recruiting that provides a resource center of newsletters, guides to career sites, trial subscriptions to business magazines, and so on.

The Riley Guide

www.dbm.com/jobguide /post.html

An excellent, succinct article about online recruiting with links to many other resources.

Table 18-2

Online recruiting resources.

Seven T ips for Recruiting Online Tips 1. Set up a separate e-mail address for handling incoming résumés and inquiries. For information on how to do this using Microsoft Outlook Express identities, see Chapter 4. 2. Set up an online filing system to separate résumés for various job postings. 3. Don’t print; file electronically. But be sure your computer system is backing up all this valuable material you’re collecting. 4. If your salary range is competitive for your area and industry, post it. 5. Keep your jobs posted until the positions are filled. 6. Be sure to remove job postings when the positions are filled.

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7. Don’t forget about free, non-high-tech methods for getting the word out—personal networking, in-house bulletin boards, reviewing all the paper résumés in your file after you post online, and the like.

Job Searching on the Internet If you are just starting a job search, the Internet should be the first place you turn to, not the last. Why? In most cases, it’s free, and it’s fast and far-reaching. If you read the first part of this chapter, you’ll remember that those are similar to the reasons that employers are now recruiting on the Internet in record numbers.

Preparing Y our Electronic Résumé Your The first step is to prepare your electronic résumé. If you haven’t been out in the job market for a while, you can use an old résumé to jog your memory about past employment details, but preparing an electronic résumé involves a great deal more than simply dusting off and adding to that old tried-and-true version. The reasons are twofold: • Employers are using résumé-tracking software that lets them scan paper résumés or add résumé files to a database that can be searched by keywords and all sorts of other criteria. • Recruiters search online databases of résumés in the same way. Thus, the content of an electronic résumé is different as well as the format.

The Content of an Electronic Résumé Opinions vary among human resources professionals about the elements that an electronic résumé should contain, and some résumé database sites actually have a résumé form that you fill out. Figure 18-7 shows a portion of the form at Monster.com. To add your résumé to the giant database at this site, you must complete this form.


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Figure 18-7 The résumé form at Monster.com (http://my.monster.com/title.asp).

An electronic résumé typically has most, if not all, of the following elements. Job title. The first line should contain words that describe the type of position you are seeking. When employers search résumé databases, this line is the first thing they see. You need to use it to attract attention to your résumé. Some typical examples include Advertising Account Representative, Senior Technical Writer, MBA Tax Accountant, Software Engineer, Purchasing Agent, Marketing Manager, and Controller. All these job titles, by the way, are also good keywords. Contact information. Unless a résumé database site requires otherwise, place your contact information immediately following the job title. Include your name, physical address, phone number, fax number, and e-mail address. If you have a professional Web site, include the URL.

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WARNING Do not include your social security number, and do not include the URL of your Web site if it focuses on the personal, the family, and the cute.

Objective. This is a one- or two-line phrase that describes the kind of position you are seeking. Include as many keywords as you can. (We’ll discuss keywords in more detail later in this section.) Summary or keyword paragraph. This paragraph summarizes your skills and, like the objective, needs to contain as many keywords as possible. Professional opinions vary as to whether you should include both an objective and a summary, and some even advise including your objective in the summary paragraph. Regardless of which you do, this information needs to be close to the top. Some résumé-tracking systems record the first 100 words in a résumé, so you want those 100 words to describe your qualifications and your skills that are relevant to the position you are seeking. Experience. Opinions also vary about the best way to organize this section of your résumé. Should it be in chronological order or by function? Or should it be a blend? If you’ve been in the same field most of your working life, a good choice is reverse chronological order; in other words, list your most recent positions first. If, on the other hand, you’ve worked in more than one field, you might want to group positions. For each position you list, include the job title, the place of employment, and a description of your duties and responsibilities. Whether you include your dates of employment depends on your circumstances, but most employers will want this information. TIP

If you have relevant experience from 15 or 20 years ago, you might want to summarize these positions at the bottom of the experience section.

AW ord About Keywords Word Résumé keywords are nouns and noun phrases that are key to your industry, field, job title, and skills. Sprinkle them liberally, although not repetitively, throughout your résumé. Here are some example keywords for a few industries: • Aerospace: aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, structures, materials, orbital mechanics. • Architecture: industrial design, construction management, environmental systems, air conditioning and refrigeration.


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• Chemical engineering: process analysis and control, polymer engineering, electronic materials, biomedical, biotechnology. Here are some keywords that highlight skills and responsibilities: • Systems analysis • Rapid application development • Market research • Strategic planning • New product launch • Costing • Variance reporting In addition, any acronyms and abbreviations that are in general use in your industry are excellent keywords as are degrees or certifications. If you’re unsure about the keywords to include in your résumé, here are some ways to become better informed: • Get a printed copy of help-wanted ads and highlight the important words in jobs that you would apply for. • Go to the many online recruiting sites and identify keywords in job descriptions. • Look for keywords in online and print magazines for your profession. A word to the wise: be sure that the keywords you use are an accurate description of your experience and skills. MBA may be a great keyword, but if you don’t have one, don’t use it.

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Formatting Y our Electronic Résumé Your You will find that many online job database sites and many job descriptions that are posted by employers include specific instructions for formatting your electronic résumé. (If you’re reading this section of this chapter first, check back in the “Posting a Job Opening” section for the steps that Boeing includes for submitting an electronic résumé.) Some online résumé databases give you the choice of submitting your résumé as plain text or as a Web page (in HTML). We suggest that you create and save your résumé as straight text and then save another version that is converted to HTML. In many word-processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, doing so is easy. A plain text résumé is different from a résumé that has been formatted in a wordprocessing program and saved in that program’s format. A plain-text résumé is an ASCII file. It looks much as if it were typed on a typewriter and contains no tabs, no italics, no boldface, no special paragraph indentions, and so on. Why do you need to create such a plain-looking document when you have so many tools and so many ways to pretty it up these days? Because virtually every software program ever created can read an ASCII file. Remember your electronic résumé might be stored by any number of different résumé-tracking programs and online databases. You don’t want to submit a beautifully formatted file that some of them can’t read. To create a plain-text electronic résumé, use the steps that follow. We’re using Microsoft Word 2000 and Windows 2000 Professional, but you can follow the same general procedure in most of today’s word-processing programs. 1. Open Word. Click Start, click Programs, and then click Microsoft Word. 2. Start a new document. Click the File menu, and then click New to open the New dialog box, as shown in Figure 18-8. Click Blank Document, and then click OK.


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Figure 18-8 The New dialog box.

3. Save your document as a Text Only file. Click the File menu, and then click Save As to open the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure 18-9. Choose a folder in which to save your file, and in the File Name dropdown list, select Text Only. Click Save. When asked if you’re sure you want to save the file in this format, click Yes.


4. Select a monospaced font for your résumé. In a monospaced font, each letter and each space takes up the same amount of space, as it would on an old standard typewriter. Click the Format menu, and then click Font to open the Font dialog box, as shown in Figure 18-10. In the Font list, select Courier New. In the Size list, click 12, and then click OK. 466


Figure 18-10 The Font dialog box.

TIP

If you ever need to submit a printed résumé that will need to be scanned, you can simply print out this file you are creating. Courier 12-point text can be easily and accurately scanned. For the best scanning results, be sure your printer cartridge or toner is at full strength, and print on good, plain white paper.

Now you’re ready to start typing your résumé. Follow these guidelines: • Set your margins at zero and 65. • Begin each paragraph flush left. Don’t use centering or flush-right formatting features. • Don’t use tabs. They’ll be lost when your résumé is viewed onscreen. • Use all capital letters to emphasize your name and major headings such as Objective, Summary, and Experience. • When you finish, spell-check your document, and then ask another person to read it over. Remember, spell-checkers don’t pick up errors such as two for to or too. • Verify that all information is correct, especially dates. It’s easy to make a typo when entering dates. When you’re satisfied with the appearance and content of your résumé, save it again. Chapter 18 Using the Internet for Recruiting and Job Searching

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Now, to see how your résumé looks when it arrives in the body of an e-mail message, send it to yourself. If you’re using Word 2000, click the File menu, click Send To, and then click Mail Recipient. Your résumé will open in the body of the New Message window in Outlook Express. Enter your e-mail address, and click Send. WARNING Never send your electronic résumé as an attachment to an e-mail message. Most employers will simply delete your message without opening it because of the many recent computer viruses that travel via e-mail attachments. Also, some of your recipients may not be very computer savvy and may not know how to handle e-mail attachments.

Seven Sure W ays to Sabotage Y our Résumé and Ways Your Your Job Search 1. Failing to correct a typo in your résumé. Those who distribute résumés—electronic or otherwise—that contain typos are known as unemployed. 2. Omitting an objective or a summary in your résumé. 3. Lying about either your skills or your experience. 4. Using too many complex words. Write as if you were addressing a class of sixth graders. 5. E-mailing a résumé that arrives garbled because the employer’s program can’t read formatted text or a Web page. 6. Emphasizing your duties rather than your accomplishments. 7. Including salary requirements in your résumé. Don’t do this even if an ad or a job description says it’s mandatory. Employers need employees these days, and they look at all the résumés they receive. You’re much more likely to be ruled out when you include salary requirements than when you don’t.

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Posting Y our Résumé Your Where you post your résumé is up to you. You can start by taking a look at all the recruiting Web sites we mentioned in the first part of this chapter. Naturally, you can post your résumé at any of these sites. Most are free, but some are fee-based. As is the case with many employment agencies or headhunters, employers pay to list their job openings, but job candidates do not. How you post your résumé depends on the requirements at the site. As we mentioned earlier, Monster.com requires that you fill out an online form, which becomes your résumé. At other sites, you can submit a straight-text résumé, which we described in the previous section. Follow the instructions at the site.

Creating an Electronic Cover Letter In the not-too-distant past, a cover letter was considered essential to the résumé-submission process. They were assumed to be a way of personalizing a query about a specific position, and job seekers spent many hours composing and formatting them. Little did they know that managers such as ourselves, facing a stack of hundreds of résumés, flipped straight past almost all cover letters and scanned the résumé for essential skills and experience. Later, we might glance at a cover letter attached to the résumé if we were considering an interview, but if all the contact information was included in the résumé, as it should be, we might well never look at the cover letter. All that work on a job seeker’s part for nothing. Well, both job seekers and employers have faced this reality, and today a cover letter is no longer considered essential. In fact, when you post your résumé to a job database, you usually can’t include a cover letter, and if you do, it is discarded. Most employers do the same. Any information about you that you want an employer to notice must be in your résumé. If you feel that you absolutely must include a cover letter when you submit a résumé via e-mail, place your comments first in the body of the message, and then copy and paste your résumé. Keep your cover letter contents brief, remembering that the reader will already most likely be checking the job title that begins your résumé.


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Searching for Jobs How you search for jobs on the Internet depends on how the individual site is structured. At some sites, you must first register even if you can search for free. In this section, we’ll look at how to search for a job at America’s Job Bank. At this site, you can post your résumé for free, and you can search the jobs database for free and without registering. You can search by occupation, keyword, military code, and job number. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Open the America’s Job Bank site. Go to http://www.ajb.dni.us/seeker. Figure 18-11 shows this site’s home page.

Figure 18-11 The America’s Job Bank site for job seekers.

2. Click the Search link.

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3. Select how to search. Click the link to Occupation, Keyword, Military Code, or Job Number. For purposes of example, click Occupation. You’ll see the page in Figure 18-12.

Figure 18-12

Searching by occupation at America’s Job Bank.

4. Select a job title. Click the Select Job Title button to open the page shown in Figure 18-13. Follow the onscreen instructions to select a job title. When you’ve made a selection, you’ll again see the Occupation Search page, which will display your job title in place of the Select Job Title button.


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Figure 18-13

Searching by job title at America’s Job Bank.

5. Start the search. You can now specify a location by entering a zip code and the number of miles from that zip code you’d be willing to work. To start the search, click Search Now. We searched on the job title Database Administrator and found 66 jobs within our geographical location. To view a job description, click the button in the View column. At the bottom of the job description page, click How To Apply for instructions on how to submit your résumé. Now, we don’t want to appear non-businesslike here, but is this cool or what? In less than five minutes, we found multiple job listings in our area, and in less than a couple of minutes more, a résumé could be arriving in the mail box of a potential employer. Sure beats the heck out of combing the Sunday classifieds and snail mail. TIP

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Before submitting your résumé, check out the company’s profile by using the techniques we suggested in Chapter 8.


Summary This chapter has focused on what we consider one of the most exciting and potentially life-changing aspects of the Internet—recruiting and job searching. Processes that in the past took weeks and months of precious time can now be reduced to minutes. If you are an employer who has not yet investigated Internet recruiting, you need to get on the bandwagon. Your competitors are already scooping up valuable employees because they use the Internet to get to them first. If you’re unemployed, your job is to find a job, and the way to do that the quickest and in the most efficient manner is to use the Internet. A job seeker who did use the Internet may already have the job of your dreams.


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Chapter 19

SETTING UP AND USING ONLINE BANKING

Featuring: • Understanding Online Banking • Prerequisites for Using Online Banking • Using Online Bill Payment • Prerequisites for Using Online Account Transfers and Statements • Using Online Account Transfers and Statements

P

ersonal financial programs like Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money and even small business accounting programs like Intuit QuickBooks let you simplify your financial affairs and record-keeping by using online bill payment and banking services. Because these services are becoming more widespread every year and more useful all the time, it’s worthwhile to discuss online banking in general, describe the specifics of using online banking, and review some of the practical problems the services suffer from. All of this information is provided in this chapter. NOTE

This chapter uses the Quicken personal finance program in examples because it’s the most popular personal finance and small business accounting program. Other personal finance programs work almost the same way, however. Small business accounting programs—including QuickBooks—work in a very similar manner.

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Understanding Online Banking When people talk in general about online banking, they actually refer to several banking activities, including online bill payment, online account transfers, and online statements. Each of these activities warrants a brief description. In addition, it makes sense to briefly discuss the prerequisites for using online banking.

Online Bill Payment Online bill payment refers to the automatic payment via the Internet for items you record in your accounting system. In the case where you’re recording payments using Quicken, for example, online bill payment means a payment you’ve entered in a Quicken register is automatically paid. In essence, when you use online bill payment, you tell the online payment service’s computer to use the information you’ve recorded about a particular payment for making the actual disbursement. NOTE

The cost for online bill payment service varies, depending on the bank. Currently, our banks charge $5.95 a month for both online bill payment and online banking for a personal account. The same banks charge $9.95 a month for both online bill payment and online banking for a business account. Does the price of the service seem expensive? If you consider how much it costs to mail a payment ($.33), it’s not so bad. And the check form you use to pay a bill may not be cheap. For business checks and computer checks, you can easily pay a dime per form. Using online bill payment can actually save you money.

One specialized form of online bill payment is online payroll. With online payroll services like that provided through the QuickBooks online payroll service, the online payment service uses payroll information to make electronic funds deposits, automatically make payroll deposits, and file quarterly and annual federal and state payroll tax returns. We have used QuickBooks online payroll service and found the service to be more unwieldy than a payroll service bureau like ADP or PayChex (perhaps because there’s not an expert you can ask for help whenever you need it) but more flexible (since you can do payroll whenever you want) and less expensive.

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NOTE

Online payroll services appear to run about half the cost of equivalent outside payroll service bureaus like ADP or PayChex. However, do recognize that with an online payroll service you will probably prepare and print the payroll checks, which means you will go to slightly more work if you choose the online payroll option.

Online Account T ransfers Transfers With online account transfers, you can use your account program to move money between accounts. You can, for example, move money from a checking account to a money market account. You can sometimes move money from bank accounts to liability accounts (like a credit card account or a loan account) if the accounts are all at the same bank. As with online bill payment, with online account transfers, you essentially tell the bank’s computer to use the information you’ve recorded about a particular transfer to make the transfer.

Online Bank Statements A third banking activity that’s part of online banking is the automatic retrieval of an electronic, or online, bank statement. This may be the most useful feature of online banking. By working with online bank statements, you can grab bank statements at any time and as often as you like. This means, of course, that you can reconcile bank accounts whenever and as often as you like. You can also easily determine when checks or deposits have cleared a bank whenever you want. Typically, online bank statements greatly simplify the work of reconciling an account. With Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks products and with Microsoft Money, for example, the program will actually make many of the comparisons between your records and the bank’s records. This is easy, of course, because it’s easy for the accounting program to compare your electronic records with the recently retrieved electronic bank statement.

Prerequisites for Using Online Banking To use online bill payment, you need a connection to the Internet and a client (like Quicken, QuickBooks, or Microsoft Money) that will send payment and banking instructions to your bank. If you want to use online banking, you also need a bank that supports online banking functions. Chapter 19


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NOTE

Currently, about 75 banks and credit unions support online banking, and this number is constantly increasing. In an effort to increase the number of banks offering this service, Intuit, Microsoft, and CheckFree (another online bill payment service) have created an alliance, called the Open Financial Exchange. The objectives of this alliance are to make online exchange of financial information easier and to encourage greater numbers of financial institutions to participate in online banking.

If you want to use only online bill payment, you can use any bank. You will, however, need to sign up with an online bill payment service such as Intuit’s. (When you sign up with an online bill payment service, you give the service permission to write checks and make electronic disbursements from your existing bank account.)

Caveats About Online Bill Payment Although the businesses charging you fees for online financial services and the software companies selling you online financial software don’t mention it, practical problems with online banking do exist. Online bill payment services require you to be more organized in your bill paying. You need to transmit electronic payment information to the online bill payment service a few days early so that the service has time to process your payment. If you’re always juggling those last few bills or closely watching your cash flow, this might not work. In the case of an individual using online banking, for example, you lose the option of paying the mortgage with a handwritten check on the last day and personally running the check down to the bank. NOTE If your Internet connection isn’t dependable—and sometimes ours aren’t—you also need to factor this into your bill-paying and banking schedule.

Another potential drawback is that some merchants don’t like to deal with electronic payments. Reportedly, some banks with their own online bill payment services have balked at accepting electronic bill payments through Intuit or another financial institution. To be candid, we have had trouble paying some bills electronically, which is understandable. Electronic payments can be a little confusing to merchants. The checks don’t look exactly like regular checks. (They aren’t signed, for example.) And there’s no way to include a remittance advice or payment coupon, which can be especially problematic if you’re sending money to a lockbox. 478


Signing Up for Online Banking Services For Intuit’s Quicken and QuickBooks products and for Microsoft Money, you sign up for an online bill-payment service by filling out the online services agreement that comes in the software package or by filling out forms that are available through your bank. You may need to include a voided check with your sign-up paperwork. Other programs’ online bill-payment services work in a similar way. A few days after you mail in your signed service agreement, you will get a welcome letter from either your bank or Intuit Services Corporation. The letter provides the information you need to set up your accounting program (Quicken, QuickBooks, Microsoft Money, or another program) for the online bill payment service. When you set up a bank account in your accounting program, you are prompted to enter information that the accounting program uses to connect to the online banking service and to uniquely identify the bank and the account. In Quicken, for example, when you go to the register for the first time, you see several links at the top of the register to assist you with banking online. Click the Enroll With Your Bank Or Banker hyperlink to learn about the services that your bank offers and apply for the services.

Using Online Bill Payment If you’re comfortable working with your accounting program, you’ll have no trouble with online bill payment. Once you’ve told the accounting program that you want to use the online bill payment feature with a particular account, the only extra tasks you need to complete are building a list of electronic payees (the merchants, banks, and individuals that the online bill payment service pays) and learning to electronically transmit payment instructions to the online bill payment service center.

Setting Up an Account for Online Bill Payment The steps you take to set up an account for online payment work are similar no matter which accounting program you use. NOTE

The following steps describe how to set up an online account using Quicken 2001 for Windows. Previous versions of Quicken and other accounting programs work, of course, in a slightly different manner.

To use Quicken to set up an account for online bill payment, follow these steps:

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1. Display the account’s register, and click the Overview tab. Click the account’s hyperlink in the Banking area to open that account’s register. 2. Click the Available, Not Enabled hyperlink next to Online Bill Payment. Quicken asks you to connect to the Internet (if you are not already connected), and information about your bank is downloaded into Quicken. Next, you see the Select Financial Institution dialog box. 3. Open the Edit Bank Account dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-1. Click the Yes option button next to Online Bill Payment, and then click Next.

Figure 19-1 The Edit Bank Account dialog box.

4. Enter your bank’s routing number. The welcome letter that you got from your bank or Intuit supplies this information. Click Next. 5. Enter your account number. Select an account type from the drop-down list box. 6. Enter your customer ID number. This is often your social security number. 7. Review your account description. Click Next twice to review the information that you provided, and then click Done. Once you’ve set up the account for online payments, you can identify those individuals, businesses, and merchants you want to pay electronically. You do this by setting up an electronic payees list.

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Describing Electronic Payees Before you can pay someone online, you need to add the person or business to a list of the merchants. To do this in Quicken, follow these steps: 1. Display the Online Payee List, as shown in Figure 19-2. Click the Banking menu, and click Online Payee List.

Figure 19-2 The Online Payee List.

2. Indicate you want to add a new online payee. Click New to open the Set Up Online Payee dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-3.

Figure 19-3 The Set Up Online Payee dialog box.

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3. Describe the online payee. Fill in the dialog box, and click OK. Then review the information in the Confirm Online Payee Information dialog box, and click Accept. If you have additional payees to describe, click the New button in the Online Payee List and go through the process again.

Paying a Bill with Online Bill Payment To pay a bill with online payment, you record the payment in the usual way but identify it as an online payment. In Quicken, you identify the payment as an online payment by clicking the Banking menu and then clicking Online Banking. When Quicken displays the Online Center, click the Payments tab, if necessary. Figure 19-4 shows this tab.

Figure 19-4 The Payments tab of the Online Center.

NOTE

The Payments tab of the Online Center is very similar to the Quicken check form, with a few important differences: there is an Account drop-down list box for selecting the account that you’re using, and the Pay To The Order Of line is labeled Payee.

You enter an electronic payment in almost the same way that you enter a regular check, with two differences: you must select which bank account you’re using for the payment, and when you get to the Payee line, you must specify an electronic payee.

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You can specify an electronic payee by entering a name in the Payee box. As you type, if the payee is on your Online Payee List, Quicken will attempt to automatically fill in the rest of the name. If the name is not on your list, when you click Enter, Quicken opens the Set Up Online Payee dialog box (see Figure 19-3) so that you can supply the information necessary to make an electronic payment. As you can see, you fill in an electronic payment form in the same way that you complete a check that you want to print. After you have filled out the form, click Enter. Quicken adds your payment to the list and displays its current status in the text box at the bottom of the window. Note that Quicken has not sent the payment to your bank yet. It is stored on your computer until you send your transactions to the bank by clicking Update/Send, as explained in the next section. TIP

Before you start using online payment to pay your bills, experiment with the feature by sending yourself an electronic payment for some nominal amount, such as $1.00. You’ll learn how long the online bill payment service takes to get payments to the payee, and you’ll understand how the service uses the electronic payee information you provide.

Sending Electronic Payments Once you’ve described all of your electronic payments, making the actual payments is a snap. All you do is connect to the online bill payment service’s computer or the bank’s computer and transmit your payment instructions. In Quicken, you would do this by displaying the Online Center (click the Banking menu and click Online Banking) and then clicking the Update/Send button at the top right of the window. Quicken connects to the Internet; as it does so, you will see a series of message boxes. Through the Internet, Quicken connects to the online bill payment service computer and opens the Instructions To Send dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-5. This dialog box shows a list of the online bill payments you have recorded up to that point, along with any other online transactions waiting to be sent.

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Figure 19-5 The Instructions To Send dialog box.

If you see an electronic payment in the Instructions To Send dialog box that you don’t want to transmit—or at least not yet—click it. This unmarks the electronic payment so Quicken won’t send it. When you want Quicken to send an unmarked electronic payment, click that payment to mark it again. If this is the first time you’re using online bill payment, the dialog box will look something like the one shown in Figure 19-5, though it might vary depending on your bank. Click Send. Quicken asks you for your existing personal identification number (PIN) and prompts you to change it to a new PIN for your online bill payment account. (Usually, on your first call-in, you use your ATM card PIN.) If this isn’t your first time using online bill payment, the dialog box shown in Figure 19-5 has an extra text box for your PIN. Just type your PIN in the Enter Your PIN box, and then click Send. Quicken sends your payment instructions. After the transmission is complete, Quicken opens the Online Transmission Summary dialog box.

Online Bill Payment and Security Online bill payment uses a PIN as a way to keep your account information private. When you instruct the online bill payment service computer to actually process payments, Quicken supplies your account number and you supply your PIN. The online bill payment service computer then verifies the numbers you and Quicken provided and lets you transmit payment instructions. While this process may sound dangerous—after all, someone only needs to know your account number and PIN to start tapping your account—this security system is the same one you now use with your automated teller machine (ATM) card. 484


As an extra measure of security, some of the banks that provide online bill payment services require you to change your PIN every time you transmit payment information. This little gambit means that even if someone discovered the PIN that you were using last week, it wouldn’t be any help this week. What’s more, if a miscreant did access your online bill payment account, he or she would need to change your PIN. In that case, the next time you tried to send payments, you would find that someone had accessed your account and changed your PIN. The bottom line is that PINs work very well as long as you keep the number a secret and don’t forget it. NOTE In Quicken, if you have online accounts with more than one bank, you can use a PIN Vault feature to store your account PINs in one place and enter a single password to connect to all the banks. To set up the PIN Vault, click the File menu, click PIN Vault, and then click Setup. Click Next to start the Setup Wizard. For each bank with which you have online services set up, select the bank from the drop-down list and enter the PIN in the two text boxes provided. Then enter and confirm the password you want to use for all your accounts. Review the summary the wizard provides, and click Done. The next time you use online services, you’ll need to enter only the single password you specified.

Making Recurring Online Payments You most likely pay some bills regularly, such as on a monthly basis. For example, mortgage, rent, car loan, and medical insurance payments are made regularly. To make it easier to pay repeating transactions, accounting programs like Quicken typically let you schedule an online payment transaction so that it is paid automatically until you tell the online payment service to stop paying it. For example, if you’re supposed to pay, say, a $1,000-per-month mortgage payment by the tenth of every month and you have 30 years of these monthly payments, you can tell your accounting program to send in your $1,000 every month by the tenth of the month. To create a repeating transaction in Quicken, follow these steps: 1. Open the Online Center to the Payments tab. Click the Banking menu, click Online Banking, and then click the Payments tab. 2. Open the Create Repeating Online Payment dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-6. Click the Repeating button. Chapter 19


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Figure 19-6 The Create Repeating Online Payment dialog box.

3. Provide the first payment date. In the First Payment text box, enter the date of the first repeating payment you’ll make using the online bill payment service. 4. Select the account you’ll use. If you have more than one account set up for online bill payment, select the account that will be used for the payment from the Account drop-down list box. 5. Identify the payee. Select the electronic payee from the Payee drop-down list box. 6. (Optional) Provide a memo description. Enter a description in the Memo box. 7. Categorize the payment. Use the Category drop-down list box to describe the payment as falling into some expense category. If you want to split the payment, click the Split button and then fill out the Split Transaction window. 8. Provide the payment amount. Enter the payment amount in the Amount box. 9. Describe the payment frequency. Select a payment frequency from the Frequency drop-down list box.

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10. Specify how many payments will be made. Use the Duration option buttons and the Stop After [X] Pmts box to describe how many payments you’ll make. For example, if you have a $1,000 rent check you’ll pay each month indefinitely, click the Unlimited option button. If you have a $1,000 mortgage payment you’ll pay monthly for 30 years, click the Stop After option button and enter 360 in the text box. (Thirty years of monthly payments is the same thing as 360 payments.) 11. Specify a payment reminder lead-time. Use the Prompt To Connect box to specify how far in advance Quicken should remind you to transmit this payment. In general, you should transmit payments about five days before they’re due. 12. Authorize the payment. Click the Authorize button. Quicken closes the Create Repeating Online Payment dialog box. To create additional online repeating payments, repeat steps 2 through 12.

Troubleshooting Problems with Electronic Payments When you have problems with an electronic payment, you do the same things you would do if the payment had been made with a paper check. If you’ve transmitted an electronic payment by mistake, you can try to stop payment. If you have questions about a particular payment, you can contact the bank or the online bill payment service.

Stopping a Payment To stop payment in Quicken, click the Banking menu and then click Online Banking to open the Online Center. Check the status of your payment in the list at the bottom of your screen. If it says Not Sent in the Status column, highlight the transaction by clicking it, and then click the Delete button. When Quicken asks you to confirm the deletion, click Yes. If the status message says Sent, click the transaction to highlight it, and then click the Cancel Payment button. Quicken asks you to confirm your stop-payment request, and then adds the payment cancellation to your list of instructions to send. The next time you connect to your bank, Quicken sends the instruction to cancel the payment. (This works only if your bank hasn’t already made the payment, of course.) If the stop-payment request works, Quicken voids the electronic payment.

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Getting Electronic Payment Information To see electronic payment information in Quicken, click the Banking menu and click Online Banking to open the Online Center. The list box at the bottom of the screen lists any current online transactions. To inquire about an earlier payment, click the Payments tab of the Online Center. Select a payment from the list, and click the Update/Send button to get the current status of a payment.

Getting Help from Y our Bank Your You can get help from your bank regarding electronic payments in two ways: • Call the bank at the number listed on your bank’s welcome letter. • Send the bank an e-mail message. To send an e-mail message to your bank using Quicken, follow these steps: 1. Open the Online Center to the E-Mail tab. Click the Banking menu, click Online Banking to open the Online Center, and then click the E-Mail tab, which is shown in Figure 19-7.

Figure 19-7 The E-Mail tab of the Online Center. 488


2. Indicate you want to create an e-mail message. Click Create to open the Create dialog box. 3. Describe the type of message you want to send. To describe the type of message you’re sending, select E-Mail About An Online Payment. Then select the online bill payment account on which you made the payment from the drop-down list box. If appropriate, select the individual online bill payment from the list box. 4. Write your message. Click OK. Quicken opens the E-Mail About An Online Payment dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-8. Write your message in the Message box, enter your name in the Sincerely box, and then click OK to add the message to the list of instructions to send to your bank.

Figure 19-8 Sending an e-mail inquiry to a bank.

Replies to your inquiries and any other e-mail messages from your bank are automatically “mailed” to you whenever you connect to your bank to do your online banking. Incoming messages are listed on the E-Mail tab of the Online Center. To read a mail message listed on the E-Mail tab, select it in the first list box by clicking it, then click the Read button. Quicken displays the message text in the Message box. To delete a message after you’ve read it, select the message and click the Delete button.

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Prerequisites for Using Online Account T ransfers Transfers and Statements With online account transfers, you can move money between accounts and even pay a credit card bill, if the credit card is issued by the bank with which you do your online banking. With online statements, you can receive your bank statement electronically and make account reconciliations very fast and easy. There aren’t any hard-and-fast prerequisites for using online account transfers and statements. However, you’ll find these online features easiest if you’ve been using the program (such as Quicken or Money or QuickBooks) for at least a few weeks and have performed one or two reconciliations on the accounts that you want to use. Of course, you’ll also need to sign up for online account transfers and online statements with your bank and have an Internet connection. NOTE

Your bank may use the term online banking to describe the set of online features where you can pay bills online, make online account transfers, and receive online statements.

Signing Up for Online Account T ransfers Transfers and Statements Signing up for online account transfers and statements isn’t difficult, but you do need to work with a bank that supports these online features. Telephone your bank and ask whether your bank provides online banking services using Quicken (or whatever other client you want to use). TIP

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If your bank doesn’t provide the service and you use Quicken, you can use the account program to find a bank that does provide the service. For example, in Quicken, you can find a bank by using the Finance menu’s Online Financial Institutions List. When you choose this command, Quicken connects to the Quicken.com Web site through the Internet and gets a list of the numerous major banks that provide online services in cooperation with Quicken. This list appears in the Financial Institution Directory. Read through the information to learn which services your bank or other banks in your area offer and how to contact a bank.


Setting Up for Online Account T ransfers Transfers and Statements As with online bill payment, you need to tell your account program if you want to use online account transfers and online statements. To do this with Quicken, follow these steps: 1. Display the account’s register, and click the Overview tab. Click the account’s hyperlink in the Banking area to open that account’s register. 2. Click the Available, Not Enabled hyperlink next to Online Bill Payment. Quicken asks you to connect to the Internet (if you are not already connected), and information about your bank is downloaded into Quicken. Next, you see the Select Financial Institution dialog box. 3. Identify the bank. If you’ve selected a financial institution that Quicken recognizes, Quicken displays the setup page for that institution. If you haven’t selected a financial institution that Quicken recognizes, Quicken displays a list of participating institutions. Click a hyperlink to see the online services offered at an institution. 4. Apply for online banking. After you’ve selected an institution, click the Tell Me More hyperlink to learn more about the services your bank offers. Click the Enroll hyperlink to apply for online services online. 5. Enable online banking. After you’ve applied and received any necessary setup information from your bank, click the Set Up Quicken hyperlink to open the Edit Bank Account dialog box. Click the Enable Online banking check box, and click Next. 6. Identify the bank or financial institution. You do this by providing your bank’s routing number. The welcome letter that you got from your bank should supply this information. 7. Identify the account. Enter your account number and select an account type from the drop-down list box. 8. Enter your customer ID number. Your customer ID may be your social security or taxpayer identification number. 9. Review your information. Click Next to display dialog boxes that let you review the information. Assuming the information is correct, click Done. Chapter 19


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Using Online Account T ransfers and Statements Transfers Once you’ve set up an account for online account transfers and online statements, using these online banking features is quite simple. The paragraphs that follow describe how these activities work in Quicken, but other accounting programs such as Microsoft Money and QuickBooks work in a similar fashion.

Transferring Funds Between Accounts If you have two or more accounts at the same institution and you want to transfer money between accounts, you simply identify the accounts and the transfer amount. To do this in Quicken, follow these steps: 1. Open the Online Center to the Transfers tab. Click the Banking menu, click Online Banking, and then click the Transfers tab, as shown in Figure 19-9.

Figure 19-9 The Transfers tab of the Online Center.

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2. Identify the accounts you’re moving money between. Use the Transfer Money From and To drop-down list boxes to identify the accounts you’re moving money between. 3. Identify the transfer account. Enter the amount of the transfer in the Amount box. 4. Record the transfer. Click Enter to add the transfer to the list of transactions to be sent to the financial institution. NOTE

The text box at the bottom of the tab lists all of the transfers you have recorded. To remove a transfer, click the transaction and then click Delete.

One final comment: Some financial institutions do not process transfers electronically; instead, they process the transfers manually at central clearinghouses. This procedure may cause a time lag between the time you send your transfer in and the time the bank actually processes it.

Retrieving Online Account Statements To retrieve your account balance and cleared transactions for all your online accounts, including bank accounts and credit card accounts, you simply connect to the bank’s computer and ask for the statement. To do this, follow these steps: 1. Open the Instructions To Send dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-10. Click the Update/Send button in the upper right of the Online Center.

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Figure 19-10 The Instructions To Send dialog box with online banking transactions.

2. Review your payment and transfer instructions. The Instructions To Send dialog box shows any of the transactions that online banking will send once it goes online. (Quicken automatically assumes that you will want to send any transactions.) If you do not want Quicken to send a particular transaction while online, click the transaction. Quicken removes the check mark to indicate that the transaction will not be sent. 3. Provide your PIN. Click in the Enter Your PIN box, and type in your PIN. (The bank included your PIN with the information it sent when you activated online banking.) 4. Send your account instructions. Click Send. Quicken connects to the bank and transfers the information from your computer to the bank. At the same time, online banking retrieves transactions from your bank and picks up any new transactions it can’t find in your register. Online banking also indicates which transactions have cleared the bank.

Approving Online T ransactions Transactions Quicken holds the transactions that it has downloaded so you can approve them before you put them in your account registers. To examine the transactions, click OK in the Online Transmission Summary dialog box, and then click the Transactions tab in the Online Center, as shown in Figure 19-11.

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Figure 19-11 The Transactions tab of the Online Center.

If you have more than one account at the financial institution, you can use the list box at the top of the tab to choose an account. Click the name of the account that you want to examine, and Quicken will display the data in the window below the list box. In Figure 19-11, you can see one disadvantage of online banking. Because banks don’t keep track of the names on the checks, all checks (like check number 1206 in Figure 19-11) look as though they’re made out to Check. If the check doesn’t match with one you’ve already entered in the register, you can enter the Payee name and assign the category as you enter the downloaded transaction in the register. Online banking does supply the Payee name for your credit card accounts or for debit purchases. Different banks handle the register details differently, however.

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To compare the downloaded data with your register, click the Compare To Register button. Quicken splits the window, with the register showing in the top half and the list of transactions underneath, as shown in Figure 19-12. Use the scroll bars in each section to move through the lists and compare transactions. To accept a single transaction and add it to your register, highlight the transaction by clicking it, and then click the Accept button. To accept all of the transactions at once, click Accept All. To remove a transaction without adding it to your register, click the transaction, and then click Delete.

Figure 19-12 Comparing the online transactions with the account register.

Corresponding with the Bank If you have any questions, comments, or problems about your online account transfer transactions or your online statement, you can correspond directly with your bank via e-mail. Your messages are automatically transferred with your transactions.

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To do this in Quicken, you click the E-Mail tab of the Online Center. To send a message to your bank, click the Create button in the E-Mail tab. In the next dialog box, click the E-Mail About Online Account option button to send your bank a message regarding its online banking services. After you click OK, Quicken opens the Message To [Your Financial Institution] dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-13. Fill in the text boxes to identify yourself, the subject of your message, and the account in question. Enter your message. To send your message, click OK. Quicken adds your message to the list of transactions. Quicken does not actually send your message to the bank until the next time you click Update/Send to transfer your transactions.

Figure 19-13 Writing a message to your financial institution.

Replies to your inquiries and any other e-mail messages from your bank are automatically “mailed” to you whenever you connect to your bank to do your online banking. Incoming messages are listed on the E-Mail tab of the Online Center. To read a message, highlight it by clicking it and then click Read. Quicken opens a window containing your message. You can print the message by clicking the Print button.

Reconciling an Online Bank Account You reconcile, or balance, online bank accounts in a manner very similar to the way you balance other bank accounts. In Quicken, for example, you use the Reconcile Online Account dialog box, as shown in Figure 19-14. To use this dialog box, you first indicate whether you want to balance against a paper statement you’ve received through the mail or against the most recent online balance you’ve retrieved.

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Figure 19-14 The Reconcile Online Account dialog box.

Once you choose which balance you want to reconcile against, Quicken displays the Reconcile Bank Statement area, as shown in Figure 19-15. You use this area to indicate which transactions have cleared the bank. As you do, Quicken calculates a cleared balance figure at the bottom of the screen. When this amount equals the statement balance, you’ve reconciled your account.

Figure 19-15 The Reconcile Bank Statement area.

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NOTE

In general, online accounts are extremely easy to reconcile. The reason is that you can more frequently reconcile the accounts—even as much as every day. This means you quickly catch the sorts of errors that make manual reconciliations tedious and time-consuming.

Summary Online banking isn’t quite the experience that the banks and software companies promise. Yet that’s really too bad because the unmet promises of online banking can obscure the positive features. Online banking, account transfers, and statements already offer true convenience and timesavings to individuals and businesses with heavy accounting duties. And these online banking services are only getting better. Even now, there’s little reason not to take advantage of them.

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Chapter 20

SETTING UP AND USING ONLINE INVESTING

Featuring: • What Is Online Investing? • Picking a Broker • How Online Investing Works • Resources for Online Investors • Record-Keeping for Online Investing

P

age through the Wall Street Journal or any other major newspaper and you’ll notice the numerous advertisements for online brokerage services. Online brokerage services have become extremely popular because they offer low commissions to investors and easy access to investment information and resources.

NOTE

While a traditional, full-service broker might charge you as much as $100 to buy or sell a security, online brokerage services often charge only a few dollars to buy or sell a security.

Despite the popularity of online investing, however, not every online investing activity is easy. Accordingly, this final chapter discusses how to set up and use online investing.

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What Is Online Investing? Online investing, in a nutshell, simply means you use your Web browser and an Internet connection to give buy or sell instructions to a broker. You make these transactions using a Web form. Web forms vary from one online broker to the next, but, in general, the Web form simply provides a space for you to identify the security you want to buy or sell, the type of buy or sell transaction you want to place, and an expiration date for an order. (We discuss all of these items in more detail later in the chapter.) After you describe a sale or purchase you want to make by filling in the fields on the Web form, you click a Send button to transfer this information to the online broker’s computers. These computers then place your order at the appropriate securities exchange, and assuming there is somebody willing to transact with you, the computer takes care of either buying or selling the securities. Even though your computer and the Internet seem to promise instant satisfaction, there is a lag time in processing the transaction while your order reaches the online broker’s server. (This might take some time if the Internet or your online broker is experiencing heavy traffic.) You also need to wait for someone to accept the order. (Simply asking to buy a stock at a particular price or saying that you want to sell a bond at a particular price doesn’t mean somebody else is willing to buy or sell at that exact moment.)

Picking a Broker Picking the best online broker for your specific situation generally involves two factors: the cost of the online broker’s services and the range of the services you need.

Considering Net Investment Costs The cost of an online broker is sometimes confusing—at least at first glance. In general, your investing costs include three items: the cost per trade, the account maintenance fee (if any), and the interest income you’ll earn on your cash account. NOTE

We’ll use the term net investment costs to describe the sum of your trading commission expenses (a positive number), any account maintenance fee expenses (a positive number), and the interest income (a negative number).

Assume, for example, that your broker charges you $10 per trade and a $50 annual maintenance fee, and that your cash account will earn 2%. If you trade (buy or sell) 50 502


times a year and carry $25,000 in cash in your associated cash account, your estimated costs total: $10 * 50 trades + $50 annual fee - 2% * $25,000 = $25 net costs While $25 of net investment costs might seem minimal—especially considering the modest $10 commission paid for a trade—consider another example. Assume your broker charges you $30 a trade, no annual maintenance fee, and that your cash account will earn 4%. In this case, your estimated costs total: $30 * 20 trades + $0 annual fee - 4% * $25,000 = $0 net costs Clearly, then, considering costs means looking at more than just the trading commission. Account maintenance fees (if these are charged) and interest rates paid on cash accounts (whenever you’ll have large cash balances) can mean an online broker that looks cheap may be just as expensive as some other, seemingly overcharging broker.

Considering Investment Services Obviously, you want to make sure that the broker you choose lets you buy and sell the sorts of securities you want to invest in. You also want to make sure the online broker provides any ancillary services that you need for your investing—such as access to online research reports. The major business newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and monthly magazines like Smart Money, Worth, and Money regularly debate the strengths and weaknesses of the popular, large online brokerage services. If you haven’t yet picked an online broker, you may want to keep your eye out for feature articles in any of these periodicals that discuss which online brokerage services seem to be the most popular and working best for investors. Before you make a firm decision on an online brokerage service, you need to know that your broker will allow you to electronically retrieve your brokerage account statement. In other words, you want to make sure that your broker will prepare an electronic version of the monthly account statement that you can then automatically download into the personal accounting program you use for investment record-keeping. As a practical matter, this means that you want to be able to download an electronic statement into either Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money. By having an online brokerage service that provides this service, you almost eliminate your investment bookkeeping. The online brokerage service does the transaction entry work described later in the chapter. Chapter 20


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Signing Up for an Account Once you select an appropriate broker, you will need to follow their instructions for setting up your online brokerage account. This probably involves filling out an application. You will also need to get an account name, an account number, and a password, which you’ll use to identify yourself to the online broker’s Web server. (The process of applying for and being approved for an online brokerage account takes several days.) You also typically provide your initial investment of funds as part of this process.

Choosing an Online Portfolio An online portfolio is an investing option that represents a hybrid between a mutual fund account and an online investment account. Online portfolios allow you to build a portfolio of stocks for a set fee. For example, at the time we were writing this late in 2000, a new service called Folio fn allowed you to buy as many as 150 stocks for either $29.95 a month or $295 a year. That seems expensive, but if you want to take a passive investment approach and you have significant funds to invest, an online portfolio may make sense. On a $300,000 portfolio, for example, $295 is roughly .1%, which is roughly half of the expense ratio on the hugely popular Vanguard Index 500 mutual fund and the new electronically traded funds that let investors buy indexes. The other interesting feature of an online portfolio for taxable investors is that these portfolios let you easily harvest tax losses. For example, if you had invested in a portfolio of 80 stocks, even though the portfolio showed an overall gain, you could sell stocks with unrealized capital losses to trigger deductible capital losses.

How Online Investing W orks Works Once you’ve applied for and been approved for an online investing account and have received your account number, account name, and password, you are ready to begin buying and selling securities. You are also ready to begin using the online brokerage services research tools to research securities you may want to buy or may want to sell.

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Connecting to the Broker’ eb Site Broker’ss W Web To begin your investment activities, start your Web browser and, if necessary, establish an Internet connection. Then enter the online brokerage service’s URL in the Address box of your Web browser. Figure 20-1 shows the Welcome screen that one popular online investment service, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online (http:// www.online.msdw.com/), presents when you initially visit the site.

Figure 20-1 The Welcome screen at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online.

Once you are at the online broker’s home page, you typically click the Log In hyperlink to display a Web form that asks for your account number or name and your password, as shown in Figure 20-2. Fill in the appropriate box or input blank, and then click the Log In or Sign In or Submit button. Assuming you have entered a valid account number and password combination, the online brokerage Web server allows you to begin using the Web site’s tools.

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Figure 20-2 The login form assures that only you can access your account and funds.

You’ll benefit by spending some time exploring the online brokerage service’s Web site before you ever attempt to place an order to buy or sell securities. Most of the popular Web sites provide a rich set of tools and resources to investors. You can often get an analyst’s research for securities you are interested in buying or selling. You can get historical price and volume information about securities—such as the graph of the securities prices over the last year. Or you can often use the online broker’s Web site for brokerage account maintenance activities, such as changing the e-mail address the online brokerage uses to communicate with you, changing your password, or providing new mailing address information.

Buying and Selling Securities Online To buy or sell a security, click the button or hyperlink that leads to an order form. Figure 20-3, for example, shows the stock order form that investors use to place orders with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online.

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Figure 20-3 The order form at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online.

To use this stock order form, simply fill in the blanks. In general, no matter which online investment service you use, you take the following steps: 1. Indicate what kind of order you are placing. Select an entry from the Buy/Sell drop-down list box. 2. Indicate purchase or sale quantity. For example, tell the broker how many shares of a stock you want to buy or sell. 3. Identify the security. Enter the ticker symbol in the Symbol box. If you don’t know the symbol for a security, click the TickerSearch hyperlink to search for the security symbol.

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4. (Optional) Set a limit price if you want to buy or sell a security—but only if it can be bought for a specified price. Enter this price in the Limit Price box. Note that you would often use a market order, which is just an order to buy or sell a security at its current market price. However, you can also set a price, or limit, that you want. If you set a limit on a buy order, you’re saying you want to buy only if the price is below the limit. If you set a limit on a sell order, you’re saying you want to sell only if the price is above the limit. Note that if the market price never moves past the limit, your order will not go through. NOTE

A market order is an order placed to buy or sell at the current market price. During market hours, you can follow the market price on online brokerage service Web sites by looking up a real-time quote. Some companies charge for this service, while others provide free, unlimited real-time quotes to account holders.

5. (Optional) Set a stop price if you want to buy or sell a security—but only if it moves past a certain point. Again, you would probably most often use market orders. However, you can also set a price that the market price needs to move past before your order is processed. If you set a stop order on a buy, the stop price is the price at which the market price needs to move past for your order to be placed and hopefully processed. If you set a stop order on a sell, the stop price is the price at which the market price needs to move past for your order to be placed and hopefully processed. 6. Identify which account you will use for funds. Select an account type from the Account Type drop-down list box. For example, if you’re buying or selling securities using cash in your money market, cash, or sweep account, select this entry. If you were instead using margin, select this entry. If you were shorting a security—this means selling a security you don’t own or buying back a security to cover a previously created short position—select this entry. 7. Describe the type of order. Select an order type from the Order Type drop-down list box. For example, if you want to place a market order—that means you are willing to buy or sell the security at the market price—select this entry. If instead you want to buy a stock only at a limit price, select the Limit Order Type. If you want to buy a stock only at the stock price, select the Stock Order Type. You can also specify that the order type is a stop limit order.

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8. Indicate the duration of the order. Select an entry from the Duration drop-down list box. Day means the order is good for a day, and GTC, which stands for “good ’til canceled,” means that the order stays outstanding until either it’s executed or you cancel it. Figure 20-4 shows a completed order.

Figure 20-4 A completed order at the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online Web site.

After you have described in detail an order you want to place, click a Send, Place, or Pre-Submit button. Figure 20-4, for example, shows a Pre-Submit button. The online brokerage service then displays a confirmation window that describes your order, as shown in Figure 20-5. Use this window to review the order description and make sure that the order is as you want. The Verify Order window typically also identifies the estimated commission and any fees, as well as the net proceeds you will receive.

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Figure 20-5 The Verify Order window.

Assuming the order is correct, click the Place Order, Order Now, or Submit button. The brokerage service then places your order. Probably within a few seconds your order will be executed and you will have either sold or purchased securities. The online brokerage service may provide you with a Web page that lists your pending orders. Typically, you can use this pending order Web page to monitor which orders you have outstanding. You will also typically have a Web page that lets you confirm the details of any executed orders. Figure 20-6 shows the Web page that the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online brokerage Web site uses.

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Figure 20-6 A View Orders Web page.

Resources for Online Investors As mentioned throughout this book, the Internet gives you access to a plethora of online resources useful for performing investment research and making better investment decisions. No list of online investing resources can ever be complete—and if it was complete, it would quickly be out-of-date—but the major directories of online investing resources are the places you want to begin your search for good sites. There are numerous sites, but the paragraphs that follow give you some great places to start your search.

Investing in Stocks The Investing in Stocks Web site at http://www.investinginstocks.com provides a rich and thorough directory of top financial Web sites, investment super sites, research tools, news sites, magazines, message boards, investment software tools and utilities, online brokers, mutual funds, and day trading sites. This is a great place to begin exploration of the world of online investing resources.

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Quote.Y ahoo.com Quote.Yahoo.com Not surprisingly, the Quote.Yahoo site also provides a rich directory of Web resources useful for online investors. The Quote.Yahoo.com (http://quote.yahoo.com) site provides delayed stock quotes, graphs of price and volume data, a portfolio tracker, and thoughtprovoking, lively message boards.

Wall Street Research Net The Wall Street Research Net site at http://www.wsrn.com provides another powerful directory of Web sites useful to online investors. The Wall Street Research Net site, for example, provides links to more than a half million financial sites and provides investment information on more than 10,000 companies. The site also supplies a directory of popular business news sites.

Record-Keeping for Online Investing In order to keep records of your online investing activities, you’ll need to get a personal record-keeping program such as Quicken or Microsoft Money. Both programs work well, but Quicken is the more popular and more powerful tool, so we’ll discuss how record-keeping works with Quicken. NOTE

The steps for Microsoft Money for investment record-keeping closely parallel those described below. For this reason, even if you are using Microsoft Money, you may still want to read through the following paragraphs.

Downloading Investment Records Quicken supports online investing for many of the popular online brokerage services. This means that you don’t have to record the transactions you effect with an online investment account. Instead, you can tell Quicken to retrieve these transactions directly from the online investment broker. To work with your online investment account, start Quicken, click the Investing menu, and click Online Investing Setup. Then follow the onscreen instructions for setting up your account.

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To download investment instructions from your online investment service, click the Investing menu, click Online Investing, and then click Update/Send. With the help of your Web browser, the online broker’s Web site downloads the investment transactions directly into your register, as shown in Figure 20-7. NOTE

The Online Investing command doesn’t appear on the Investing menu until you’ve successfully set up an account for online service.

Figure 20-7 An investment account register in Quicken.

NOTE

All of the transactions shown in the register in Figure 20-7 were downloaded directly into the register from the online broker’s Web site.

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Keeping Manual Investment Records If you’re forced to use an online broker that won’t let you automatically download account transactions into your record-keeping system, you need to perform this record-keeping manually. Again, let us say that if at all possible you want to avoid this work— especially if you’re actively buying and selling securities. However, if you can’t avoid this manual record-keeping, you can use the instructions below to explain how to do most of this accounting.

Setting Up an Investment Account To track investments in Quicken, you need to set up an investment account. Your investment transactions will be recorded in this account. You typically set up an investment account for each mutual fund in which you own shares and each brokerage account in which you hold securities. To set up an investment account, click the Finance menu and click Account List to open the Account List. Click New to open the Create New Account dialog box. Click the appropriate Investment option button, click Next, and then provide the information that Quicken asks for: the account name, whether there’s a linked cash account (for storing cash), information about the account’s tax status, and so on. After you set up the account, select the investment account from the Account List and click Open to open the Create Opening Share Balance dialog box. Usually, you don’t want to use this dialog box because it doesn’t allow you to enter the actual cost data that is useful for tax calculations, so click Cancel to close this dialog box without entering data.

Naming the Stocks or Securities Y ou Hold You To name the stocks or securities you hold once you’ve provided the starting cash balance, display the brokerage account’s register, click the Investing menu, and click Security List to open the Security List. Then click New to open the Set Up A New Security dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-8. You also use the Set Up A New Security dialog box to describe each new security you buy by filling in the boxes that Quicken provides.

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Figure 20-8 The Set Up A New Security dialog box.

Purchasing Shares Quicken provides two methods for recording transactions such as share purchases: You can enter a purchase transaction directly into the register. You can also use an investment form dialog box to collect the share purchase transaction and then have Quicken enter the purchase transaction in the register for you. To enter the first and any subsequent purchases of mutual fund shares directly into the register, display the investment register, as shown in Figure 20-9, and move to the first empty row of the register.

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Figure 20-9 An investment register with some share purchases.

1. Provide the purchase date. Enter the purchase date in the Date text box. Be sure to enter the actual purchase date and not the date you mailed the check to the mutual fund management company or the broker or the date you recorded the purchase. Quicken categorizes any capital gain or loss as short-term or long-term based on the difference between the purchase and sales dates shown in the register. 2. Enter the appropriate purchase action. If you made this purchase sometime in the past, enter the action as ShrsIn. Place the cursor in the Action box and type ShrsIn, or select the ShrsIn entry from the Action drop-down list box. If this is a purchase you’re currently making, enter the action as BuyX. Type BuyX in the Action box, or select that entry from the Action drop-down list box.

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3. Name the security you’re purchasing. You can select a security from the Security drop-down list box. Or if you are purchasing this security for the first time, enter the security name and Quicken will prompt you for the additional information it needs. 4. Provide the share price. Enter the price per share you paid in the Avg. Cost or Price box. (Quicken changes the name of the box that holds the share price data from Avg. Cost to Price if you record a BuyX transaction.) You can enter the share price in dollars and cents, such as 10.125, or in dollars and eighths, such as 10 1/8. 5. Provide either the number of shares purchased or the total purchase amount. Enter the number of shares you purchased in the Shares box or the total amount you paid in the Basis or Amount box. (Quicken changes the name of the box that holds the total price from Basis to Amount if you record a BuyX transaction.) Quicken calculates whatever piece of data you didn’t enter. For example, if you enter the price as $10.00 and the number of shares as 100, Quicken calculates the total as $1,000.00. 6. (Optional) Record additional information. If you want to record some additional piece of information, such as the order number, use the Memo box. 7. If necessary, record the transfer account. If you’re recording a BuyX action, use the XFer Acct box to show which account you used to pay for the purchase. If you enter an account name in the XFer Acct box, Quicken records a payment transaction in the account equal to the value you enter in the XFer Amt box. 8. If necessary, provide the commission paid. If you’re recording a BuyX action, either enter the amount you paid for the shares and any commission in the XFer Amt box or enter the commission you paid in the Comm Fee box. (If you purchased shares of a no-load mutual fund, the commission equals zero.) Quicken calculates whatever piece of data you didn’t enter. For example, if you enter the total paid for the mutual fund shares as $1,000.00 and the commission as $50.00, Quicken calculates the XFer Amt as $1,050.00.

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9. Click Enter to record the transaction. Quicken records the transaction into the investment register and moves to the next empty row of the register so you can enter another transaction. If you entered the Action as BuyX, Quicken also records a payment transaction in the XFer Acct. The last transaction in the investment register shown in Figure 20-9 shows a BuyX transaction recording the purchase of Labor Ready at 3 3/4. NOTE

Instead of recording information directly into the investment register, you can use the Buy/Add Shares dialog box to record a current purchase or an earlier purchase of mutual fund shares. To do this, display the investment account in a register, move the cursor to the next empty row of the investment register, and click the Easy Actions button to open the Easy Actions menu. Click Buy/Add Shares to open the Buy/Add Shares dialog box. Use this dialog box’s buttons and boxes to describe the purchase.

Describing Mutual Fund Profit Distributions To record a mutual fund distribution you receive by check using an income form, display the investment account’s register, move the cursor to the next empty row of the register, click the Easy Actions button, and then click Record An Income Event to open the Record Income dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-10.

Figure 20-10 The Record Income dialog box.

To record the distribution, enter the distribution date in the Date box; enter the mutual fund security name in the Security box; enter the appropriate distribution amounts in the Dividend box, the Cap. Gain Dist Short box, and the Cap. Gain Dist Long box; and enter the name of the account in the Transfer Account box. If you need to collect any additional information, use the Memo box.

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Quicken takes the information entered in the Record Income dialog box and records transactions in the investment register. Quicken records one transaction for each type of distribution. Figure 20-11 shows the investment register with a $250 dividend distribution, a $25 short-term capital gain distribution, and a $75 long-term capital gain distribution. (These are the last transactions shown in the register.)

Figure 20-11 How Quicken records an income distribution in the register.

As noted earlier, you don’t need to use the Record Income dialog box to enter income distribution transactions in an investment register, but it makes things easier. To record them directly into the register, enter each distribution individually (see Figure 20-11). NOTE

When you reinvest a mutual fund distribution, you essentially combine two of the transactions already described in this chapter: receiving a distribution and buying shares. You can record this sort of transaction directly into the register, but as with income distributions you don’t reinvest, the easiest approach is to use the Reinvest Income form, which works like the Record Income form. To display the Reinvest Income, open the investment account’s register, click the Easy Actions button, and click Reinvest Income. Chapter 20


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Describing the Share Sales To record the sale of shares using an investment form, display the investment account’s register, click the Easy Actions button and click Sell/Remove Shares to open the Sell/ Remove Shares dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-12.

Figure 20-12 The Summary tab of the Sell/Remove Shares dialog box.

To record the share sale, enter the sale date in the Date box; enter the security in the Security box; enter the number of shares being sold in the # Of Shares box; enter the share sales price in the Price/Share box; and enter the sales commission you are paying, if any, in the Commission box. If you’re recording a current sale, indicate the account into which you’ll deposit the sales proceeds by clicking the Yes, To option button in the Record Proceeds? section of the dialog box; and then select the account from the Yes, To drop-down list box. Otherwise, if you’re recording an earlier sale and don’t want to adjust a bank account balance for the sale, click the No option button in the Record Proceeds? section of the dialog box. If you want to specifically identify the shares, click the Specify Lots button and use the Specify Lots For dialog box to specifically identify as many shares as you’ve said you’ll sell, as shown in Figure 20-13. If you don’t use the Specify Lots button to specifically identify the shares you’re selling, Quicken uses a first-in, first-out costing assumption to calculate the capital gain or loss on the sale. In other words, it assumes the shares you sell are always those you’ve held the longest.

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Figure 20-13 The Specify Lots dialog box.

Recording Account Fees If you write a check to pay an account fee, you don’t need to do anything special in the investment register. You just write the check in the usual way. Categorize the check that pays an account fee as investment expense or a similar expense category. Items such as an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) and custodial fees are miscellaneous deductions. At the time we’re writing this, a miscellaneous deduction in excess of 2 percent of your adjusted gross income may be used as an itemized deduction. If you sell shares (or, more likely, the mutual fund manager sells shares) to pay an account fee, you need to do a little more work to record the account fee. You need to record a SellX transaction in the investment register, as described in the preceding section “Describing the Share Sales.” There’s a slight trick to recording this type of SellX transaction. The entry for the commission or fee equals the total sales amount. For example, if you record the sale of $10 of mutual fund shares to pay for, say, a $10 account fee, both the Total Amount and Comm/Fee boxes show 10. The XFer Amt box, as a result, shows as 0. (When you record this transaction, Quicken sets the Price box value back to 0, so both the Price and XFer Amt boxes show 0.)

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If you use the Sell/Remove Shares dialog box (displayed when you click Sell/Remove Shares on the Easy Actions menu) to record an account fee transaction, you enter the number of shares you need to sell to pay the account fee, the sales price per share, and the commission. If you’ve correctly entered these inputs, the total sale shows as zero because the commission—really the account fee—consumes the entire sales proceeds. NOTE

Check with your tax advisor concerning investment expenses such as account maintenance fees paid for by selling shares. While the approach described here is the only one you can easily do in Quicken, it causes your account maintenance fees to show up as capital losses equal to whatever you originally paid for the shares. Unfortunately, this overstates your capital loss by the amount of the account fee and understates your investment expenses by the amount of the account fee. On your tax return, therefore, you need to adjust your capital losses or gains and your investment expenses (a possible miscellaneous deduction) for this discrepancy.

Recording Share Splits A share split occurs when the mutual fund or company gives each current shareholder new shares. In a two-for-one split, for example, a shareholder receives one new share for each share already held. Someone who holds 100 shares prior to the split, for example, holds 200 shares after the split. You can record share splits directly into the register or with an investment form, but the investment form approach is easiest. To record a share split transaction using an investment form, display the investment account in a register, click the Easy Actions button and click Stock Split to open the Stock Split dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-14.

Figure 20-14 The Stock Split dialog box.

To describe the share split, enter the split date in the Date box, enter the mutual fund or stock that’s splitting in the Security box, enter the number of new shares equal to one old share in the New Shares box, and enter the number of old shares in the Old Shares box. 522


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You can edit investment account transactions using either the register or the form used to originally enter the transaction.

Tracking Market V alues Values To provide the current price-per-share information to Quicken, display the Portfolio View of the investment account by clicking the Portfolio button at the top of the register or by clicking the Investing menu and then clicking Portfolio View. Figure 20-15 shows this view.

Figure 20-15 The Portfolio View window.

The Portfolio view lists each of the securities you hold within each account. The abbreviation “est.” shows next to the prices of those security prices that are only estimates. To track the market value of a security, select the security and then enter the current market price in the Price column.

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Updating Prices Online You can quickly and easily retrieve security price information using Quicken. If you have an Internet connection and have entered ticker symbols for all the securities you want to track, Quicken can update the prices and adjust the market values automatically. Simply click the Update button in the Portfolio view, and then click Get Online Quotes. Click the Update Now button or click the Customize button to open the Customize Investment Download dialog box (not shown in a figure). Here you can specify the securities for which you want to get updated prices. Click OK, then click Update Now to connect to the Internet and download the information you requested. As you do this, you will see a series of messages as Quicken connects, transmits, and receives information over the Internet.

Recording Interest Income It’s likely that you’ll earn interest or other income on the cash balances you hold in your brokerage account. To record this interest or income, click the Easy Actions menu, click Record An Income Event, and then fill out the Record Income dialog box as described earlier in the chapter. The only difference in recording cash balance interest and miscellaneous brokerage account income rather than stock income is that you don’t identify a specific security.

Reconciling Investment Accounts You can reconcile mutual fund investment accounts and brokerage investment accounts. In a mutual fund, you reconcile just the shares. In a brokerage account, you reconcile shares and the cash balance. Mechanically, reconciling an investment account works like reconciling a bank account. If you’re comfortable using Quicken and have reconciled a bank account, you’ll have no problem reconciling an investment account.

Short Sales To record a short sale transaction in Quicken, you just sell a stock you don’t own. To show that these are shares you actually owe your broker, Quicken displays the number of shares and the current market value as negative amounts in the Portfolio view. To record the transaction in which you close out your short position by buying the stock you’ve previously sold, you record a stock purchase in the usual way.

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Margin Loans and Margin Interest If you purchase a security and the total purchase cost exceeds the cash balance in a brokerage account, Quicken assumes that you’ve borrowed the needed cash on margin from your broker. To show the margin loan, it displays the cash balance as a negative value. To record margin loan interest in cases where you have a linked cash account, you record the margin loan interest as an expense when you record the withdrawal from the linked cash account that pays the margin interest. To record margin loan interest in cases where you don’t have a linked cash account, click the Easy Actions menu, click Advanced, and then click Margin Interest Expense. When Quicken opens the Margin Interest Expense dialog box, use it to describe the margin interest.

Writing Calls and Puts A call is an option to buy a share of stock. A put is an option to sell a share of stock. You may write, buy, or exercise calls and puts. When you write a call or put, what you really do is collect money from someone in return for promising the person the option, or chance, to buy or sell a share of stock at a specified, or strike, price by some future date. When a call or put expires without being exercised—and this is the usual case—recording the transaction is simple. If you’re the one writing the call or put, just record the transaction as miscellaneous income. If you’re the one buying the call or put, you just record the option purchase the way you do any other stock purchase. If the call or put expires and becomes worthless, just record the sale as a stock purchase with the amount set to zero. (This is the most common case.) If, on the other hand, you sell the call or put before the expiration date because the call or put can be profitably exercised, you record the sale as a stock sale with the amount set to whatever you sell the option for.

Exercising Calls and Puts You probably won’t actually exercise a call or put. You’ll probably sell it, as described above. If you do exercise a call or buy option, however, you need to record two transactions.

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To record the exercise of a call option, first record a transaction that sells the call option for zero. Then record a transaction that purchases the optioned number of shares at the option price. To record the exercise of a put option, first record a transaction that sells the put option for zero. Then record a transaction that sells the optioned number of shares at the option price. NOTE

For income tax purposes, what you pay for a call needs to be counted as part of the purchase price if you exercise the call option and purchase shares. What you receive for a put needs to be counted as part of the sales price if you exercise the put and sell shares. This can get complicated, so you may want to consult your tax advisor.

Describing Bond Purchases Whenever you buy additional bonds, you need to record the purchase and any accrued interest, so you actually record two transactions. As with stocks and mutual funds, you can record bond purchases directly into the register or by using an investment form. Because the investment form approach is easier, it’s the one we’ll describe here. NOTE

Bond prices are quoted as a percentage of their face, or par, value. A $1,000 par value bond that sells for $950, for example, has a price of 95. Because Quicken calculates the total security amount as the price times the quantity, however, you can’t enter the bond price as a percentage. Instead, you need to enter the actual dollar price. To describe a bond you’ve purchased for $950, for example, you enter the price as $950.

To record a bond purchase, follow these steps: 1. Open the Buy/Add Shares dialog box. Click the Easy Actions menu, and click Buy/Add Shares to open the Buy/Add Shares dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-16.

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Figure 20-16 The Buy/Add Shares dialog box.

2. Record the purchase date, bond name, and number of bonds purchased. Enter the purchase date in the Date box, enter the bond name in the Security box, and enter the quantity of bonds you purchased in the # Of Shares box. 3. Enter the dollar price per bond you paid in the Price/Share box. Remember that Quicken expects you to enter the actual dollar price you paid, not the price as a percentage of the bond’s face, or par, value. You don’t include the accrued interest in the bond price in step 3. You record that bit of information later. 4. Enter the brokerage commission you paid in the Commission box. You can enter any three of the following four inputs: number of shares, price, commission/fee, or total of sale. Using the three values you do enter, Quicken calculates the fourth value. 5. Identify the cash you’ll use for the purchase. If you will use cash from some other account for the purchase instead of cash from the brokerage account, click the Yes, From option button and use the box to enter the name of the account. Do this only if you’re not using a linked cash account. 6. Record the transaction. Click Done. Quicken records the transaction. After you record the bond purchase, you usually need to record accrued interest paid to the previous holder. In effect, what you’re really doing by paying accrued interest is giving the previous bondholder his or her share of the next interest payment. To record this accrued interest, follow these steps: Chapter 20


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1. Open the Return Of Capital dialog box. Click the Easy Actions menu, and click Return Of Capital to open the Return Of Capital dialog box, as shown in Figure 20-17.

Figure 20-17 The Return Of Capital dialog box.

2. Describe the accrued interest. Enter the purchase date in the Date box and the bond or lot name in the Security box. In the Amount box, enter the accrued interest you paid as a negative number. If you want to identify the transaction as an accrued interest adjustment, use the Memo box. 3. Record the transaction. Click OK. Quicken records the accrued interest transaction.

Describing Bond Interest and Return of Capital Distributions Most bonds pay monthly or semiannual interest. In addition, some bonds—for example, mortgage-backed securities such as GNMA bonds—return a portion of the bond principal with each interest payment. NOTE

The 1099 statement, and probably also your brokerage statement, should tell you what kind of distribution you’ve received.

As with other investment transactions, you have a choice as to how you record bond interest and return of capital transactions. You can enter these transactions directly into the register, as discussed earlier in the chapter, or you can use an investment form. To record an interest payment, click the Easy Actions menu and then click Record An Income Event. In the Record Income dialog box, identify the interest payment date, the security paying the interest, and the amount. Fill in the Record Income dialog box’s text boxes as described earlier in this chapter. The steps for recording bond income are similar to those for recording stock or mutual fund income. 528


To record a return of capital distribution, including the payment of interest you previously accrued, click the Easy Actions menu and then click Return Of Capital. In the Return Of Capital dialog box, give the interest payment date, name the security paying the interest, and indicate the amount of previously accrued interest you’re now receiving.

Recording Accrued Interest Shown on a 1099-OID You aren’t always paid the interest that you’ve earned. If you purchase a negotiable certificate of deposit (CD), for example, the bank issuing the CD may accrue the interest you’ve earned through the end of the year and then add this amount to the CD’s value. If you purchase a zero-coupon bond, you don’t receive periodic interest payments at all. Rather, the bond issuer accrues interest each year and then repays the bond and the total accrued interest at maturity. Even though you aren’t paid interest, however, you need to record the interest you’ve earned because you need to report the accrued interest as taxable income. Fortunately, in most cases the bond issuer sends a 1099-OID form that reports the amount of accrued but not paid interest. NOTE

Bond issuers also report the amortization of original-issue discounts on 1099OID forms. In fact, OID stands for Original Issue Discount. Because originalissue discounts effectively increase the annual interest earnings, you also need to record these amounts.

To record accrued interest, you actually record two transactions, as mentioned earlier in this chapter in the discussion of how to record a bond purchase when the purchase price includes accrued interest. This is what you do: • Click the Easy Actions menu, click Record An Income Event, and then complete the Record Income dialog box. • Click the Easy Actions menu, click Return Of Capital, and then fill in the Return Of Capital dialog box. Describe the accrued but unpaid interest as a negative return of capital. (This is the same technique used earlier in the chapter to deal with accrued interest paid with a bond purchase.) NOTE

By entering the return of capital as a negative number, Quicken increases the bond cost, or carrying value, by the accrued interest amount.

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Accrued Interest and the 1099-OID Form Accrued interest income can get messy when, for income tax purposes, you need to record accrued interest that isn’t reported on a 1099-OID form. The reason is that you’re required to report the accrued interest—even though you won’t get a 1099-OID amount. Later on, when you ultimately do get a 1099-INT or 1099OID that includes the previously recorded accrued interest, you need to adjust this figure so it doesn’t double-count the accrued interest. Many people don’t report accrued interest income until it’s reported on a 1099OID form or actually paid and reported on a 1099-INT form. With this simplified approach, you don’t evade income taxes on the interest income, but you do delay paying the income taxes. Once the interest is accrued, the IRS does insist that you pay income taxes. If this applies to your situation, talk to your tax advisor.

Describing the Bonds Y ou Sell You Describing the bonds you sell is easy as long as you have the necessary information: the number of bonds sold, the price per share (or the transaction total), and the commission paid (if any). You also need to know the amount of accrued interest you will be paid. As with other investment transactions, you can record bond sales either directly into the register or by using an investment form; using an investment form is easier. To record a bond sale, click the Easy Actions menu and click Sell/Remove Shares. In the Sell/ Remove Shares dialog box, click the Summary tab. Enter the sales date, name the bond being sold, give the sales amount and sales commission, and indicate where you’ll deposit the money. After you record the bond sale, you need to record the amount of accrued interest you’re being paid. In effect, the bond purchaser pays you your share of the next interest payment. To do this, click the Easy Actions menu, click Record An Income Event, and fill out the Record Income dialog box so that it describes the accrued interest being paid. From your perspective, it’s irrelevant that the bond purchaser rather than the bond issuer pays the interest, so recording this accrued interest payment works just like recording a regular interest coupon payment, as described earlier in this chapter.

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Recording Early Withdrawal Penalty T ransactions Transactions Early withdrawal penalties on certificates of deposit are a special type of tax-deductible expense. Like IRA contributions, alimony, and a few other items, these penalties are deductions from your total income and are used to calculate your adjusted gross income. Because of this, be sure to record any early withdrawal penalties you pay with a separate transaction. If you’re using an investment account with a linked cash account, record the early withdrawal penalty as if it were paid from the cash account. If you’re not using an investment with a linked cash account, use the Easy Actions menu’s Miscellaneous Expense command. In either case, when you do record the early withdrawal penalty, categorize the early withdrawal penalty expense in a way that lets you easily report this penalty on your income tax return. (You might want to set up a new expense category called Early Withdrawal Penalty.)

Tracking Other Debt Securities You can use Quicken to keep records of most other debt securities. Table 20-1 lists some of the other common debt securities, along with suggestions for how you can treat them in Quicken. DEBT SECURITY

HOW TO HANDLE IT

Certificates of deposit (CDs)

Treat negotiable CDs like bonds. (Mechanically, jumbo negotiable CDs are almost identical to corporate and government bonds.) Consider treating non-negotiable certificates like bank accounts.

U.S. Savings Bonds

Treat these as you do a regular bond. You won’t record interest payments, but you will need to accrue interest.

Zero-coupon bonds

Treat these the same as U.S. Savings Bonds. You won’t need to record interest payments (the bond won’t pay these), but you will need to accrue interest.

Table 20-1

How to track some other debt securities with Quicken.

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Understanding Quicken’ Quicken’ss Annual Return Calculations Quicken’s Investment Performance report calculates an internal rate of return for each security. Here we’ll describe why you use the internal rate of return (IRR) tool and show how it compares with the other standard performance measurement tools. NOTE

Microsoft Money makes a similarly problematic return calculationon its investment reports.

What Is an IRR? The IRR tool calculates the annual profit an investment delivers as a percentage of the investment’s value at the start of the year. For example, in a simple case, if you buy an investment for $100 and the investment pays $10 in dividends at the end of the year and then is sold for $95, your IRR is 5 percent. There are actually two steps to making this calculation: • First, you need to calculate the annual profit. You can do this by combining the $10 of dividends with the $5 capital loss (calculated as $95–$100) for a result of $5 of annual profit. • Second, you divide the $5 of annual profit by the $100 investment value at the start of the year. $5/$100 equals 5 percent, and that’s the IRR. By calculating an IRR, you can quantify the performance of a stock that you’ve purchased and of your investment portfolio as a whole. This is particularly true with individual stocks and brokerage accounts because you often don’t really know how your stock picks, your broker’s picks, and your portfolio have done and are doing relative to the market as a whole and relative to other investments. In comparison, you usually have a pretty good idea as to how well a mutual fund does on a quarterly or at least an annual basis. The fund manager will report to you on the quarterly and annual returns.

Some Mechanical Problems with the IRR Now that you understand the basic logic of the IRR tool, you should know that the IRR, for all of its usefulness, isn’t flawless. Quicken (and every other investment record-keeper’s computer program) calculates a daily IRR and then multiplies this percentage by the number of days in a year to get an equivalent annual IRR. 532


This sounds right, but it presents problems in the case of publicly traded securities because a short-term percentage change in a security’s market value—even if modest—can annualize to a very large positive or negative number. If you buy a stock for $10 1/8 and the next day the stock drops to $10, the annual return using these two pieces of information is a whopping –98.9 percent! If you buy a stock for $10 1/8 and the next day the stock rises to $10 1/4, the annual return using these two pieces of information is an astronomical 8,711 percent. To minimize the problems of annualizing short-term percentage changes, you probably want to refrain from measuring IRRs for only short periods of time. An annualized daily return can be very misleading. One other thing to note is that the IRR calculation becomes more difficult when you try to calculate the average annual profit percentage, or IRR, for a series of years when the starting value is changing from year to year. The basic problem is that the IRR formula is what’s called an nth root polynomial (n is the number of days in the IRR calculation). A one-year IRR calculation is a 365th root polynomial. (Remember that Quicken calculates daily IRRs and then annualizes these daily percentages.) The problem with an nth root polynomial is that, by definition, it can have up to n real and imaginary solutions. An annual IRR calculation could theoretically have 365 correct IRRs. You would not normally have this many solutions, but you could still have several correct solutions. So you can see that by using IRR-based return calculations, there’s an opportunity for real confusion. Quicken, recognizing these problems, does not attempt to calculate IRRs for investments that look like they may have more than one IRR. You’ll know for which investments you can’t calculate an IRR, but you won’t know how those investments did.

Summary For investors with large portfolios, online investing offers big benefits. Investment costs often decrease, and investment record-keeping often becomes simpler. In some cases, investment decisions may even get better because of access to better information. Online investment tools, however, can be tricky use—especially as you start. The information provided in this chapter should help to ease the burden of becoming proficient.

Chapter 20


533

Part 4

Appendixes

In This Part

Appendix A Using Netscape Navigator and Messenger

537

Appendix B Using Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition

559

Appendix C Using Outlook Express Macintosh Edition

589

535

Appendix A

USING NETSCAPE NA VIGA TOR AND NAVIGA VIGATOR MESSENGER

Featuring: • Obtaining and Installing Netscape Communicator • Exploring Netscape Navigator • Using Bookmarks • Searching the Internet • Using Netscape Messenger • Customizing Netscape Navigator

A

s we mentioned earlier in this book, Netscape Navigator is one of the two most popular Web browsers in use today, the other being Microsoft Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator is part of Netscape Communicator, a suite of Internet tools that also includes the following: • Messenger, an e-mail and newsgroups client • AOL Instant Messenger Service (AIM), which is instant messaging software • Composer, a program for creating Web pages • Radio, a free feature that you can use if you register with Netscape Netcenter

537

In this appendix, we’ll look first at Netscape Navigator and then take a brief look at Netscape Messenger. NOTE

In this chapter, we’ll be discussing Netscape Communicator as it is installed on and works with Windows 98 Second Edition.

Obtaining and Installing Netscape Communicator You can get Netscape Communicator in two ways: you can order it on a CD at the Netscape site, or you can download it from the Netscape site by using Internet Explorer. To download Netscape Communicator, follow these steps: 1. Start Internet Explorer. Click the Launch Internet Explorer Browser button on the Quick Launch toolbar. 2. Go to the Netscape site, as shown in Figure A-1. In the Address bar, enter http://www.netscape.com/.

Figure A-1 538

The Netscape home page.


3. Navigate to the download page. Click the Download hyperlink to locate the Download page. 4. Select the configuration you want. On successive pages, click hyperlinks to select a language, an operating system, a version of Netscape Communicator, either the basic version of Communicator or the complete version, and an encryption (your only choice here is 128). When you’ve made these choices, click Download Now. 5. Start the download process. On the SmartDownload page, shown in Figure A-2, select a country (if necessary) and then click Download.

Figure A-2

NOTE

Downloading Netscape Communicator using SmartDownload.

By default, Netscape uses SmartDownload, which lets you pause the downloading, resume it, and surf the Web during the download process. If you prefer not to use SmartDownload, click the Download Without Smart Download hyperlink.

Appendix A


539

6. Select a location in which to save the files. In the File Download dialog box, shown in Figure A-3, click the Save This Program To Disk option button, and click OK to open the Save As dialog box, as shown in Figure A-4. By default, Netscape places the downloaded files in your desktop folder and displays an icon on the desktop. Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, accept this arrangement. Click Save to begin the download.

540

Figure A-3

The File Download dialog box.

Figure A-4

The Save As dialog box.


During the download process, the dialog box shown in Figure A-5 reports the progress. If you look closely at this dialog box, you’ll see that the file is being downloaded from the Netscape FTP site. (We discussed the FTP protocol in Chapter 6.)

Figure A-5

Reporting the progress of the download.

Installing Netscape Navigator When the download is complete, you’ll see an icon labeled something similar to sd32d408.exe on your desktop. Double-click this icon to download Netscape using Smart Download and begin the installation process, and follow the onscreen instructions. When the installation is complete, you’ll see the Netscape Communicator icon on your desktop.

Opening Netscape Navigator To start Netscape Navigator, click the Netscape Communicator icon on your desktop. The first time you open Netscape, you’ll probably be prompted to create a new profile. To do so, click Next and then follow the instructions provided. Click Finish when you’re done to open Netscape Navigator. You’ll then see something similar to the screen in Figure A-6.

Appendix A


541

Figure A-6

Starting Netscape Navigator.

When you install Windows, it automatically makes Internet Explorer the default browser. In other words, when you click a hyperlink in an e-mail message or any other document, that resource opens in Internet Explorer. If you later install Netscape Communicator, it may establish itself as the default browser and change the settings for the other default Internet services. To verify that the default browser is the browser of your choice or to change the default browser or the settings for other Internet services, double-click the Internet Options tool in the Windows Control Panel, and then click the Programs tab. To change a selection, click the down arrow in any of the drop-down list boxes, choose a program, and then click OK. To reestablish the defaults set by Windows, click the Reset Web Settings button.

542


Exploring Netscape Navigator As is the case with Internet Explorer, you can easily start using Navigator. Simply select the URL in the box at the top of the page, enter another URL, and press the Enter key to go to a site. Or click one of the many hyperlinks found on the default start page, which, of course, is the Netscape home page. Later in this chapter, we’ll look at how to select a different Web site as your start page. To really use Netscape, though, you need to be familiar with the features of its interface, and we’ll look at those in this section. What should be a source of information about these features, NetHelp, is unfortunately not great and is much in need of being updated. To open NetHelp, click the Help menu, and then click Help Contents. What may be of more assistance is the Introduction to Communicator “book” found at http:/ /help.netscape.com/products/client/pe/reflib/introcom.htm. Figure A-7 shows the opening page.

Figure A-7

Getting Internet help for Netscape Communicator.

Appendix A


543

The Menu Bar In Navigator, as in Internet Explorer and other Windows programs, you can take care of tasks in any of several ways. We’ll look first at the Menu bar, which is at the top of the screen and is shown in Figure A-8.

Figure A-8

The Menu bar in Navigator.

The File Menu The File menu contains many of the commands that are found in other Windows programs as well as some that are specific to Navigator. Table A-1 lists and describes the items on the File menu. NOTE

544

Depending on what features you have installed, you may see other commands in addition to these.

COMMAND

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

New

Opens a submenu from which you can choose to open a new browser window, a Composition window in which you can write an e-mail message, a blank page, a page from a template, or a page from a wizard that lets you create a Web page.

Open Page

Displays the Open Page dialog box in which you can enter a URL or the name of a local file to open.

Save As

Opens the standard Windows Save As dialog box that you can use to save the current page or selection to a file.

Save Frame As

Saves the page as a file if the current Web page is in frames. This command is grayed out if the current page is not in frames.

Send Page

Opens the Composition window in Messenger.

Edit Page

Opens the current page in Composer so that you can edit it.

Offline

Opens a submenu from which you can choose to work offline or synchronize files.

Page Setup

Opens the Page Setup dialog box, in which you can specify how the current page will be laid out when it is printed.


COMMAND

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

Print Preview

Opens the page in a print preview window so that you can see how it will look when printed.

Print

Opens the standard Windows Print dialog box.

Close

Exits Navigator.

Exit

Exits Navigator.

Table A-1

The items on the File menu.

The Edit Menu On the Edit menu, you’ll find several of your standard Windows commands—Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All—as well as some commands specific to Netscape. The Windows commands all work as they do in any Windows program. Table A-2 describes the Netscape-specific commands. (We’ll look at some of them in detail later in this appendix.) COMMAND

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

Find In Page

Displays the Find dialog box, which you can use to search for a term on the current page.

Find Again

Lets you search once more for a term you previously searched on.

Search Internet

Opens a Web site that you can use to search the Internet. Preferences opens the Preference dialog box, which you can use to customize Navigator.

Table A-2

Netscape-specific items on the Edit menu.

The View Menu The View menu contains the commands you use to control what appears on the screen. To select which of the toolbars will be displayed or hidden—Navigation, Location, Personal, or Floating Component bar—click the View menu, click Show, and then click one of those items on the submenu. (We’ll discuss the toolbars later in this appendix.)

Appendix A


545

Table A-3 explains the other items on the View menu. COMMAND

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

Increase Font

Enlarges the size of the font on the screen.

Decrease Font

Reduces the size of the font on the screen.

Reload

Restarts the process of loading a page.

Show Images

Displays images if you previously turned them off. To turn off images, click the Edit menu, and then click Preferences. In the Category list, click Advanced, clear the Automatically Load Images check box, and click OK.

Refresh

Refreshes the screen display.

Stop Page Loading

Prevents the loading of a page. Handy when a page is loading too slowly.

Stop Animations

Freezes animated banners, flickering signs, and so on.

Page Source

Displays the HTML code for the current page.

Page Info

Displays information about the current page, such as its URL, when it was last modified, its size, and so on.

Character Set

Displays a submenu from which you can select a language.

Table A-3

Items on the View menu.

The Go Menu This menu contains commands that replicate using the Back, Forward, and Home buttons on the Navigation toolbar and a list of previously viewed pages. Click a page in the list to go to that page.

The Communicator Menu The first part of the Communicator menu contains commands that take you to other components in the Communicator suite—Messenger, Composer, AOL Instant Messenger Service, and Radio—if you installed all components. If you have only Navigator installed, this menu is the Window menu rather than the Communicator menu.

546


Clicking Bookmarks on the Communicator menu opens a submenu of items related to creating and managing bookmarks. We’ll look at how to use bookmarks later in this appendix. Clicking Newsgroup opens a Messenger window in which you can access newsgroups. Clicking Address Book opens Address Book, which is shown in Figure A-9. As with Windows Address Book, you use the Communicator Address Book to store contact information.

Figure A-9

Address Book in Netscape Communicator.

Clicking Tools opens a submenu of items. Table A-4 explains the items on this menu that you are likely to use.

Appendix A


547

COMMAND

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

History

Opens the History window, which displays a list of sites you’ve recently visited, including the title of the page, the URL, when you first and last visited the site, and so on.

Security Info

Opens a window that contains security information about the current page.

Message Center

Opens Message Center, which is a small, Messenger-like e-mail program.

Import Utility

Opens the Netscape Messenger Import Utility, which you can use to import address books from other programs into the Communicator Address Book.

Window

Displays a submenu listing all Netscape browser windows you have open (if you have multiple pages open at the same time).

Table A-4

Items on the Tools submenu.

The Navigation T oolbar Toolbar The Navigation toolbar, which is shown in Figure A-10, contains some buttons that are common in Windows program—Back, Forward, and Print—and they function in the standard ways. Clicking the Reload button is the same as choosing Reload from the View menu. Table A-5 explains the other buttons on the Navigation toolbar.

Figure A-10 The Navigation toolbar. BUTTON

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

Home

Takes you to the Netscape home page or another page that you specify.

Search

Opens the Net Search page so that you can search the Internet.

My Netscape

Takes you to a personal home page that you can customize.

Security

Opens the Security Info window.

Shop

Takes you to the Shop@Netscape page, where you can shop using a directory of categories or by clicking specific links.

Stop

Halts the loading of a page.

Table A-5 548

Buttons on the Navigation toolbar.


The Location T oolbar Toolbar The Location toolbar, which is shown in Figure A-11, contains the Bookmarks button, the Location field, and the What’s Related button. You enter a site’s URL in the Location field. Clicking What’s Related displays a list of resources related to the current page. We’ll look at the Bookmarks button and how to use bookmarks later in this appendix. Figure A-11 The Location toolbar.

The Personal T oolbar Toolbar The contents of the Personal toolbar depend on the components you have installed. Figure A-12 shows the contents if you installed the entire Communicator suite of tools, and Table A-6 explains what these buttons do.

Figure A-12 The Personal toolbar. BUTTON

WHA T IT DOES WHAT

Instant Message

Opens AOL Instant Messenger.

WebMail

Takes you to the WebMail site, where you can sign up for a free email account.

Contact

Takes you to the Netscape Communications Center, where you can download WebMail, WebCalendar, AOL Instant Messenger, and Address Book and access other communications services.

People

Opens People Search, where you can search a worldwide directory of more than 200 million residential phone numbers and addresses as well as search the Yellow Pages for businesses.

Yellow Pages

Opens the Netscape Yellow Pages.

Download

Takes you to the SmartDownload page.

Channels

Displays a list of bookmarked areas that exist on Netscape Netcenter.

RealPlayer

Takes you to http://www.real.com, where you can download music, multimedia programs, games, and so on.

Netcenter

Takes you to the Netscape home page.

Table A-6

The buttons on the Personal toolbar. Appendix A


549

The Floating Component Bar The Floating Component bar appears at the top right of the main Navigator window and contains buttons that you can click to quickly move to a Communicator component, as you can see in Figure A-13. To display or hide the Floating Component bar, click the View menu, click Show, and then click Floating Component Bar. You can also close the Floating Component bar by clicking its Close button.

Figure A-13 The main Navigator window with the Floating Component bar displayed.

TIP

To move the Floating Component bar, click its title bar and drag it.

Using Bookmarks A bookmark is a link to a Web page that you store in a file to use later. When you find a site that you know you’ll want to revisit, create a bookmark. You can simply click this link to the page to open it. You don’t have to remember the URL or even the name of the site.

550


Bookmarks are stored in folders in the Bookmarks folder, which is shown in Figure A-14. To open the Bookmarks folder, click the Bookmarks button on the Location toolbar, and then click Edit Bookmarks on the submenu. The Bookmarks folder is similar to other Explorer-like folders in Windows. Click the plus sign that precedes a folder name to display the folder’s contents.

Figure A-14 The Bookmarks folder.

Adding and Opening a Bookmark You can add a bookmark in several ways. With the page open that you want to bookmark, do one of the following: • Click the Bookmarks button, and then click Add Bookmark. • Click the Bookmarks button, and then click File Bookmark to open a submenu that lists the folders in your Bookmarks folder. Click the folder in which you want to store the bookmark. • Click the icon to the right of the Bookmarks button, and drag it leftward to open the Bookmarks list. Drag it to the folder where you want to store it. To go to the Web page that the bookmark represents, open the Bookmarks folder, click the folder that contains the bookmark, and then click the bookmark.

Appendix A


551

Creating a Bookmark Folder To create a new folder in the Bookmarks folder, follow these steps: 1. Open the Bookmarks folder. Click the Bookmarks button, and then click Edit Bookmarks. 2. Open the Bookmark Properties dialog box, as shown in Figure A-15. Select the folder in which you’ll place the new folder, click the File menu, and then click New Folder.

Figure A-15 The Bookmark Properties dialog box.

3. Give the bookmark a name. In the Name field, type a name. Enter a description if you want, and click OK.

Placing a Bookmark Button on the Personal T oolbar Toolbar If you often visit a site, you can place a bookmark button to it on the Personal toolbar. With the page open, simply click the icon to the right of the Bookmarks button and drag it to the Personal toolbar. If you no longer need such quick access to the site, delete it by opening the Bookmarks folder, opening the Personal Toolbar Folder, right-clicking the bookmark, and choosing Delete Bookmark from the shortcut menu.

Managing Bookmarks To move a bookmark from one folder to another, select it, drag it just beneath the folder to which you want to move it, and release the mouse button. Delete any bookmark in the same way that you delete a bookmark button on the Personal toolbar, as described in the previous section. 552


Searching the Internet In Navigator, you can search in a couple of ways: • By using the Netscape home page • By clicking the Search button on the Navigation toolbar To search using the Netscape home page, click the drop-down list box to select a search engine, enter a word or a phrase in the search field, and press the Enter key. Clicking the Search button opens the Net Search page, as shown in Figure A-16. To use a particular search engine, click its name in the list, enter your word or phrase, and press the Enter key. Results are returned on the Web site of the search engine you selected. To search by categories, click a category listing on the page.

Figure A-16 The Net Search page.

TIP

To display a list of search tips, scroll down the page and click the General Tips hyperlink.

Appendix A


553

Using Netscape Messenger Messenger is the e-mail program that is included in the Communicator suite. To open Messenger, click the Communicator menu and then click Messenger. When you open the program, you’ll see a screen similar to the one in Figure A-17.

Figure A-17 Netscape Messenger.

Before you can use Messenger to send and receive mail, you need to supply some settings. If the program doesn’t ask for these the first time you open Messenger, you can enter them in the Preferences dialog box. Before you begin, you’ll need your e-mail address, the name of your incoming mail server, and the name of your outgoing mail server. Follow these steps: 1. Open the Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure A-18. Click the Edit menu, and then click Preferences.

554


Figure A-18 The Preferences dialog box for Messenger.

2. Supply your real name and e-mail address. In the Category list, select Identity. If Messenger hasn’t picked up your real name and your user name from information in Windows, supply this information, as shown in Figure A-19. You must supply your real name and e-mail address; whether you enter information in the other fields is optional.

Figure A-19 Supplying setup information.

Appendix A


555

3. Supply the names of your incoming and outgoing mail servers. In the Category list, select Mail Servers to display the screen shown in Figure A-20. Click Edit to open the Mail Server Properties dialog box, enter the name of your incoming mail server in the Server Name box, and click OK. Back in the Mail Servers screen, enter the name of your outgoing mail server in the Outgoing Mail (SMTP) Server box, and then click OK.

Figure A-20 The Mail Servers screen.

NOTE

If you want to use Messenger as your default e-mail program, open the Internet Options dialog box in Internet Explorer (click Tools, and then click Internet Options). Click the Program tab, click the down arrow in the E-Mail drop-down list box, and then select Netscape Messenger.

If you’ve used any other e-mail program, you’ll find it relatively easy to send and receive messages with Messenger. For help on the details, connect to the Internet, click the Help menu, and then click Help Contents. In the left pane, scroll down to the section “Using E-Mail.” Now, simply click a hyperlink to get specifics on a topic.

556


Customizing Netscape Navigator Earlier in this appendix, we used the Preferences dialog box to establish settings for Messenger. You also use the Preferences dialog box to personalize Communicator in the following ways: • Change the appearance of fonts and colors. • Specify the language in which you prefer to view Web pages. • Specify the start page. • Enable and disable the What’s Related button. • Specify helper applications for various file types. To use the Preferences dialog box, follow these steps: 1. Open the Preferences dialog box. Click the Edit menu, and then click Preferences. 2. Select categories, and choose options. Select a category in the Category list to display a page of associated options. When you have selected all your options, click OK. TIP

To change your start page, open the page you want to use, open the Preferences dialog box, select Navigator in the Category list, and click the Use Current Page button.

Appendix A


557

Appendix B

USING INTERNET EXPLORER MACINTOSH EDITION

Featuring: • Understanding How a Web Browser Works • Opening Internet Explorer • Exploring the Web • Using the Favorites List • Using the History List • E-Mailing Pages and Links • Saving Web Pages • Creating Internet Scrapbooks • Printing Web Pages • Searching the Web • Downloading Files • Dealing with Cookies and Temporary Internet Files • Changing Your Home Page

A

s you learned in Chapter 1, to access resources on the World Wide Web you need a client program called a Web browser. The Web browser’s primary job is to let 559

you view Web pages and move from one resource to another, although these days most Web browsers provide much more functionality than that. In this appendix, we focus on Microsoft Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, the Web browser that’s included with all current versions of MacOS. NOTE

Although most of the procedures described in this appendix work on older versions of Internet Explorer, we recommend upgrading your software to the latest version. This appendix uses version 5.

Understanding How a W eb Browser W orks Web Works Before getting into Internet Explorer specifics, we want to explain how a Web browser works. You don’t need this information to use a Web browser, of course, but knowing about the process will help you understand why access is sometimes slow, give you a clue as to the meaning of some of the cryptic messages you sometimes see on your screen, and, in general, help you to become a more informed business user of the Internet. When you enter a Web address in the Web browser application on your computer, here is a general overview of what happens: • The browser software on your computer sends the address to your Internet service provider (ISP). • Your ISP then sends the address to the nearest node of the domain name server (DNS). The DNS is a set of databases, distributed among servers, that stores the numeric addresses of Web sites. (A later section in this appendix explains URLs and numeric addresses.) • The DNS returns the site’s numeric address to your Web browser. • Your Web browser sends the numeric address to a router, which checks the traffic on the Internet and finds a path that is the least busy to the server that contains the resource you are requesting. • The server receives the address, acknowledges this receipt, and places the request in a queue to wait until the server fulfills earlier requests. When the server acknowledges the receipt, you’ll see a message in the browser’s status line that tells you the connection is successful. • The server then sends the resource back over the Internet to your ISP, which then sends it to your computer. 560


This process may sound time-consuming, but even with a slow Internet connection, it can take only seconds, and with a fast Internet connection, it can happen almost instantaneously, whether the resource is stored on a server halfway around the world or on a server in the next building in your office complex.

Opening Internet Explorer You can open Internet Explorer in the following ways: • Double-click the Browse The Internet alias on the desktop. • Double-click the Microsoft Internet Explorer alias in the folder where Internet Explorer is installed. • Select Web Page from the Apple menu’s Favorites item. The first time you open Internet Explorer, you’ll see something similar to Figure B1, which shows the Apple Excite page. You can retain this start page or select any other. You’ll find the steps later in this appendix.

Figure B-1

The default start page. Appendix B


561

You can also open Internet Explorer from any document that includes a hyperlink. For example, if you receive an e-mail message that contains a URL in the body, simply click the URL to open that page in Internet Explorer. In addition, double-clicking a filename that ends in .htm or .html opens that file in Internet Explorer. NOTE

The Favorites menu in the Apple menu is separate from Internet Explorer’s Favorites menu. To add or remove Web pages from the Apple menu Favorites folder, open the System Folder on your hard drive and then open the Favorites folder. Add a favorite for the current page by dragging the @ icon in Internet Explorer’s Address bar into the Favorites folder.

AW ord About URLs Word URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is an address for a resource on the Internet. It actually represents a string of numbers called an Internet Protocol (IP) address, for example, 169.254.69.104. Since it’s much easier for humans to remember names instead of numbers, we typically use URLs. A URL is composed of a protocol, the name of the server on which the resource resides, and, optionally, the path to the resource and its filename. For example, in the URL http:/ /www.redtechpress.com, http is the protocol (in this case, Hypertext Transfer Protocol), www indicates that the resource is on the World Wide Web, redtechpress is the server, and .com is the domain name. Such a URL might also include the path, such as /catalog, and the name of a document, such as /index.html. You frequently see URLs in various media as simply www.redtechpress.com. Internet Explorer and other Web browsers assume the http protocol unless you specify otherwise. Another less frequently seen protocol is FTP (File Transfer Protocol); an FTP server contains programs and files that users can download. The final part of the server name, in our example, .com, refers to the domain type. At present seven domain types are recognized: • .com is a commercial organization. • .edu is an educational institution, for example, a university. • .gov is an entity that is part of the U.S. government. • .int is an international organization, such as the United Nations. • .mil is a branch of the U.S. military.

562


• .net is a network organization. • .org is a nonprofit organization. You pronounce the domain part of a URL as dot com, dot e-d-u, dot gov, and so on. You have, no doubt, though seen references to dot-coms, which are businesses that in recent years have sprung up on the Internet. These are not simply businesses that have a Web site, but businesses that exist entirely on the Internet. Mid-2000 found many dot-coms in trouble, and Forrester Research, a leader in compiling Internet and business statistics, predicted that by 2001 most dot-coms would go out of business. The reason, according to some dot-com CEOs, is that the focus was on acquiring an audience at all costs—regardless of the costs. The Internet is a seductive medium, but it’s probably safe to assume that there’s no substitute for a well-designed and carefully thought-out business plan.

Understanding the Internet Explorer Window The components of the Internet Explorer window are much like those in other Macintosh applications. You’ll see vertical and horizontal scroll bars as necessary, you can size portions of the window by clicking and dragging, and you can display a ScreenTip by pointing to a button. Here is a list of some other components: • The Menu bar is at the top of the window, and it contains a set of menus, many of which appear in other Macintosh applications. • The Title bar is just beneath the Menu bar and it displays the name of the current Web page or other file that is open. • The Button bar is just beneath the Title bar, and it contains several buttons that correspond to the actions you perform most often, such as the Back, Forward, and Home navigation buttons. • The Address bar is beneath the Button bar, and you use it to enter a URL or filename. You can drag the small @ icon on the Address bar to left of the address (and on the Title bar) to another location to create a link to the current page. • The Favorites bar (also known as the Toolbar Favorites) located under the Address bar contains a short list of preselected hyperlinks. You can add or remove pages from this list. • The Activity Indicator is the large “e” at the far right of the Menu bar and is animated when Internet Explorer is sending or receiving data. Appendix B


563

• The Explorer bar is a slim bar that appears along the left side of the browser window. It contains a number of useful tools, such as the Favorites and History folders, which expand into a small pane when clicked. • The Main window displays the resource you most recently accessed. • The Status bar is at the bottom of the screen. When you choose a menu command, the Status bar displays a description of what it does. When you point to a hyperlink, the Status bar displays its URL. When you click a hyperlink, the Status bar displays a series of messages related to the progress of finding and opening that resource. TIP

You can quickly toggle the Button bar, Address bar, and Favorites bar on or off by clicking the small button on the left side of the window, underneath the Favorites bar. (When you move your mouse over it, a ScreenTip is displayed saying Click here to collapse the toolbars.)

Exploring the W eb Web Once you open Internet Explorer, you can start exploring the Web immediately. All you have to do is click a hyperlink or enter a URL you’ve gleaned from TV or someone’s business card in the Address bar. You can, however, use several techniques to make the time spent connected to the Internet more efficient.

Using the Address Bar If you’ve entered a URL (perhaps a lengthy one) and then want to use only part of it to try to access a resource, place the cursor in the Address bar, hold down the Control key, and press the right or left arrow key to jump forward or backward to the next separator character (the slashes, the dots, and so on). To quickly fill in the www and .com for a Web address, enter the domain name you want to visit, such as apple, and then press Control+Enter. Internet Explorer automatically fills in the URL to make www.apple.com.

Using AutoComplete You’ll notice that sometimes when you start to enter a URL, Internet Explorer will try to complete the URL for you, as well as display a list of possible URLs under the Address bar, as shown in Figure B-2. This is the AutoComplete feature at work. If AutoComplete picks the URL you want, simply press the Enter key. Otherwise keep typing. If you see the URL you want to visit in the list that appears, click the URL with your mouse and then press the Enter key. 564


Figure B-2

Using AutoComplete in the Address bar.

AutoComplete also works in other fields you fill in on a Web page, such as search queries, a list of stock quotes, information you supply when you purchase items over the Internet, and so on. Using AutoComplete to fill in forms can save you a lot of time, but it is a mixed bag when it comes to security. Although the information stored as an AutoComplete entry is encrypted on your hard drive and is not accessible to Web sites, anyone with physical access to your computer can call up the AutoComplete information by launching Internet Explorer and attempting to fill out a form with AutoComplete information. Therefore, we suggest that you consider this before using AutoComplete to store passwords and credit card information. TIP

To add or remove AutoComplete entries, click the Edit menu, click Preferences, select Forms AutoComplete from the category list, and then use the Add, Change, and Delete buttons to alter your AutoComplete entries.

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Internet Explorer also has a Form AutoFill feature, which allows you to enter your personal information, such as name, address, and phone number, once in the Internet Explorer Preferences dialog box, and then be able to quickly call up this information when filling out Web forms. (This information is accessed only when you specifically allow it.) To use this feature, follow these steps: 1. Open the Internet Explorer Preferences dialog box. Click the Edit menu, and then click Preferences. 2. Indicate that you want to use AutoFill. Select the AutoFill Profile entry in the category list, as shown in Figure B-3.

Figure B-3

The AutoFill Profile screen of the Internet Explorer Preferences dialog box.

3. Enter your user information. In the AutoFill Profile boxes, enter the user information you want to store for quick retrieval when filling out Web-based forms, and then click OK. 4. Fill in forms with AutoFill. You can use the AutoFill information you entered to fill in Web forms just as you would use AutoComplete, or you can click the AutoFill button on the Button bar to fill in all forms on the current Web page using your AutoFill information. All information from AutoFill is highlighted in yellow.

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Navigating with Hyperlinks A hyperlink, or simply link, can be a word, a phrase, an image, or a symbol that forms a connection with a resource that can be located on your local computer, your local network, or the Internet. In Internet Explorer, textual links are usually underlined and in a different color from normal text. You know something is a link if the pointer becomes a hand with a pointing finger when you place the mouse cursor over it. To follow a link, of course, you simply click it. To return to the page you were viewing before following a link, click the Back button on the Button bar or press the Delete key. To then return to the page you were viewing before you pressed Back, click the Forward button. If a page is taking too long to download, click the Stop button. Click the Refresh button to reload the current page. Click the Home button to return to your home page. TIP

Click and hold the Back or Forward buttons to see a list of pages you’ve recently viewed. Select the page you want to view from the pop-up list to go directly to that page without clicking Back or Forward multiple times.

If you find something that you know you’ll want to revisit often, you can place a link to it in the Toolbar Favorites (add less frequently visited links to the Favorites list). To remove an item from the Toolbar Favorites (also known as the Favorites bar), click the chevron on the right side of the Favorites bar, click Open Toolbar Favorites Window, select the link you want to delete, and press the Delete key. TIP

To open a link in a new browser window, click and hold a hyperlink and then choose Open Link In New Window from the shortcut menu.

Using the Page Holder Sometimes you come across a Web page with a number of links that you’d like to follow. If you open the links one at a time, it’s easy to lose track of the original page containing the links, and opening each page in its own window can get awkward. To avoid this confusion, you can use Internet Explorer’s Page Holder feature to create a temporary copy of the main page, which you can then use to navigate from without worrying about losing track of it. To use the Page Holder, follow these steps:

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1. Open the Page Holder. Click the Page Holder tab on the Explorer bar. 2. Add a page to the Page Holder. Browse to the page you want to keep hold of and either click the Add button in the Page Holder bar or drag the @ icon in the Address bar into the Page Holder bar. The page is then displayed in the Page Holder bar. 3. Follow links. Click any link in the Page Holder bar to follow the link in the Main window. To follow another link from the page you’re holding, simply click that link in the Page Holder bar. 4. Modify the link display. To display only a list of the links in the held page instead of the entire page, click the Links button, as shown in Figure B-4.

Figure B-4

The Page Holder in Links view.

5. Clear the Page Holder. To clear the currently held page from the Page Holder, click Clear. 568


6. Create Page Holder favorites. To make a page in the Page Holder easily accessible in the Page Holder later, click the Favorites button in the Page Holder bar and then click Add To Page Holder Favorites. You can then quickly call up that held page by clicking the Favorites button in the Page Holder bar and selecting the page from the list. 7. Close the Page Holder. Click the Page Holder tab bar on the Explorer bar to close it.

Using the Favorites List As we mentioned, you can also keep track of sites you want to revisit by adding them to your Favorites list. (In Netscape Navigator, favorites are called bookmarks.)

Adding to the Favorites List To add a page to the Favorites list, click the Favorites menu and click Add Page To Favorites. Alternatively, display your Favorites list by clicking the Favorites tab on the Explorer bar, and then clicking the Add button, as shown in Figure B-5.

Figure B-5

A Favorites list. Appendix B


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Organizing the Favorites List If you just keep adding sites to the Favorites list without any sense of organization, you’ll soon find that you have links to a lot of sites but that you can’t find any one quickly. To keep your Favorites organized, follow these steps: 1. Create a folder for similar sites. Click the Favorites tab on the Explorer bar, click the Organize button, and then click New Folder, as shown in Figure B-6. A new, untitled folder appears.

Figure B-6

Organizing the Favorites list.

2. Name the folder. Type a name in the box.

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3. Move favorites to the folder. Drag favorites into the folder to clean up the Favorites list. Repeat steps 1 through 3 if you need more folders. 4. Add visual dividers. Click the Organize button, and then click New Divider. 5. Customize favorites. To modify the advanced properties of a favorite, click and hold the mouse on the favorite you want to modify and then choose Get Info from the shortcut menu. In the Info dialog box shown in Figure B-7, you can modify the name of the favorite and all aspects of it, including whether it should be checked for changes or downloaded for offline viewing at a later time. 6. Close the Favorites list. Click the Favorites tab on the Explorer bar to close the list.

Figure B-7

Modifying the advanced properties of a favorite.

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Using the History List Another way to find out where you’ve been and return there is to use the History list. The History list displays a list of all the Web pages you’ve recently viewed. To use the History list, follow these steps: 1. Open the History list, as shown in Figure B-8. Click the History tab on the Explorer bar.

Figure B-8

Using the History list.

2. Select a day. All Web pages you visited on a given day are stored in the corresponding day’s folder in the History list. Click a day folder to see the pages you visited on that day. 3. Display a page. When you find a page you want to return to, click it in the History list. 4. Close the History list. Click the History tab on the Explorer bar to close the list. 572


E-Mailing Pages and Links When you run across a page you want to share with a colleague, you can send the page or a link to it. Simply click and hold the Mail button on the Button bar, and then click Send Link. The New Message window will open with the link or the page inserted in the body of the message. (Appendix C discusses sending messages in Outlook Express.)

Saving W eb Pages Web You can save a Web page as a file on your local drive or on your network. To save a Web page that is open in Internet Explorer, follow these steps: 1. Open the Save dialog box, as shown in Figure B-9. Click the File menu, and then click Save As.

Figure B-9

Saving a Web page.

2. Select a folder and filename. Select a folder in which to save the page. In the Name box, accept the name that’s suggested or enter another name. 3. Select a file type. In the Format box, select Web Archive to have all images downloaded and bundled with the Web page for later viewing. Select HTML Source to save only the Web page and not any associated files, or select Plain Text to save only the plain text from the Web page, leaving out any formatting. 4. Save the file. Click Save. Appendix B


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To save a Web page without opening it, click and hold its link, and then click Download Link To Disk to download the file and open the Save dialog box. Then follow steps 2 through 4 to save the page. To save a portion of a page and place it in another document, follow these steps: 1. Make your selection, and copy it. Select what you want, click the Edit menu, and click Copy. 2. Insert your selection in another document. Open the other document, place the insertion point where you want the text, and press Apple+V, or click the Edit menu and click Paste. To save an image from a Web page, follow these steps: 1. Select the image. Click and hold the image, and then click Download Image To Disk to open the Save dialog box. 2. Save the file. Select a folder, select a filename, select a type, and then click Save.

Creating Internet Scrapbooks To save a page or a portion of a page to an Internet Scrapbook—a virtual repository you can use to permanently store Web pages and images you find (even if the original page changes)—follow these steps: 1. Find the page or image you want to keep. 2. Open an Internet Scrapbook, as shown in Figure B-10. Click the Scrapbook tab on the Explorer bar.

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Figure B-10 Saving to the scrapbook.

3. Add the page or image to the scrapbook. Click the Add button in the scrapbook, or drag the image into the scrapbook. 4. Organize the scrapbook. To organize your scrapbook images and pages, click the Organize button, click New Folder or New Divider, and then drag your scrapbook items where you want them.

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Printing W eb Pages Web To print a Web page you have open in Internet Explorer, follow these steps: 1. Click the Print button. 2. Specify the number of copies and page range. In the Copies box, enter the number of copies you want, as shown in Figure B-11. In the Pages section, click the From option button and enter a page range if you want to print only a specific section.

Figure B-11 Setting print options.

3. Set advanced options. If the settings listed in the box aren’t what you want, click the General box to select a different category of options to change, such as print quality or Internet Explorer (to toggle images and Web page backgrounds, for example). 4. Click Print. Internet Explorer prints out the page with the settings you specified. To preview your page before printing it, click and hold Print on the Button bar and then click Print Preview to open a Print Preview window, as shown in Figure B-12.

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Figure B-12 Previewing a page before printing.

Searching the W eb Web If you’ve spent any time at all searching the Internet, you probably know about search services such as AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and Yahoo!. You know that you can go to those sites and enter a search term or phrase to locate documents and other resources that contain references to your search item. With Internet Explorer, however, it’s possible to search all those services at the same time plus a few more. You can also specify whether you want to find a Web page, a person’s address, a business, a map, a picture, and so on. NOTE

In this section, we’ll look briefly at the essential search services provided by Internet Explorer. Chapter 8 discusses what every business user should know to turn the Internet and the Web into a powerful research and intelligencegathering tool.

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577

Doing a Basic Search Before we get into all the options you can apply to a search, let’s do a simple search for resources that might give us some information about advertising on the Internet. Follow these steps: 1. Open the Search bar, as shown in Figure B-13. Click the Search button.

Figure B-13 Opening the Search bar.

TIP

578

The fastest way to perform a search is to enter find and then enter a search phrase directly in the Address bar.


2. Enter a search phrase. In the Find A Web Page Containing box, type “Internet advertising.” (Type the quotation marks but not the period. Using quotation marks like this says to find resources that contain the phrase, not just one or the other of the important words.) Click Search. Figure B-14 shows the results of the search.

Figure B-14 The results of a search.

To open a document, simply click it. To begin a new search, click New. TIP

MacOS also has its own search tool—Sherlock. To use this very capable tool, click the Apple menu and click Sherlock.

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Broadening a Search If you want to broaden a search once you’ve seen the results of your first search, click the Use Advanced Search button. As Figure B-15 shows, you’ll see more options that you can use to be more specific about your search.

Figure B-15 Specifying more search options.

For even additional options, click the More Options link at the bottom of the Search bar to open MSN Search, as shown in Figure B-16.

580


Figure B-16 Opening MSN Search.

To further refine a search, click the Customize button to open the Customize Search Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure B-17. You use this dialog box to specify the search services you use to find individual items. For example, you can choose to use InfoSpace, Bigfoot, and WorldPages to find a person’s mailing address, or you could specify to use only one of the three. Scroll down this dialog box to see your other options. Notice that at the bottom of the dialog box you can click the Previous Searches check box to tell Internet Explorer to store the results of the last 10 searches.

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Figure B-17 The Customize Search Settings dialog box.

Downloading Files Downloading files can be perplexing and difficult at times. Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition helps you download files more effectively by providing a special Download Manager feature that you can use to manage files. To download files, follow these steps: 1. Download the file. Click the link to the file you want to download. Internet Explorer automatically begins downloading the file and opens the Download Manager window, shown in Figure B-18.

Figure B-18 Downloading files using Download Manager. 582


2. View your downloads. In the Download Manager window, view the files you are downloading or have recently downloaded. 3. Open the downloaded file. Double-click a file to view the properties of the download, or to open the file. In the dialog box displayed, click Reveal In Finder to display the file on your hard drive. Double-click the file to open it or move it to the desired location.

Dealing with Cookies and T emporary Internet Temporary Files When you browse the Internet with Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, there are several different types of files that get stored on your hard drive to improve the performance and convenience of your browsing experience. However, these files can also be used by anyone with local or network access to your hard drive to determine what Web sites you’ve visited, so it’s useful to understand what these files are, what they do, and how to configure the way in which Internet Explorer deals with them.

Dealing with Cookies The first type of file that Internet Explorer creates is the cookie. Cookie support is a much maligned but mostly harmless feature of all modern browsers. A cookie is nothing more than a simple text file that is created on your hard drive that stores information you provide to a Web site—typically what items you’d like to purchase from an online store. Cookies can’t harm your computer, nor can they provide Web sites with any information you didn’t already introduce. To view and work with the cookies on your hard drive, follow these steps: 1. Display the cookie settings. Click the Edit menu, click Preferences, and then select Cookies from the category list under the Receiving Files heading, as shown in Figure B-19.

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Figure B-19 Viewing your cookies.

2. Open or delete cookies. To view the details of a cookie, select it from the list of cookies stored and click View. To delete a cookie, select it and press the Delete key. 3. Specify your cookie preference. To disable cookies or ask to be prompted before writing any cookies, select the appropriate setting from the When Receiving Cookies box, but be aware that disabling cookies will also disable most online shopping Web sites.

Changing History Settings The History list (discussed earlier in this appendix) helps you quickly find a site you’ve previously visited, but also permits anyone else to view the sites you’ve been visiting. To modify the way in which Internet Explorer maintains the History list or to delete the files in the History list, follow these steps: 1. Display the History settings. Click the Edit menu, click Preferences, and then select Advanced from the category list, as shown in Figure B-20.

584


Figure B-20 Changing History settings.

2. Specify how many Web pages to remember. If you want to maintain a lengthy log of the Web pages you’ve visited, increase the number in the Remember The Last box, or decrease it if privacy is an issue. TIP

If privacy is important, changing the History settings or clearing the History list isn’t adequate. Make sure to routinely check your cookies, empty your cache, and disable Address AutoComplete by selecting Browser Display from the list of preferences and clearing the Use Address AutoComplete check box.

3. Clear the History folder. To remove all items from the History list, click the Clear History button.

Modifying Internet Explorer’ Explorer’ss Cache Internet Explorer maintains a Web page cache where the most recent pages and objects you view on the Internet are stored for quick access. To change how Internet Explorer uses its cache, follow these steps: 1. Display the cache settings. Click the Edit menu, click Preferences, and then select Advanced from the category list (see Figure B-19).

Appendix B


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2. Specify how often to check for new pages. In the Cache section of the Internet Explorer Preferences dialog box, select how often Internet Explorer should check to see if the pages stored in the cache are up-to-date. 3. Enter the cache size. In the Size box, specify how large the cache should be. A larger size may improve the performance of your Web browser, although in general, sticking with a cache size of 5MB to 10MB is adequate for most users. 4. Empty the cache or change the cache location. Click the Empty Now button to empty the contents of the cache, which may be useful if you’re having trouble getting a truly refreshed view of a Web page. Click the Change Location button to change where the cache file is stored.

Changing Y our Home Page Your By default Internet Explorer opens the MSN home page when you open Internet Explorer. To specify a different Web site as your start page, follow these steps: 1. Open the Internet Explorer Preferences dialog box. Click the Edit menu, click Preferences, and then select Browser Display from the category list, as shown in Figure B-21.

Figure B-21 Browser Display settings.

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2. Specify the current page or a blank page. Enter a URL in the Address box. To specify a blank page, click the Use None button. Click OK.

Summary Of course, the most important thing about Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition is not how it works but how you can use it to access the resources that make you a more informed and better-equipped businessperson. You can certainly just point and click to your heart’s desire, but you’ll soon find yourself off track and probably wasting a good bit of time. Using the techniques described in this appendix, you can, for example, click a site from your Favorites list to go immediately to a site whose data you need to check every day or perhaps even more often (such as stock prices or weather conditions). You can quickly search for and find Web sites, business names and addresses, and all sorts of other business resources, and you can save the file, print it, and send it to a colleague or a client. You won’t necessarily need to do all of these things every day, but you can refer to this appendix when a specific task presents itself.

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Appendix C

USING OUTLOOK EXPRESS MACINTOSH EDITION

Featuring: • Understanding How E-Mail Works • Setting Up Outlook Express • Touring the Outlook Express Window • Reading and Managing Messages • Creating and Sending Messages • Creating Message Rules • Using Identities • Keeping Track of Contact Information • Customizing Outlook Express • Taking Charge of Your Wired Office

P

erhaps even more than the Web, electronic mail has become an essential business tool. Before the Internet was available commercially, we worked at companies that provided internal e-mail programs, and with all the right connections, you could access your office e-mail account from home. Within days, most new employees were so dependent on the e-mail system that they ceased to function if the server went down. And that was small potatoes compared with how the business world now relies on the Internet for e-mail.

589

Some business users consider e-mail both a blessing and a curse, and at the end of this appendix, you’ll find some ideas about how to manage e-mail (and other components of your electronic office) rather than letting it manage you. NOTE

In addition to being an e-mail reader, Outlook Express is also a newsreader. Chapter 5 discusses newsgroups.

In this appendix we look at how to use Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition, the e-mail program that’s included with the most recent versions of MacOS. Outlook Express is an Internet standards e-mail reader, which means that you can use it to send and receive e-mail if you have an Internet e-mail account. An e-mail account is not the same thing as an account with an online information service, such as CompuServe or America Online. An Internet e-mail account provides services such as standards-based e-mail, but it does not provide services such as chat rooms, access to databases, conferences, and so on. NOTE

This appendix uses Outlook Express 5 Macintosh Edition for illustrations and for describing the steps to accomplish tasks. If you are using an older or newer version of Outlook Express, the screens will look much the same, and the steps will be similar, although not identical.

Understanding How E-Mail W orks Works As Chapter 3 mentioned, you don’t need to understand how a Web browser works to use it, and you don’t need to understand how e-mail works to use an e-mail program to send and receive messages. But if you know in general the steps involved in getting a message from your computer to another computer on the Internet, you’ll become a more informed business user, and you’ll have an idea of what’s going on when you see, for example, a message that says “POP server unavailable.” After you create an e-mail message and click the Send button, your message travels the following route to get to its intended recipient:

590


• Your e-mail program, such as Outlook Express, contacts your ISP’s computer and connects to an SMTP server program. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The server program acknowledges that it has been contacted, and your e-mail program tells the server that it has a message it wants to send. The server program then says to send the message or to wait because it is busy. • If it gets the green light, your e-mail program sends the message to the SMTP server and asks for confirmation. • The server confirms that it has received the message and then asks the domain name server for the best path through the Internet to the intended recipient. • The domain name server replies with the best path, and the SMTP server sends the message on its way. • When the message arrives at the recipient’s SMTP server, it is transferred to a Post Office Protocol (POP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), or Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) mail server (such as Hotmail), which holds the message until the recipient requests it. • When your recipient logs on to the Internet, opens his or her e-mail program, and checks for new mail, the message is downloaded to the recipient’s computer. Although this process sounds very involved, and technically it is, it can happen very quickly. We live in the United States and exchange messages with a colleague in Greece in a matter of minutes. One exception to the process outlined earlier is America Online (AOL), the largest ISP in the United States. AOL uses proprietary protocols instead of the SMTP and POP protocols and then uses a gateway to translate the proprietary protocols into the standard e-mail protocols so that AOL users and users of standard e-mail programs can communicate. (A gateway is simply a software device that both transfers and converts information that originates from systems using different communication protocols, or rules.)

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Setting Up Outlook Express These days most ISPs provide you with an e-mail account as well as access to the Web. Before you can use Outlook Express to send and receive e-mail, you need to configure your e-mail account and optionally import any messages or address books you may have in another mail program.

Importing Settings If you used an earlier version of Outlook Express or another e-mail program previously on your computer and you want to import settings or data, follow these steps: 1. Launch Outlook Express. To open Outlook Express, either click the Mail toolbar button in Internet Explorer or double-click the Outlook Express icon or alias on your desktop or hard drive. 2. Choose to import settings. In the Outlook Express Setup Assistant window, which is displayed when you first open Outlook Express as shown in Figure C-1, click the I Am Upgrading From a Previous Version option button to import settings from an earlier version of Outlook Express or another program.

Figure C-1

592

The Outlook Express Setup Assistant.


3. Select whether to make Outlook Express your default mail program. Click the I Want To Test Drive Outlook Express check box if you don’t want to make Outlook Express your default e-mail program, otherwise leave the I Want To Use Outlook Express check box checked. Click the right arrow at the bottom right of the window to move to the next screen. 4. Choose the program from which to import. Select the program you want to import settings from, as shown in Figure C-2, and then click the right arrow to move on.

Figure C-2

Selecting a program from which to import settings.

5. Choose what you want to import. Select the settings and data you want to import, and then click the right arrow to move on, as shown in Figure C-3. You may be asked to provide the location of the previous program.

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593

Figure C-3

Selecting settings and data to import.

Setting Up an Existing Mail Account If you already have an e-mail account but it’s not configured on your computer already, follow these steps: 1. Launch Outlook Express. To open Outlook Express, either click the Mail toolbar button in Internet Explorer or double-click the Outlook Express icon or alias on your desktop or hard drive. 2. Choose to import settings. In the Outlook Express Setup Assistant window, which is displayed when you first open Outlook Express (see Figure C-1), click the I Already Have An Internet EMail Account option button. 3. Select whether to make Outlook Express your default mail program. Click the I Want To Test Drive Outlook Express check box if you don’t want to make Outlook Express your default e-mail program. Otherwise, leave the I Want To Use Outlook Express check box checked. Click the right arrow at the bottom right of the window to move to the next screen.

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4. Enter your name. Enter your name as you want it to appear on the e-mail messages you send, and then click the right arrow to move on. 5. Enter your e-mail address. Enter the e-mail address given to you by your ISP in the E-Mail Address box, and then click the right arrow to move on. 6. Specify your server information. In the E-mail Server Names screen, shown in Figure C-4, select the type of mail server you’re using from the drop-down list box. In the Incoming Mail box, enter the POP or IMAP server address given to you by your ISP, and in the Outgoing Mail box, enter the SMTP server address given to you by your ISP. Click the right arrow to move on.

Figure C-4

Specifying mail server information.

7. Enter your user name and password. In the Internet Mail Logon screen, enter your e-mail user name, and, optionally, your e-mail password. TIP

For increased security, don’t click the Save Password check box. This will force you to enter your password every time you check your e-mail. Appendix C


595

8. Enter a name for the account. In the final screen, enter a friendly name for the e-mail account, and click the Include This Account In My “Send & Receive All” Schedule check box if you want to check mail on this account whenever Outlook Express checks for new mail. Click Finish.

Signing Up for a Hotmail Account If you don’t already have an e-mail account, Outlook Express makes it easy to quickly get set up with a free Hotmail e-mail account. This account can be used either in a Web browser or with an e-mail program that supports Hotmail e-mail (such as Outlook Express 5 and later) and versions of Outlook newer than Outlook 2000. To sign up for a Hotmail account, follow these steps: 1. Launch Outlook Express. To open Outlook Express, either click the Mail toolbar button in Internet Explorer or double-click the Outlook Express icon or alias on your desktop or hard drive. 2. Specify that you don’t have an e-mail account. In the Outlook Express Setup Assistant window, which is displayed when you first open Outlook Express as shown in Figure C-5, click the I Don’t Have An Internet E-Mail Account option button.

Figure C-5 596

The Outlook Express Setup Assistant.


3. Select whether to make Outlook Express your default mail program. Click the I Want To Test Drive Outlook Express check box if you don’t want to make Outlook Express your default e-mail program. Otherwise, leave the I Want To Use Outlook Express check box checked. Click the right arrow at the bottom right of the window to move to the next screen. 4. Specify whether you have Internet access. If you already have Internet access, select the first option; if not, select the second option to sign up for service with an ISP. Click the right arrow to move on. 5. Click the Set Up Hotmail button. Your default Web browser opens to the Hotmail sign-up page. Follow the instructions provided to sign up for a new account. 6. Enter your name. In the next screen that appears, enter your name as you want it to appear on the email messages you send. Click the right arrow to move on. 7. Enter your user name and password. In the Hotmail Logon screen, enter your e-mail user name, and, optionally, your email password. TIP

For increased security, don’t click the Save Password check box. This will force you to enter your password every time you check your e-mail.

8. Enter a name for the account. In the final screen, enter a friendly name for the e-mail account, and click the Include This Account In My “Send & Receive All” Schedule check box if you want to check mail on this account whenever Outlook Express checks for new mail. Click Finish.

Touring the Outlook Express Window You can open Outlook Express in the following ways: • Double-click the Outlook Express icon on your hard drive. • In Internet Explorer, click the Mail button on the Standard toolbar, and then click Read Mail or Read News. Figure C-6 shows what you’ll see when you open Outlook Express.

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Figure C-6

The Outlook Express main screen.

This window contains the usual Macintosh Menu bar and Title bar, as well as a useful toolbar. The Folders list is a tool for organizing messages and contains the following folders by default, although, as you will see, you can add your own folders to this list: • The Inbox folder is the repository for newly received messages and messages that you haven’t disposed of in some way. • The Outbox folder contains messages that are ready to be sent. • The Sent Items folder contains copies of messages that you have sent. • The Deleted Items folder contains copies of messages that you have deleted. In other words, unless you tell Outlook Express to do otherwise, messages that you delete are not immediately removed but are placed in the Deleted Items folder. • The Drafts folder contains messages that you are working on but that aren’t yet ready to be sent. • The Address Book contains a list of all contacts you have. 598


Reading and Managing Messages Click the Inbox folder in the Folders list to open your Inbox folder and read messages. Figure C-7 shows the Inbox folder in Preview Pane view. Message headers appear in the upper pane, and you select a message to open it in the lower pane.

Figure C-7

Reading a message in Preview Pane view.

To sort messages by a different field, click the heading you want to sort by; for example, click the From heading to sort messages by who sent them. To change the text size or the line wrapping in the Preview pane for a specific message, click the Rewrap The Selected Text button or the Increase Text Size button at the top right of the Preview pane. Double-click a message header in the list to display the message in its own window, as shown in Figure C-8.

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Figure C-8

TIP

Reading a message in a separate window.

If you want to edit a message you’ve received, open the message in its own window and then click the Edit toolbar button.

Saving Messages To keep messages for future reference, you can store them in an Outlook Express folder; however, you can also save messages onto your hard drive, a Zip disk, or a floppy disk. To save a message in an Outlook Express folder, simply drag its header to the folder. You can also create your own folders. For example, you might want to create a folder for a project and then place all correspondence related to the project in that folder. Alternatively, you might want to create a folder for a person and place all messages from the person in that folder. To create a new Outlook Express folder, follow these steps:

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1. Create a new folder or subfolder. Click the File menu, click New, and then click New Folder or New Subfolder to create a subfolder of the currently selected folder, as shown in Figure C-9.

Figure C-9

Creating a new folder.

2. Name the folder. Enter a name for the folder. Outlook Express renames the untitled folder to reflect your new name. To save messages onto your hard drive or a removable disk, open the message or select its header and follow these steps:

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1. Open the Save Message dialog box, as shown in Figure C-10. Click the File menu, and then click Save As.

Figure C-10 The Save Message dialog box.

2. Select a folder. Select a folder, and then accept the filename that’s suggested or type a new filename in the Name box. 3. Select a file type. In the Format drop-down list box, select how to save the message, and then click Save.

Printing Messages If you need a paper copy of a message, you can print it in the following ways: • Select the header of the message, and click the Print button on the toolbar. • Open the message, and then click the Print button in the Message window. • Select the message or open the message, click the File menu, and then click Print. Whichever method you use, you’ll open the standard Macintosh Print dialog box.

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Marking Messages Although some of us may have a Pavlovian reaction to the mail notification alert, you don’t need to read and process every message the instant it arrives in your Inbox. When you’re checking mail, you can mark messages so that when you have time you can go back and deal with them. You can mark messages in the following ways: • To identify a message as important, select the message header, click the Message menu, and click Flag Message to place a little red flag to the left of the header. • If you’ve read a message but want to read it again later and respond, you can mark it as unread. Select the message header, click the Edit menu, and then click Mark As Unread. Now instead of an open envelope preceding the header, you’ll see a closed envelope, with the header in boldface.

Replying to Messages To reply to a message from a single sender, click the Reply toolbar button. If the message was sent to multiple recipients, you can reply to all recipients of the message by clicking the Reply All toolbar button. Compose your message and click the Send Now button to connect to the Internet (if you’re not already) and send the message immediately, or click the Send Later button to place the message in the Outbox to be delivered the next time you click the Send & Receive button. By default, Outlook Express includes the text of the original message in your reply. Sometimes this can be helpful, and at other times it can be a real nuisance, especially if you have to wade through several replies to get to the essence of the message. You have a couple of alternatives if you don’t want the original message included in the reply: • Click the Reply button, place your cursor in the body of the message, click the Edit menu, click Select All to highlight the message, and press the Delete key. • Click the Edit menu and click Preferences to open the Preferences dialog box. Click the Compose tab, clear the Include Entire Message In Reply check box, and click OK, as shown in Figure C-11.

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Figure C-11 Preventing messages from being included in replies.

TIP

You should never put anything in an e-mail message that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper.

Forwarding Messages Sometimes it’s handy to forward a message, and you can include your own comments in the forwarded message as well. As is the case with passing along anything that was created by somebody else, be sure that forwarding a message won’t upset the original sender. To forward a message, open it, click the Forward button, enter an e-mail address, add comments, and click the Send Now button to send the message immediately. You can also click the Send Later button to place the message in the Outbox to be delivered the next time you click the Send & Receive button.

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Deleting Messages You can delete a message in the following ways: • Select the message header, and press the Delete key or click the Delete toolbar button. • Open the message, and click the Delete toolbar button. By default, deleted messages are placed in the Deleted Items folder, and they stay there until you manually delete them. To do so, click the Tools menu, click Run Schedule, and then click Empty Deleted Items Folder. Click Delete when you’re asked if you want to delete these items. To automatically clear the Deleted Items folder when you close Outlook Express, follow these steps: 1. Open the Schedules dialog box. Click the Tools menu, click Run Schedule, and then click Edit Schedules to open the Schedules dialog box, as shown in Figure C-12.

Figure C-12 The Schedules dialog box.

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2. Double-click the Empty Deleted Items Folder schedule. 3. Specify when to perform the action. In the When section of the dialog box, select On Quit from the drop-down list box, as shown in Figure C-13.

Figure C-13 Modifying a schedule.

4. Specify how old messages should be. In the Action section of the dialog box, enter the age you want deleted items to be before they’re automatically erased. Setting this to a couple days or a week can provide the time to rescue any messages you might accidentally delete.

Creating and Sending Messages To create a new mail message, follow these steps: 1. Open the New Message window, as shown in Figure C-14. Click the New button on the toolbar.

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Figure C-14 The New Message window.

3. Address and compose your message. In the To line, enter an e-mail address or click the icon to open your Address Book and select the address. Follow the same procedure to copy someone on the message. To send a blind carbon copy of the message, enter the name in the Bcc box. Enter a subject in the Subject line, place the cursor in the message body, and type your message. 4. Send the message. Click the Send Now button to connect to the Internet (if you’re not already connected) and send the message immediately, or click the Send Later button to place the message in the Outbox to be delivered the next time you click the Send & Receive button.

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Formatting T ext Text You can create a message in two formats: plain text and HTML. By default, Outlook Express uses plain text. While all modern e-mail programs for Windows and Macintosh computers support HTML mail, most wireless e-mail devices (such as cell phones and PDAs) as well as most Internet appliances (such as specialized telephones with e-mail capability) don’t. (Older versions of America Online and Qualcomm’s Eudora don’t support HTML either.) To format text in a message, you need to send the message in HTML format. When you use HTML to create a message, you are essentially creating a Web page, and you can format text with different fonts, colors, and apply styles such as numbered lists. To switch a message from plain text to HTML format, follow these steps: 1. Open a new message. Click the New toolbar button. 2. Change the message format to HTML. Click the Format menu and click HTML to display the Formatting toolbar, as shown in Figure C-15.

Figure C-15 An e-mail message composed in HTML. 608


The Formatting toolbar contains many of the tools you see and use in your word processor. You can use it to do the following, among other things, in your message: • Insert a bulleted list. • Add effects such as boldface, italics, underline, and font color. • Insert a numbered list. • Format paragraphs as flush left, flush right, or centered. • Insert a horizontal line. • Insert a picture. • Specify a font and font size.

Attaching Files to Messages Earlier in this chapter we mentioned that you can save files that are attached to messages. Obviously, you can also attach files to messages. Before getting into the details, though, we need to remind you that some rather serious computer viruses make the rounds via e-mail attachments. Many businesses would cease to function these days if they couldn’t e-mail files to colleagues and clients, so abandoning the use of file attachments is not an option. To be on the safe side, we recommend not opening any attachments that you didn’t specifically request or for which you don’t know the source; just select the message header, and press the Delete key. Also, be particularly wary of an attachment that appears to have been forwarded. To open or save an attachment, follow these steps: 1. Open the message. Double-click the message containing the attachment to open it in its own window. 2. Display the attachment. Click the down arrow to the left of the Attachment field. 3. Open or save the file. To open the attached file, select it from the list, as shown in Figure C-16, and click the Open button. To remove the attachment, click the Remove button. To save the attachment to your hard drive, click the Save button. In the Save Enclosure dialog box, specify a folder into which to save the file, and click Save.

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Figure C-16 A message with an attachment.

To attach a file to a message you are composing, follow these steps: 1. Display the Attachment field. Click the down arrow to the left of the Attachment field, as shown in Figure C-17.

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Figure C-17 Attaching a file to a message.

2. Attach the file. Click the Add button, use the Choose Object dialog box to locate the file, and then click Choose. Your message now contains the name of the file in the Attach line. TIP

Click the Find button to use Apple’s Sherlock tool to help you locate the file you want to attach.

3. Specify the encoding to use. Since Macintosh, Windows, and Unix computers encode attachments differently, if you’re sending the attachment to someone using a different operating system, click the Encode For box under the Attachment field to select how to encode the file(s) as shown in Figure C-18. We recommend that you click the Encode For Any Computer option button and click the Append Windows Extensions To File Names check box.

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Figure C-18 Specifying how to encode the attachment.

Including a Personalized Signature Many people never bother to sign their e-mail messages. After all, their name appears in the From line. Others create elaborate signatures that are automatically appended to all messages. Your business or organization may, in fact, have guidelines about what you should include in a signature. It’s common to include your name, title, the name of your organization, perhaps its physical address, and your phone number. To create and manage signatures, follow these steps: 1. Open the Signatures window, as shown in Figure C-19. Click the Tools menu, and click Signatures.

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Figure C-19 The Signatures window.

2. Create a signature. Click New. In the Name box, enter the name for the signature, as shown in Figure C-20. In the main signature body, compose your signature, and then close the window when you’re finished. Click Save to save the signature.

Figure C-20 Creating a new signature.

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3. Create other signatures. Click the New button in the Signatures window to create any other signatures you want to use, such as a signature for your personal messages. 4. Specify which signatures should be used randomly. If you want your signature to be selected at random from a list with every message you send, click the Random check box next to any signature you want to include in this random list. 5. Configure your mail accounts with a signature. To specify which signature to use with each mail account, or to specify that a signature should be picked at random, click the Tools menu, click Accounts, doubleclick an account, click the Options tab, and select a signature from the Default Signature drop-down list box, as shown in Figure C-21. Select Random from this box to have signatures chosen at random.

Figure C-21 The Edit Account dialog box.

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Creating Message Rules You are not at the mercy of your Inbox. With Outlook Express 5 Macintosh Edition you can create very powerful message rules for all mail and news accounts you use. You can choose to earmark junk mail, block mail from certain senders, and you can route mail from other senders directly to a folder. To create a message rule, follow these steps: 1. Open the Mail Rules window. Click the Tools menu and click Rules to open the Mail Rules window, as shown in Figure C-22.

Figure C-22 The Mail Rules window.

2. Select the type of rule to create. Click the tab corresponding to the type of mail rule you want to create. For example, to create a mail rule for all mail accounts that use the POP protocol, click the POP tab. To create a Hotmail rule, click the Hotmail tab. 3. Create a new rule. Click the New button to open the Define Mail Rule dialog box, as shown in Figure C-23. Appendix C


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Figure C-23 The Define Mail Rule dialog box.

4. Name the rule. Enter a name for the rule in the Rule Name box. 5. Specify when to apply the rule. In the If section, specify what messages should be processed by this rule. For example, to apply a rule to all messages containing certain words in the subject field, select Subject from the drop-down list box and then enter the words you want to look for in the text box. Click the Add Criterion button to add additional criteria, or click the Remove Criterion button to remove criteria. TIP

If you want to process junk mail, first turn on the Junk Mail filter. Click the Tools menu, click Junk Mail Filter, and then click the Enable Junk Mail Filter check box. Don’t actually create any junk mail rules that delete messages until you’ve watched the Junk Mail Filter process your mail for a couple of weeks. This will help to prevent the loss of important messages.

6. Specify what action to perform. In the Then section, specify what action you want to perform on messages that meet your selection criteria. For example, you might want to select Move Message from the first drop-down list box and then specify a folder to move the selected messages to. 7. Click OK to complete the rule.

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8. Manage your rules. In the Mail Rules window, click the check boxes next to any rules you want to enable, and clear the check boxes next to any rules you want to disable. To run one rule before another, select a rule and use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to adjust its position. TIP

You can apply a newly created rule to messages you’ve already received. To do so, select the messages on which you want to use the rule (press Apple+A to select all messages in a folder), click the Message menu, click Apply Rule, and select the rule you want from the submenu.

Using Identities An identity in Outlook Express is sort of an e-mail user profile. You’ll want to use identities if more than one person uses your computer and uses Outlook Express. When you set up identities, each person sees only his or her e-mail messages and has his or her own contacts in Address Book. When you install Outlook Express, you are set up as the main identity. To set up other identities, follow these steps: 1. Click the File menu, and click Switch Identities. Click Switch when asked if you want to close all windows and switch identities. 2. Create a new identity. Click New in the dialog box listing your identities to display the New Identity dialog box, as shown in Figure C-24. Enter a name for the new identity in the Identity Name box. If you want to base the identity on an existing identity, thereby getting a copy of all messages and contacts, choose the identity from the Base Initial Settings On drop-down list box. Click OK.

Figure C-24 The New Identity dialog box.

If you created a new identity from Outlook Express’s base settings, walk through the Outlook Express Setup Wizard, as described at the beginning of this appendix.

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To switch from one identity to another, follow these steps: 1. Click the File menu, and click Switch Identities. 2. Select the identity. Select an identity from the list, as shown in Figure C-25, and click OK. To select an identity every time you open Outlook Express, click the Show This List At Startup check box.

Figure C-25 Switching identities.

Keeping T rack of Contact Information Track Earlier in this appendix you learned that an easy way to enter an e-mail address in Outlook Express is to add it from your Address Book. This section gives you an overview of Address Book and shows you how to set it up to quickly locate contact information and to set up group, or distribution, lists. To open the Address Book shown in Figure C-26 in Outlook Express, click the Addresses button on the toolbar in the Main window.

Figure C-26 The Address Book window. 618


Adding Information for an Individual To add contact information for an individual, open Address Book and follow these steps: 1. Create a new contact. Click the New button on the toolbar. 2. Add information for this person. Use the pop-up windows in the new contact to add as much or as little information as you want, as shown in Figure C-27. Press the Tab key to move from one field to another, or click a different section to enter a different type of information.

Figure C-27 A new contact.

3. Save the information. Click the Save toolbar button. 4. Close the contact window. You’ll see the new contact listed in the Address Book window. To send mail to this new contact, select the contact in the Address Book and click the New Message To toolbar button, or type the contact’s name in the To line of a new message.

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Setting Up a Distribution List In Address Book, a distribution list is called a group. To set up a group, follow these steps: 1. Create a new group. In Address Book, click the New Group toolbar button. 2. Name the group. Enter a name for the group in the Group Name box, as shown in Figure C-28. This name will appear in the list in the main Address Book window.

Figure C-28 Creating a new group.

3. Add members to the group. Click the Add button and enter the name of the contact, or click the Address Book button and drag a contact from the Address Book window into the new group’s window. 4. Save and close the group. Click the Save Group toolbar button, and then close the group. The group name now appears in the main Address Book window with a group icon next to it.

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Finding People You can find contact information for people directly from within Outlook Express using directory services such as Bigfoot Internet Directory Service, WhoWhere Internet Directory Service, Yahoo! People Search, and so on. To do so, follow these steps: 1. Select the directory service to use. In the Folders list, click the down arrow next to Directory Services to expand the list of services, and then select the service you want to use. 2. Enter some information. Fill in the information you know about this person, as shown in Figure C-29, and then click Find.

Figure C-29 Searching for people.

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Customizing Outlook Express Unless you’ve turned off sounds, you’ll hear a sound when a new message arrives in your Inbox. You can disable this sound if you want, you can specify that Outlook Express check for new messages more frequently or less often, and you can personalize a number of other features that concern e-mail and news, using the Preferences dialog box. To open the Preferences dialog box, click the Edit menu and then click Preferences. A few of the tabs in the Preferences dialog box are discussed in the following sections, the rest you can probably figure out on your own, or with the aid of Outlook Express’s online Help.

Specifying General Options The Preferences dialog box has seven tabs, although the Spelling tab is only available if you have installed a Microsoft Office program that includes the spell-checking feature, for example, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. By default, the Preferences dialog box opens at the General tab, which is shown in Figure C-30.

Figure C-30 The General tab of the Preferences dialog box.

To enable an option, check it; to disable an option, clear the check box.

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Specifying What Happens When Y ou Read Messages You or News Click the Read tab in the Preferences dialog box, shown in Figure C-31, to specify options that pertain to reading messages and newsgroups. Most of these options are selfexplanatory; if you need more information, click the question mark button, and then click the option.

Figure C-31 The Read tab in the Preferences dialog box.

Managing How Messages Are Sent Earlier in this appendix we looked at the differences between using plain text and HTML formats for messages and how to specify one or the other in the New Message window. You can also specify the format using the Compose tab in the Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure C-32.

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Figure C-32 The Compose tab in the Preferences dialog box.

In addition, you can use the options in the Compose tab to enable or disable the following features: • Save a copy of every message you send in the Sent Items folder. This option is selected by default, and we suggest that you leave it that way. Having a record of what you said when and to whom is always a good idea in any business situation. • Include the original message when you reply to a message. This option is enabled by default, and if you ever want to do this, leave it enabled. Otherwise, you can’t include the message in your reply. If you don’t want to include the message, it’s easy to delete it from your reply. Simply place your cursor in the body of the message, click the Edit menu, click Select All, and then press the Delete key. • If you receive messages in both plain text and HTML format, you can reply in the format in which the messages were sent by clicking the Reply To Messages In The Format In Which They Were Sent check box.

Checking Spelling Typically, e-mail messages get a bad reputation in the spelling, punctuation, and grammar department, and for good reason. One of our business contacts even sends streamof-consciousness messages—they are in all lowercase letters, have no punctuation, no 624


paragraph indications, contain a lot of abbreviations and misspelled words, and so on. Not impressive from a business point of view, or from any point of view for that matter. True, e-mail has developed as one of the most important communications tools ever because it’s quick and easy, but in a business environment you want to apply the same standards to e-mail that you apply to any other form of communication. You want to portray a professional image, and you want your customers, colleagues, and other contacts to trust you and your abilities. At the very least, read a message before you click the Send Now button. If you want to avoid embarrassing typos and misspelled words, select the option in the Spelling tab of the Preferences dialog box to always check the spelling of a message before it is sent. (As we mentioned earlier, you won’t have the Spelling tab unless you have an Office application installed that contains the spell-checking feature.) The options are in general those found in other applications that can check spelling.

Taking Charge of Y our Wired Of fice Your Office Do you ever wonder how you’d get by without the number of communications tools you currently have at your disposal? Phone, voice mail, fax, e-mail, pagers, the Internet and its vast supply of instant resources, even paper memos, reports, home-to-office network connections—the list seems endless. Or, maybe instead you wonder how to get your work done in the midst of all these tools. A recent issue of Harvard Management Update, a newsletter put out by the publishing arm of Harvard Business School, had some suggestions that we’ve adapted for inclusion here. Not every suggestion is applicable to all situations, but among them, you’re sure to find some that will help you better manage the deluge of information that faces you in your electronic office. • You don’t have to read e-mail the instant you hear the you-have-mail alert. Some business professionals set aside certain times each day to check e-mail. You don’t have to be interrupted unless you want to be. If something is really urgent, the sender will probably find another way to get in touch with you. • You also don’t have to answer the phone just because it rings. You can let voice mail pick it up and then respond at certain times during the day that let you give your full attention to the matters at hand.

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• Don’t open every e-mail message. If the subject line tells you that another get-richquick scheme has just landed in your mailbox, press the Delete key. • If an e-mail message looks interesting but you can tell that it isn’t essential, consider moving it to another folder for similar messages. You can then read them at your leisure. • Instead of using e-mail for team projects, set up an intranet (an internal Internet) or a secure Internet Web site to which members can post messages and files. • Take care of paper filing first, and then set up an electronic filing system for e-mail. Create folders for projects, people, and so on, and be diligent about moving messages into these folders. • If you have tons of old messages lying around, just get rid of them. If you can’t bear that thought, move them to a folder for old messages. • Multitask. Return phone calls while printing something, or check your paper organizer while downloading a file from the Internet. • Don’t waste time by following links that have nothing to do with the reason you’re searching the Internet. • Unsubscribe to newsletters you no longer need or never get around to reading. (Chapter 5 discusses electronic newsletters and mailing lists.) • Regularly evaluate your sources of information—journals, periodicals, reports, memos, and so on—and discontinue all that are not essential. Be on the lookout for new information sources that will keep you current. • Set aside 5 to 10 minutes each day to learn something new about any of your electronic tools.

Summary This appendix has covered a multitude of topics concerning electronic mail and, in particular, Outlook Express Macintosh Edition. Now you know how e-mail works; how to use the Outlook Express Main window; how to read, process, create, and send messages; how to attach files to messages; and how to create a signature and filter messages. You also know how to set up and use your Address Book to quickly insert email addresses, and you know several ways to personalize Outlook Express so that it works efficiently in your business setting. And you have some tips about how to manage the slew of electronic devices that inhabit your office. 626


GLOSSARY

anonymous FTP site A public access FTP site that you can log on to using anonymous as your user name and using your e-mail address as your password.

AOL Instant Messenger Service The instant-messaging software that is part of the Netscape Communicator suite of Internet tools.

ARP Anet ARPAnet An experimental four-computer network that was established in 1969 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense so that scientists could communicate.

ASCII Abbreviation for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a coding scheme that assigns numeric values to letters, numbers, punctuation characters, and control characters to achieve compatibility among different computers and different programs.

attachment A file that travels along with an e-mail message.

627

backbone A device that manages most of the traffic on the Internet. A backbone can connect several locations, and other, smaller networks can be connected to a backbone.

banner A boxed ad that adorns most Web pages.

bookmark As a verb, to add a Web site to a list in your Web browser so that you can easily click it and open it. As a noun, a site that you’ve added to the list in your browser. The Netscape Navigator browser uses the term bookmark. Internet Explorer uses the term favorite for the same thing.

Boolean logic A type of logic used by search engines. Boolean logic works with logical rather than numeric relationships.

BRI An abbreviation for Basic Rate Interface, the most common kind of ISDN access.

bridge A device that links local area networks to other networks.

cable modem A high-speed connection that uses the wiring provided by your cable TV company.

call An option to buy a security.

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CGI script A technology used on some Web servers to provide features such as visitor counters and discussion groups.

chat room An area on a Web site where you can communicate with others in real time by typing on the keyboard or, if you have the necessary equipment, speaking into a microphone and listening through speakers or earphones.

client/server network A network in which one or more computers stores resources and supplies them to the other computers. All the other computers are connected to this central computer.

ClipArt A library of photographs, line art, videos, and so on that’s included with PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications.

Composer The program for creating Web pages that is included with the Netscape Communicator suite of Internet tools.

cookie A file that is stored on your computer by the server of a site that you visit. A cookie is a data file that identifies you to the server.

digital certificate An electronic credential that verifies that you are who you say you are when connected to the Internet.

Glossary

629

directory A feature of a search service that categorizes and catalogs Web sites and their contents. A directory is created by people rather than by software.

DNS An abbreviation for domain name server, a set of databases that are distributed among servers and store the numeric address of Web sites.

domain The description of a single computer, a department, or a complete network that is used for administrative and naming purposes.

DSL An abbreviation for Digital Subscriber Line, a high-speed connection to the Internet that uses existing telephone lines but that transmits at higher frequencies than those used to transmit voice.

Dynamic HTML A version of HTML that introduces movement and the ability to react to a user’s actions on a Web page.

electronic résumé An ASCII or HTML version of the paper type.

encryption Encoding information so that unauthorized persons cannot access it.

extranet An intranet that remote users can access using the Internet and special security features.

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favorite A site whose URL you’ve placed in a list in Internet Explorer so that you can quickly and easily return to it. The Netscape Navigator equivalent is bookmark.

firewall software Special software that sits between your computer and the Internet and prevents unauthorized access. Firewall software is important if you have a high-speed, always-on connection to the Internet.

folder The container for files on your system. In earlier versions of Windows and in some other operating systems, a folder is called a directory.

FTP An abbreviation for File Transfer Protocol, which you can use to download files from or upload files to an FTP site.

gateway A device that links local area networks and also translates information from one kind of network to a different kind of network.

home page The opening page of a Web site.

HTML An abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language, the language used to create Web pages.

HTML tags The basic building blocks used to create an HTML document.

Glossary

631

HTTP An abbreviation for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the rules that specify how a Web browser and a Web server communicate.

hub The central device that connects all the computers in a network.

HyperT erminal HyperTerminal Terminal emulation software that is included with Windows and that you can use to connect to a public access server.

IAB An abbreviation for the Internet Architecture Board, an organization coordinated by the Internet Society. The IAB works out issues of standards, network resources, and so on.

IANA An abbreviation for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is a clearinghouse for Internet addresses, protocol variables, and domain names.

ICS An abbreviation for Internet Connection Sharing, a Windows feature that allows multiple computers to share the same modem or ISDN connection to the Internet.

identity In Outlook Express, a type of mail user profile that you can set up if multiple people use your computer and, thus, Outlook Express.

IETF An abbreviation for the Internet Engineering Task Force, which handles day-to-day issues of Internet operation.

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IMAP An abbreviation for Internet Mail Access Protocol, which defines how users can access and store incoming e-mail messages.

Internet The world’s largest computer network, connecting tens of millions of users.

Internet Explorer The Web browser that is included with Windows 2000 Professional.

Internet Information Services Web server software that is included with Windows 2000 Professional.

Internet service provider Abbreviated ISP. An organization that provides dedicated or dial-up access to the Internet.

intranet A private corporate network that uses Internet technology.

IP address A unique number that identifies a computer on a network or on the Internet.

IRR The profit an investment delivers expressed as a percentage of the investment’s value.

IRTF An abbreviation for Internet Research Task Force, which creates long- and short-term research groups that concentrate on protocols, architecture, and technology issues.

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633

ISDN An abbreviation for Integrated Services Digital Network, a digital connection that is available through the telephone company that can be considerably faster than a modem connection.

ISOC An abbreviation for Internet Society, a group of volunteers that promotes cooperation and coordination for the Internet, Internet applications, and Internet technologies.

keyword A word or term that you enter in a field in a search service. Multiple keywords form a search string, a phrase that the search service compares with information it finds in its database. Keywords are also important in résumé building and job descriptions. Job seekers and recruiters can search on them to identify positions and potential candidates.

LDAP An abbreviation for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which searches a directory of e-mail addresses.

limit order An order to buy a security if the price is below the limit or an order to sell a security if the price is above the limit.

link Short for hyperlink. A word, a phrase, an image, or a symbol that forms a connection with a resource that can be located on your local computer, your local network, or the Internet.

list address The address you use when posting messages to a mailing list.

634


list-hosting service A Web site that will manage subscribers and publish your newsletter.

list-management software Software that you can install on your system to manage subscribers and distribute an e-mail newsletter. List-hosting services also use list-management software.

Listproc A mailing list program. Listproc is short for list processor.

Listserv A mailing list program. Listserv is short for list service.

local area network Abbreviated LAN. A group of connected computers and other devices, such as a printer, that can share files, applications, and other resources.

mailing list An e-mail discussion group.

Majordomo A mailing list program.

market order An order placed to buy or sell at the current market price.

message rule A filter that you can apply to block mail from certain senders and route mail to specific folders.

Glossary

635

Messenger The e-mail program that is included with the Netscape Communicator suite of Internet tools.

metasearch engine A search engine that searches multiple other search engines simultaneously.

metasearch software A program that is stored on your computer and that you can use to search multiple search services simultaneously if you are connected to the Internet.

Microsoft Graph An applet that’s included with PowerPoint. You use it to create charts and graphs for a presentation.

Microsoft Organization Chart An applet that’s included with PowerPoint. You use it to create organization charts in your presentations.

modem A device that lets you transmit and receive information to and from other computers using a telephone line.

monetize In the language of the Internet, to convert a Web site that provides information into a for-profit business venture.

monospaced font A typeface in which all characters occupy equal amounts of space.

636


Mosaic The first graphical Web browser. Mosaic was released in 1992.

natural language query A plain English question.

net investment costs A term we’ve coined to describe the true costs associated with an online investment account. The net investment cost equals the sum of your trading commission expenses (a positive number), any account maintenance fee expenses (a positive number), and the interest income (a negative number).

NetMeeting A conferencing application included with Windows that you can use to finger chat over the Internet, audioconference, videoconference, share applications, collaborate on documents, transfer files, and draw on the whiteboard.

Netscape Navigator A Web browser that was first released by Netscape Communications Corp. in 1994.

network A group of computers and peripheral devices (such as printers, modems, and so on) that are connected in some way so that their users can share files and other resources.

newsgroup A collection of articles on specific topics that you can access from the news server of your ISP.

NIC An abbreviation for network interface card, an adapter that plugs into a slot on the motherboard of a computer and then is connected to the network device, such as a hub.

Glossary

637

NNTP An abbreviation for Network News Transfer Protocol, which distributes Usenet news articles.

OCR program An optical character recognition program that can convert a scanned document into text that can be used in a word processing program or a Web page editor.

offline file A file that is stored on the network but that you make available to you while not connected to the network.

online banking Online banking usually refers to several banking activities, including online bill payment, online account transfers, and online bank statements.

online bank statements Online bank statements are electronic bank statements you retrieve automatically using your accounting program. Online bank statements let you see your bank balance any time you like and reconcile bank accounts whenever and as often as you like.

online bill payment Online bill payment refers to automatically making payments for items you record in your accounting system. In the case in which you’re recording payments using Quicken, for example, online bill payment means a payment you’ve entered in a Quicken register is automatically paid.

online investing Online investing, in a nutshell, simply means you use your Web browser and an Internet connection to provide buy or sell instructions to a broker.

638


online payroll service An online payroll service uses payroll information to make electronic funds deposits, to automatically make payroll deposits, and to file quarterly and annual federal and state payroll tax returns.

online transfers With online account transfers, you can use your accounting program to move money between accounts.

opt out The process whereby you tell direct mail and telemarketing companies that personal information about you is not to be shared or used to contact you.

Outlook Express The news and mail reader that’s included with Windows 2000 Professional.

packet A chunk of information. Information is broken into packets before it is sent out over the Internet.

password A combination of characters you enter during the process of logging on.

.pcl .Pcl is a file format used by Hewlett-Packard printers. The Internal Revenue Service Web site lets you retrieve versions of IRS forms and publications in the .pcl format so that they can be easily printed on a Hewlett-Packard printer.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) Small handheld computers based on the Palm operating system or using Microsoft’s PocketPC operating system. Some PDAs provide wireless e-mail and Web browsing.

Glossary

639

.pdf .Pdf is a file format that allows publications to be displayed onscreen and printed in the exact same way they appear in the printed versions of the publications. To view and to print .pdf documents, you need the Adobe Acrobat Reader program, available for free at http://www.adobe.com.

personal information database A huge file that contains data about individuals and that can be searched on the Internet, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee.

Personal W eb Server Web Web server software that is included with Windows 98.

Plug and Play A feature of Windows 2000 Professional that automatically configures a new piece of hardware when you install it in your computer.

POP An abbreviation for Post Office Protocol, which retrieves messages from an e-mail server.

port The interface through which information passes between a computer and a device, such as a printer or a modem.

portal A large Web site that includes a search service but also other features, such as freee-mail, online chat rooms, instant messaging, news about current events and sports, and so on.

640


post To send an e-mail message to a newsgroup or a mailing list.

PostScript PostScript is a file format used by PostScript printers. The Internal Revenue Service Web site lets you retrieve versions of IRS forms and publications in the PostScript format so that they can easily be printed on a PostScript printer.

PowerPoint The program in the Microsoft Office suite that you can use to create slide presentations and Web presentations.

PPP An abbreviation for Point-to-Point Protocol, which connects a computer to the Internet.

privacy policy A statement at a Web site that sets forth what personal information is collected by the site, how this information will be used, with whom the information will be shared, and whether you can control how information about you is used.

properties Characteristics of an object or a device.

protocol A formal specification that defines the rules whereby data is transmitted and received.

put An option to sell a security.

Glossary

641

Quick Launch toolbar The left portion of the taskbar that contains icons for launching Internet Explorer and Outlook Express and for minimizing all open windows and displaying the desktop.

Radio An Internet tool that is included with the Netscape Communicator suite. You can use it to listen to radio programs over the Web if you register with Netscape Netcenter.

repeater A device that amplifies the information going across the Internet at various intervals so that the signal doesn’t weaken.

router A device that ensures that packets always arrive at the destination for which they are intended.

search engine A program that indexes resources on the Internet and puts that information into a searchable database. Search engines are also known as search tools.

search service A program that can search a file, a database, or the Internet for keywords and retrieve resources in which those words are found.

Security zone An Internet Explorer setting that specifies the types of Web sites that a user of your computer can access.

server A network computer that provides services, such as printing, storage, and communications.

642


sharing Making a resource available to others on the network.

shortcut An icon on the desktop that represents an application, a file, a document, a printer, or any other object in Windows 2000 Professional.

shortcut menu A menu of related commands that appears when you right-click an object; also sometimes referred to as a context menu or a right-click menu.

signature In Outlook Express, a text file that you can append to the close of your e-mail messages. A typical business signature contains your name, title, the name of your organization, perhaps its physical address, and your phone number.

SmartDownload A program that lets you pause the downloading of Netscape Communicator, resume the download, and access the Web during the downloading process.

SMTP An abbreviation for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which sends messages to an e-mail server.

SSL An abbreviation for Secure Sockets Layer, a way of encrypting data that is transferred to and from a Web site; typically used for credit card transactions over the Internet.

start page The Web site you see when you first open Internet Explorer. You can choose any site you want as your start page.

Glossary

643

stationery A preformatted background that you can use to compose a message in Outlook Express using HTML. You can also create your own stationery.

status area The area at the far right end of the taskbar that, by default, contains the volume icon and the clock.

stop order A price that the market price needs to move past before your investment sell- or buyorder is processed.

stop word A word that is not indexed in a database and therefore can’t be used to search the database. Common stop words include AND, IS, IT, OR, SO, and THE.

subscriber A person on a mailing list.

subscription address The address you use when sending a message to subscribe to or unsubscribe from a mailing list.

T1 A long-distance circuit that moves data at incredibly fast speeds and is very expensive.

taskbar The toolbar at the bottom of the desktop that contains icons you can use to quickly access programs.

644


TCP/IP An abbreviation for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, a set of communication protocols that is best suited to large networks, including the Internet.

Telnet A program that allows you to log on to a remote computer as if you were a terminal attached to it.

temporary Internet file A copy of a Web page that you have visited and that is stored in the Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive.

.tif .Tif is a graphics file format. Some documents at U.S. government Web sites are .tif files—or simply pictures of the original printed document.

transaction processing A system in which transactions, such as buying and selling, are executed immediately. Transaction processing lets you use the Web as a virtual store, a salesperson, or a distribution facility.

URL An abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator, an address for a resource on the Internet.

Usenet An international, noncommercial network that distributes news articles.

user Any person that is allowed to access a computer or a network.

Glossary

645

user account Identifies a user on a network or on a computer by his or her user name and password.

vCard An electronic personal information card that you can exchange via e-mail or during a teleconference.

VPN An abbreviation for Virtual Private Network, a tunnel through the Internet that connects your computer to your corporate network.

Web browser A program that you can use to explore Internet resources.

Webcast A radio broadcast that you can tune in to and listen to over the Internet.

Web site A collection of Web pages that are connected by means of hyperlinks.

.wks Tabular data available on the Internet is often stored in the .wks spreadsheet format, which is the Lotus 123 file format. Any spreadsheet program should be able to open a file that uses the .wks spreadsheet format.

wide area network Abbreviated WAN. Any network that crosses metropolitan, regional, or national boundaries.

646


wizard A Windows 2000 Professional component that steps you through a process, such as setting up a network connection, connecting to the Internet, and so on.

XML An abbreviation for Extended Markup Language, which provides a way to give detailed content information about a Web page, allowing for more meaningful searching and information gathering.

Zip A compression utility used to make files smaller. Many of the files available from the U.S. government Web sites are, for example, zipped. To uncompress the file, you unzip it.

Glossary

647

Index 10-digit phone dialing, 25–26 100 Hot Finance Web Sites page, 274 123 Link, 216

A A1 Trace, 177 Accessibility dialog box, 81 accounts, financial. See online banking; online investing accounts, Internet. See Internet service providers (ISPs) accounts, newsgroup, 132–35 account transfers. See online transfers accrued interest, 527, 528, 529–30 Acrobat Reader. See .pdf files Active Server Pages, 340 ActiveX, 333 Activity Indicator, Internet Explorer, 59 Add Directory Server dialog box, 155 Add Language dialog box, 80 Add/Remove Hardware Wizard, 22 Add/Remove Programs applet, 426 Address bar, Internet Explorer, 59, 60–61, 72 Address Book adding contact information, 113–14, 121 creating maps, 117 creating profiles, 88 opening, 102, 112–13 overview, 112–13 printing contents, 116

printing maps, 117–18 setting up distribution lists, 114–15 using to find people, 116 window, 113 addresses, IP, 41, 58 addresses, payee, 481–82 Add Sender dialog box, 108 Adobe Acrobat Reader. See .pdf files Adobe knowledge base archives, 278 advertising banner-type, 360 methods for publicizing Web sites, 355–63 offline publicity for Web sites, 363 as reason to have Web site, 334 via link exchanges, 360–61 aesthetics of Web sites, 336 airline Web sites, 267–70 Alaska Airlines Web site, 269–70 Alexa search software, 216 AltaVista keyword search example, 193–96 overview, 197–99 search engine type, 359 when to use, 216 Amazon.com, 14, 335, 406, 407 America Online. See AOL (America Online) America’s Job Bank, 470–72 AND operator, 194, 195 angle brackets (), in HTML code, 331, 332 Anonymizer.com, 168–69

Index

649

anonymous FTP sites, 148, 627 AOL (America Online) AOL Search, 359 Business & Careers Web Center, 279–80 e-mail protocols, 93 Instant Messenger Service, 537, 627 Personal Finance Web Center, 280–81 privacy policy, 174–75 Web site, 279–81 Apple Computer, 278. See also Internet Explorer, Macintosh edition; Outlook Express, Macintosh edition area codes, 25–26 ARPAnet, 8, 627 ASCII, 465, 627 Ask Jeeves, 199–201 tag, 332 attaching business cards to e-mail messages, 123 files to e-mail messages, 104–5 glossary definition, 627 AT&T AnyWho Info, 176, 179 AutoComplete feature, 60–61, 87, 122 AutoContent Wizard starting, 370–72 using to create presentation outlines, 372– 75 auto layouts, 396 axes, chart, 392

B backbone, 7, 628 backgrounds, changing on PowerPoint master slides, 399 balances, bank. See online bank statements banking, online. See online banking banks corresponding via e-mail, 496–97 downloading account statements, 493–94

650

finding, using Quicken, 490 getting help regarding electronic payments, 488–89 reconciling account statements, 497–99 signing up for online banking, 477–78, 490 transferring funds online, 477, 490, 491, 492–93 banner ads, 360, 628 bar charts, 390, 391 Barksdale, Jim, 9 Basic Rate Interface (BRI), 32, 628 baud rate, 20 Bcc feature, Address Book, 102 bCentral Web site, 281–82 BEA. See Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site Better-Whois.com, 339 BigBook, 230 Bigfoot.com, 179 BigStep.com, 419 bill payment. See online bill payment bizjournals.com, 230 biztravel.about.com, 272–73 Biztravel.com, 271 biztraveler.org, 272 blank presentations, 396 blocking e-mail messages, 107–8 BLS. See Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site tag, 332 Boeing résumé instructions, 454–55 bonds accrued interest, 527, 528, 529–30 recording distributions, 528–29 recording interest, 528–29 recording purchases, 526–28 recording sales, 530 zero coupon, 529, 531 bookmarks, Netscape Navigator. See also Favorites, Internet Explorer adding, 551


creating folders for, 552 deleting, 552 glossary definition, 628 managing, 552 moving between folders, 552 opening, 551 overview, 550–51 placing buttons on Personal toolbar for, 552 Boolean logic, 194, 195–96, 308, 313, 628 BRI (Basic Rate Interface), 32, 628 bridges, 6, 628 broadcasts, radio, 66–67 brokerage accounts. See also securities connecting to Web sites, 505–6 recording bond transactions, 526–30 recording fees by, 521–22 recording stock transactions, 515–21 selecting, 502–3 signing up for, 504 Browse For Folder dialog box, 79 browsers. See Web browsers bulletin board methodology, 337 Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site, 290–93 Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, 293–98 business cards. See also signatures, e-mail as Address Book format, 116 attaching to e-mail messages, 123 creating, 123 overview, 123 saving to file, 123 Business & Careers Web Center (AOL), 279–80 business chat, 163 Business.com, 11, 230 business information resources broad-based search services, 197–215 directories of business information, 284–88 Dun & Bradstreet, 11, 230, 234–39 The Economist, 239–42

fee-based services, 233–61 free services, 263–88 government Web sites, 289–318 investor information Web sites, 274–75, 511–12 ISP Web sites, 279–83 Lexis-Nexis news retrieval service, 242–52 for privacy and security information, 184–85 product support knowledge base Web sites, 275–79 travel service Web sites, 263–74 The Wall Street Journal, 252–61 business traveler Web sites, 270–74 business users. See also business information resources doing research, 226–30 list of uses for Internet, 10 list of Web sites for, 11 BusinessWire, 230

C C4 metasearch engine, 204 cable modems connecting to Internet via, 28–29 glossary definition, 628 how they work, 28–29 vs. other high-speed options, 33 overview, 13, 28 security issues, 29, 33 sharing connections, 46–47 calling cards, 50–52 calls (stock market), 525–26, 628. See also phone calls capital letters. See case sensitivity CareerMosaic Web site, 459 CareerShop.com, 456–57 Carnivore, 181 case sensitivity, 195 catalogs, online. See Web stores

Index

651

categories, data, 390 Cc feature, Address Book, 102 CDs, photo, 345 CDs (certificates of deposit), 531 cell phones, 320–21 Census Bureau Web site, 298–301 Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), 185 certificates of deposit (CDs), 531 CGI scripts, 333, 629 characters. See fonts Chart Options dialog box, 392 charts. See also Microsoft Organization Chart adding to PowerPoint slides, 390–93 axes on, 392 bar, 390, 391 creating, 390–93 customizing, 392–93 data categories for, 390 data labels on, 393 data series for, 390 data tables on, 393 data values for, 390 gridlines on, 392 legends on, 392–93 specifying type, 391–92 titles on, 392 types of, 391–92 Chart Type dialog box, 392 chat rooms, 163, 629 chatting in NetMeeting, 161–62 checking accounts. See online banking checking hyperlinks, 350 checking spelling. See spell-checking Cisco Systems employment opportunities Web page, 458 home page, 226–27 researching via Yahoo!, 227–28

652

client programs, defined, 5 client/server networks, 5, 629 clip art adding to PowerPoint slides, 386–88 glossary definition, 629 making changes to, 389 moving, 388 positioning, 388 resizing, 388 selecting, 387–88 Clip Gallery, 386–88 code. See HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) colors changing on master slides, 399 and presentation design templates, 396 for Web pages displayed in Internet Explorer, 80 Colors dialog box, 80 columns, adding to tables, 384 .com domain type, 58, 338, 339 Commerce Business Daily, 11 Communicator menu, Netscape Navigator, 546–48 CompaniesOnline, 230 Compaq knowledge base archives, 278 COM ports, 23 Composer, 537, 629 CompuServe Web site, 283 Computer Management window, 38–39 conferences. See NetMeeting connections, Internet changing dial-up configuration, 88–89 copying, 53 creating dial-up configuration, 26–28, 88 deleting, 53 modem configuration, 12 naming, 27, 50, 53 overview, 12, 19–20


remote access to corporate networks, 47–53 sharing, 34–47 summary of types, 12–13, 19, 20, 33 via cable modem, 13, 28–29 via DSL, 12–13, 30–31 via ISDN, 12, 31–33 via T-1, 12, 19–20 Connect To The Internet icon, 26 Contacts list, 95 content, intranet, 423–25 content, Web site. See also digital content; images; text; Web stores collecting what exists, 343–44 creating new documents, 345–46 digital, 343–46 for disseminating information, 334 features of effective sites, 336 importance of, 336 importing, 348–50 methodologies for developing, 337 product support information, 275–79 Content Advisor, 85–87 Control Panel Add/Remove Programs icon, 426 Fax icon, 152 Internet Options icon, 26, 78 Network icon, 41 Phone And Modem Options icon, 21 cookies, 75–78, 629 Copernic configuring, 220–23 downloading, 218–19 installing, 219 using, 223–25 versions of, 217 copying Internet connections, 53 text, in PowerPoint outlines, 377 text, using Web-authoring tools, 348–49

Corel knowledge base archives, 278 corporate networks. See networks crawler-based search engines, 190, 356–57 Create Folder dialog box, 98 Create Hyperlink dialog box, 349–50 credit cards, 170. See also calling cards credit reports, obtaining, 171–74 Customize Search Settings dialog box, 74–75 CuteFTP, 148

D databases Web host support for, 340 for Web store inventory, 408 data categories, 390 data labels, 393 data series, 390 data sheets, 390. See also data tables data tables, 393 data values, 390 Deja Web site, 216 Deleted Items folder, Outlook Express, 94, 100, 126 Dell Computer knowledge base archives, 278 Web site, 15 Department of Commerce. See U.S. Department of Commerce Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, 293–98 departments of motor vehicles, 179 design templates, PowerPoint changing, 397 for existing presentations, 397 vs. master slides, 396, 398 for new presentations, 396 overview, 396 selecting for use, 396–97

Index

653

dialing rules for 10-digit dialing, 25–26 creating new location, 24–25 editing location options, 24–25 setting up, 24–26 dial-up Internet connections, 12, 26–28, 88 digital certificates, 87, 88, 629 digital content adding images to Web pages, 350 collecting, 343–44 creating, 345–46 sources for, 343–44 digital ID. See digital certificates digital subscriber lines. See DSL (digital subscriber lines) Direct Hit, 201, 359 directories, for Internet calls, 154–55 directory-type search services defined, 191 glossary definition, 630 vs. search engines, 191, 192 submitting Web sites to, 357–58 discussion groups, e-mail. See mailing lists disseminating information, 334. See also content, Web site distribution lists, Address Book, 114–15 distributions, recording bonds, 528–29 mutual funds, 518–19 D-Net Web site, 284–85 DNS (domain name servers) glossary definition, 630 role in Web browsing, 56 documents, as Web site content creating new content, 346 digitizing existing content, 345–46 importing text, 348–49 Dogpile, 202–4 domain hosting. See Web hosting services

654

domain names checking for availability, 339 choosing, 338–39 rules for, 339 domain name servers (DNS), 56, 630 domains, 338–39, 630 domain types, 58 dot-coms, 59 Dow Jones businessdirectory.dowjones.com, 275 The Wall Street Journal online, 11, 252–61 Downloaded Program Files folder, 80 downloading bank statements, 493–94 Copernic, 218–19 and modem speed, 20 online investment transactions, 512–13 Drafts folder, Outlook Express, 95 dragging text, 348 DSL (digital subscriber lines) connecting to Internet via, 30–31 glossary definition, 630 how it works, 30 vs. other high-speed options, 33 overview, 12–13, 30 security issues, 31, 33 sharing connections, 46–47 Dun & Bradstreet, 11, 230, 234–39 Dundee Internet Services, 440 Dynamic HTML (DHTML), 333, 630

E early withdrawal penalty transactions, 531 e-commerce. See Web stores The Economist, 239–42 EDGAR (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission), 302–8 Edit menu, Netscape Navigator, 545 .edu domain type, 58 eGroups.com, 145–46


Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 185 electronic mail. See e-mail electronic payments. See online bill payment Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), 185 electronic résumés creating cover letters, 469 creating in Word, 465–68 elements of, 462–63 finding online, 456–57 formatting, 465–68 glossary definition, 630 keyword use, 463–64 plain text vs. HTML, 465 posting, 469 preparing content, 461–64 what not to do, 468 e-mail. See also messages, e-mail; newsletters, e-mail; Outlook Express, Macintosh edition; Outlook Express, Windows edition attaching business cards to messages, 123 blocking messages, 107–8 configuring Network Messenger for use, 554–56 creating messages, 101–4 deleting messages, 100 and file attachments, 104–5 forwarding messages, 99 housekeeping, 126, 127–28 how it works, 92–93 location for message folders, 126 marking messages, 98–99 message receipt options, 120 overview, 91–92 printing messages, 98 reading messages, 95, 119 replying to messages, 99 rules for filtering messages, 107–10 saving messages, 97–98 security issues, 125, 180–84 sending messages, 102, 121–22

signatures for messages, 106–7 spell-checking messages, 123–24 stationery for messages, 104 troubleshooting, 127 using HTML in messages, 102–3 when to use fake address, 169 wireless access, 319–25 e-mail discussion groups. See mailing lists employment. See job searching; recruiting online Enable Internet Connection Sharing option, 35, 47 encryption, 170, 180, 183–84, 630 Equifax credit reporting agency, 171, 173 errors, and bank statement reconciliation, 499 Ethernet adapters, 13 Excel. See spreadsheets exchanges, link, 360–61 Excite, 192, 359 executiveplanet.com, 273–74 Expedia.com, 264–67 Experian credit reporting agency, 171, 174 extranets, 422, 630 ezines. See newsletters, e-mail

F fake names, when to use, 169 favorites, Internet Explorer adding Web sites to list, 62–64 glossary definition, 631 managing, 62–64 organizing, 64 fax modems, 150 fax service configuring, 150–51 first-time use, 150–51 using to receive faxes, 152 using to send faxes, 151 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 181 Federal Reserve System Web site, 309–11 Federal Trade Commission, 179 fee-based Internet information resources, 233–61 File menu, Netscape Navigator, 544–45

Index

655

files. See also documents, as Web site content; presentations; Web pages attaching to e-mail messages, 104–5 location of temporary Internet files, 79 File Transfer Protocol (FTP), 6, 40, 58, 148–49, 631 filtering e-mail messages, 107–10 Financial Times Business Directory, 285 finding. See also search services contact information for people, 116 mailing lists, 142–44 newsgroup topics, 136, 137–38 Web hosting services, 342–43 firewall software, 29, 31, 631 Floating Component bar, Netscape Navigator, 550 folders creating, 97–98 glossary definition, 631 Folders List, Outlook Express, 94–95 fonts. See also text changing in Internet Explorer, 80, 81 changing in Outlook Express, 122 monospaced, 297, 466–67, 636 foreign language news, 246–47 Format dialog box, 399–400 formatting objects, 399–400 tables, 386 Web-page text, 349 Formatting toolbar, PowerPoint, 400 Form Page Wizard, 411–14 Form Properties dialog box, 415–16 forms, order. See order forms Forward button, Internet Explorer, 99 forwarding e-mail messages, 99 FreeMerchant.com, 419 FrontPage. See also Web-authoring tools creating hyperlinks, 349–50 creating Web page order forms, 411–17 publishing Web sites, 354–55 Web wizards, 347–48 FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions, 340 FTP (File Transfer Protocol), 6, 40, 58, 148–49, 631 656

G Gateway knowledge base archives, 278 gateways, 6, 94, 631 Global Seek Reports, Dun and Bradstreet, 235 Go2Net, 208 Go Gettem, 204 Go/Infoseek, 204–5, 210, 359 Go menu, Netscape Navigator, 546 Google, 205–7 Gopher, 40 GoTo.com, 216 .gov domain type, 58 government Internet information resources Bureau of Economic Analysis, 290–93 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 293–98 Census Bureau, 298–301 EDGAR, 302–8 Federal Reserve System, 309–11 Government Printing Office, 311–14 overview, 289 Government Printing Office Web site, 311–14 GPO Access Database Web site, 311–14 Graph feature. See Microsoft Graph graphic images. See images graphs. See charts gridlines, chart, 392 groups. See distribution lists, Address Book Gutenberg, Johann, 9

H hardware devices, 6–7 Headhunter.net Web site, 459 tag, 332 Help, online for electronic bill paying, 488–89 Netscape Navigator, 543 high-speed Internet connections cable modem, 13, 28–29 DSL, 12–13, 30–31 ISDN, 12, 31–33 T1, 12, 19–20 type summary, 12–13, 19, 20, 33


History list, 64–65, 80, 169 home banking. See online banking home pages. See also Web pages glossary definition, 631 for intranets, 423 Hoover’s Online, 11, 228–29, 286 hosting. See Web hosting services host names. See domain names; Web hosting services HotBot, 190, 191, 209–10, 216 HR Bookmark Web site, 460 HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). See also Web pages code overview, 330–32 glossary definition, 631 newer technologies, 333 using in e-mail messages, 102–3 tag, 330 HTML tags, 330–32, 631 HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), 6, 58, 632 hubs defined, 6 glossary definition, 632 using to share Internet connections, 46 hyperlinks. See links HyperTerminal configuring connection, 156–58 establishing connection, 156–58 glossary definition, 632 logging off, 158 overview, 156 saving sessions, 158 using to transfer files, 158–59 Hypertext Markup Language. See HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), 6, 58, 632

I IAB (Internet Architecture Board), 7, 632 IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), 7, 632 IBM knowledge base archives, 278

ICS (Internet Connection Sharing), 35, 47, 632 identities, Outlook Express, 111–12, 632 IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), 7, 632 IIS (Internet Information Services), 426, 428, 633 images adding hyperlinks to, 349–50 adding to PowerPoint slides, 386–89 adding to Web pages, using Web-authoring tools, 350 digital, 345–46 editing in PowerPoint, 389 importing, 350 saving from Web pages, 68 IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol), 6, 93, 633 tag, 332 importing images, using Web-authoring tools, 350 text, using Web-authoring tools, 348–49 Inbox folder, Outlook Express, 94, 95 indexes. See directory-type search services information, disseminating, 334. See also content, Web site information gathering, as reason to have Web site, 334 information resources. See business information resources Infoseek, 192, 204, 205 Insert Attachment dialog box, 105 Insert Table dialog box, 383 installing Copernic, 219 modems, 21–22 Netscape Navigator, 541 instant messaging, 537, 627 .int domain type, 58 Integrated Services Digital Network. See ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) Interbiznet Bugler Web site, 460 interest accrued, 527, 528, 529–30 on bonds, 527, 528–29 margin, 525 internal rate of return (IRR), 532–33, 633

Index

657

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Web site, 11, 15– 16, 315–17 international information resources The Economist, 239–42 executiveplanet.com, 273–74 search services, 216–17 Internet. See also connections, Internet; Internet services; World Wide Web configuring dial-up connections, 26–28, 88 connection alternatives, 19–52 defined, 4 and dot-coms, 59 glossary definition, 633 history of, 8–9 how it works, 5–7 impact of, 9 list of business uses, 10 management of, 7 number of users, 9 security and privacy issues, 165–85 sharing connections, 34–47 supporting hardware, 6–7 as transformative technology, 9 Internet accounts. See Internet service providers (ISPs) Internet Architecture Board (IAB), 7, 632 Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), 7, 632 Internet call directories, 154–55 Internet Connection Sharing, enabling, 35, 47 Internet Connection Sharing Application dialog box, 37–38 Internet Connection Sharing Settings dialog box, 37 Internet Connection Wizard, 26–28, 44, 88 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), 7, 632 Internet Explorer, Macintosh edition. See also Web browsers Activity Indicator, 563 adding Web sites to Favorites list, 569 Address bar, 563, 564

658

AutoComplete feature, 564–66 Button bar, 563 changing cache settings, 585–86 changing History settings, 584–85 changing start page, 586–87 creating Internet Scrapbooks, 574–75 customizing, 622–24 dealing with cookies, 583–84 default start page, 586 downloading files, 582–83 e-mailing pages and links, 573 Explorer bar, 564 Favorites bar, 563 Favorites list, 569–71 History list, 572 Menu bar, 563 opening, 561–62 Page Holder feature, 567–69 Preferences dialog box, 622–24 previewing Web pages, 576–77 printing Web pages, 576 saving Web pages, 573–74 search feature, 577–82 Status bar, 564 testing Web sites, 352 Title bar, 563 using to navigate Web, 564–69 window elements, 563–64 Internet Explorer, Windows edition. See also Web browsers Activity Indicator, 59 adding Web sites to Favorites list, 62–64 Address bar, 59, 60–61 advanced searching using Search bar, 73–75 changing start page, 79 customizing, 78–90 default start page, 57 e-mailing pages and links, 65 glossary definition, 633 History list, 64–65, 80, 169


Links bar, 59 Menu bar, 59 opening, 57–58 printing Web pages, 68–70 Radio toolbar, 66–67 role in Internet history, 9 search feature, 70–75 and Security zones, 60, 82–84 sharing the application, 36–38 simple searching using Search bar, 71–72 Standard Buttons toolbar, 59 Status bar, 60 testing Web sites, 351 Title bar, 59 using to navigate Web, 61–62 window elements, 59–60 Internet Information Services (IIS), 426–28, 633 Internet Mail Access Protocol (IMAP), 6, 93, 633 Internet Options dialog box, Internet Explorer Advanced tab, 78, 90 Connections tab, 26, 44–45, 88–89 Content tab, 85–88 General tab, 76, 78–81 vs. Internet Properties dialog box, 78 Programs tab, 89 Security tab, 82–84 Internet phone calls, 153–56 Internet Policy Institute, 9, 165–66 Internet Properties dialog box, 26, 78, 125–26. See also Internet Options dialog box, Internet Explorer Internet Protocol (IP), 4, 5 Internet protocols, 5–6. See also FTP (File Transfer Protocol); Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), 7, 633 Internet Scrapbooks, 574–75 Internet service providers (ISPs) and connection set-up, 12, 13, 26, 27 examining their privacy policies, 175–76

glossary definition, 633 role in e-mail, 92–93 role in newsgroups, 132, 135 role in Web browsing, 56 security issues, 181 selecting, 13 Web sites, 279–83 Internet services. See also e-mail; newsgroups; Web sites chat rooms, 163 for fax modems, 150–52 FTP (File Transfer Protocol), 6, 40, 58, 148–49 Gopher, 40 HyperTerminal, 156–59 mailing lists, 139–46 NetMeeting, 159–63 Phone Dialer, 153–56 specifying programs to use, 89 Telnet, 6, 40, 149–50 Internet Society (ISOC), 7, 634 Internet zone, 82 intranets defined, 6 determining need for, 422–23 glossary definition, 633 setting up, 425–32 Taco Bell example, 421–22 typical types of content, 423–25 Web servers for, 425–32 Intuit knowledge base archives, 278 inventory databases, 408, 419 investing, online. See online investing Investing in Stocks Web site, 275, 511 investment accounts. See brokerage accounts; securities Investorama Web site, 275 IP addresses, 41, 58, 633 IP (Internet Protocol), 4, 5 IRR (internal rate of return), 532–33, 633

Index

659

IRS. See Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Web site IRTF (Internet Research Task Force), 7, 633 ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) connecting to Internet via, 31–33 glossary definition, 634 how it works, 31–32 vs. other high-speed options, 33 overview, 12, 31 sharing connections, 34–46 ISOC (Internet Society), 7, 634 ISPs. See Internet service providers (ISPs)

J Java, 333 Javascript, 333 JobDescription.com, 453–54 job openings. See also recruiting online creating electronic postings, 450–55 finding résumés online, 456–57 publicizing online, 458–59 job searching America’s Job Bank example, 470–72 Boeing instructions for résumé submitters, 454–55 posting résumés online, 469 preparing electronic résumés, 461–68 JumboStore.com, 419

K Kbps (kilobits), 20 keywords, 193–96, 634 kilobits, 20 knowledge base Web sites, 275–79 Kompass Web site, 287

L labels, data, 393 Language Preference dialog box, 80 LANs (local area networks), 4, 44–45, 47–53, 635 laptops, 325 layouts. See auto layouts

660

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), 6, 634 legends, chart, 392–93 Lexis-Nexis news retrieval service, 242–52 LibrarySpot, 230 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), 6, 634 limit orders, 507, 508, 634 links adding to images, 349–50 adding to text, 349–50 checking, 350 creating, using Web-authoring tools, 349–50 exchanging as form of advertising, 360–61 glossary definition, 634 how URLs work, 58–59 overview, 61–62 sending in e-mail messages, 65 testing, 350 using to navigate Web, 61–52 verifying, 350 Links bar, Internet Explorer, 59, 62 Linux, 5 list addresses, 141, 634 Listbot mailing list provider, 146 list-hosting services, 440, 635 list-management software, 441–42, 635 Listproc, 140, 635 Listserv, 140, 441, 635 list servers for creating mailing lists, 140 Web host support for, 341 Liszt, mailing list directory, 142–43 Local Area Connection Properties dialog box, 42–43, 47 Local Area Network (LAN) Settings dialog box, 45 local area networks (LANs), 4, 44–45, 47–53, 635 Local Intranet zone, 82, 83 Locate A Web Presence Provider Web site, 342


location for e-mail message folders, 126 temporary Internet files, 79 Location toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 549 LookSmart, 210–11, 216 Lycos, 192, 212, 216 Lyris, 441, 442

M Macintosh, 5. See also Internet Explorer, Macintosh edition; Outlook Express, Macintosh edition Macromedia knowledge base archives, 279 Magellan, 216 mailing lists. See also eGroups.com; newsletters, e-mail for business, 142–44 etiquette, 144–45 finding, 142–44 glossary definition, 635 how they work, 139–41 overview, 139 setting up, 362 starting, 145 subscribing to, 141 unsubscribing from, 141 as way to publicize Web sites, 362 Web host support for, 341 Majordomo for creating mailing lists, 140–41 glossary definition, 635 Web host support for, 341 Make New Connection icon, 48, 52 Mamma metasearch engine, 204 maps, creating in Address Book, 117 margin interest, 525 Marketing Lists, Dun and Bradstreet, 235 market orders, 507, 635 marking e-mail messages, 98–99 master slides, PowerPoint changing background, 399

changing color scheme, 399 changing text formatting, 399 customizing, 398–99 defined, 398 vs. design templates, 396, 398 displaying, 398 relationship to individual slides, 398–99 slide master slides, 398 title master slides, 398 meetings. See NetMeeting Menu bar, Internet Explorer (Macintosh), 563 Menu bar, Internet Explorer (Windows), 59 Menu bar, Netscape Navigator, 544 menus, showing in full, 377 message rules, 107–10, 635 messages, e-mail attaching business cards to, 123 attaching files to, 104–5 blocking, 107–8 creating, 101–4 deleting, 100 enhancing security, 125, 182–83 forwarding, 99 housekeeping, 126, 127–28 HTML in, 102–3 location for folders, 126 marking, 98–99 printing, 98 reading, 95, 119 receipt options, 120 replying to, 99 rules for filtering, 107–10 saving, 97–98 sending, 102, 121–22 signatures for, 106–7 spell-checking, 123–24 stationery for, 104 Web links or pages in, 65 messages, newsgroup posting, 138 viewing, 136, 137–38

Index

661

Messenger, 537, 554–56, 636 metasearch engines Dogpile, 202–4 glossary definition, 636 list of sites, 204 metasearch software Copernic, 217–25 defined, 192 glossary definition, 636 how it works, 192–93 meta tags, 332–33 Micron PC knowledge base archives, 279 Microsoft as FTP site, 148–49 knowledge base archives, 275–78 U.S. Justice Department case, 9 Microsoft Excel. See spreadsheets Microsoft FrontPage. See also Web-authoring tools creating hyperlinks, 349–50 creating Web page order forms, 411–17 publishing Web sites, 354–55 Web wizards, 347–48 Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions, 340 Microsoft Graph, 390–93, 636. See also charts Microsoft Locate A Web Presence Provider Web site, 342 Microsoft Money, 475, 477, 479, 512 Microsoft Organization Chart, 393–95, 636 Microsoft PowerPoint. See PowerPoint Microsoft Product Support Services Web site, 276 Microsoft WebTV, 352 Microsoft Windows 2000, 30, 34, 426–28 .mil domain type, 58 MILnet, 8 modems. See also cable modems configuring, 23–24 glossary definition, 636

662

high-speed alternatives, 12–13, 33 how they work, 20 installing, 21–22 overview, 12, 20 Properties dialog box, 23–24 speed considerations, 12, 20, 33 monetizing, 636 Money. See Microsoft Money MoneyCentral Web site, 282–83 monospaced fonts, 297, 466–67, 636 Monster.com job search page, 450, 451 posting jobs at, 455–56 résumé form, 461–62 Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Online buying and selling securities, 506–11 connecting to Web site, 505–6 Mosaic, 8, 637 Move dialog box, 110 moving clip art, on PowerPoint slides, 388 Navigator bookmarks between folders, 552 PowerPoint outline text, 377, 378, 379 tables, on PowerPoint slides, 386 MSN bCentral Web site, 281–82 MSN MoneyCentral Web site, 282–83 MSN portal, 192 MSN Search, 73–75 mutual funds. See also brokerage accounts reconciling accounts, 524 recording distributions, 518–19 recording fees, 521–22 recording purchases, 515–18 recording sales, 520–21 recording share splits, 522 tracking market value, 523 updating prices online, 524


N naming Internet connections, 27, 50, 53 National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 8 National Science Foundation, 8 NationJob Network Web site, 459 natural language queries, 200, 637 navigating Web sites, 61–62, 336 Navigation toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 548 NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications), 8 .net domain type, 58, 338 net investment costs, 502–3, 637 NetMeeting chatting online, 161–62 configuring, 160 glossary definition, 637 opening, 160 overview, 159 uses for, 159 using to place calls, 160–61 Netscape Communicator accessing features from Netscape Navigator, 546–48 configuring Netscape Messenger, 554–56 defined, 537–38 downloading, 538–41 installing, 541 obtaining, 538–41 using Netscape Navigator, 543–53 Netscape Messenger, 537, 554–56, 636 Netscape Navigator. See also Web browsers bookmark feature, 550–52 Communicator menu, 546–48 customizing, 557 Edit menu, 545 File menu, 544–45 Floating Component bar, 550 getting Help, 543

glossary definition, 637 Go menu, 546 installing, 541 Location toolbar, 549 Menu bar, 544 Navigation toolbar, 548 opening, 541–42 overview, 543 Personal toolbar, 549 role in Internet history, 8 searching Internet, 553 testing Web sites, 352 View menu, 545–46 Window menu, 546 Net-Temps Web site, 459 Network And Dial-Up Connections folder, 32–33, 34, 42, 47, 48, 52, 53 Network Connection Wizard for dial-up connections, 48–50 for VPN connections, 52–53 Network dialog box, 41–42 network interface cards (NICs), 34, 42, 46, 47, 637 Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), 6, 40, 135, 638 networks configuring clients for shared Internet connections, 41–46 defined, 4 enabling Internet connection sharing, 34–41 glossary definition, 637 remote access to, 47–53 Network Solutions, 339 New Area Code Rule dialog box, 25–26 New Calling Card dialog box, 51–52 New Identity dialog box, 111 New Location dialog box Area Code Rules tab, 25 Calling Card tab, 50–51 General tab, 24–25

Index

663

New Mail Rule dialog box, 108–9, 110 New Message window, 101–2 newsgroups choosing screen names, 133 connecting to, 135–36 finding topics, 136, 137–38 glossary definition, 637 list of major categories, 131–32 overview, 131–32 posting messages, 138 setting up accounts, 132–35 subscribing to, 136 as way to publicize Web sites, 361 newsletters, e-mail choosing format, 437–38 editorial process, 443–47 establishing publication schedule, 448 formatting, 447 including job opportunities, 458 methods for publishing, 438–42 outlining content, 443–44 overview, 433–34 planning considerations, 436–38 publishing using Outlook Express, 439 publishing via list-hosting services, 440 publishing via list-management software, 441–42 reasons to publish, 434–35 tips for writing, 445–46 NICs (network interface cards), 34, 42, 46, 47, 637 NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), 6, 40, 135, 638 Normal view, PowerPoint, 374–75 Northern Light, 213–14, 216 NOT operator, 194, 196 NSFnet, 8, 9

664

O objects, in PowerPoint adding to slides, 382–95 changing appearance, 399–400 charts as, 390–93 defined, 370 formatting, 399–400 organization charts as, 393–95 OCR programs, 345–46, 638 offline files, 638 offline publicity for Web sites, 363 123 Link, 216 online advertising, 359–61 online banking electronic bill payment, 476, 477–89 electronic statements, 477, 490, 491, 493– 99 glossary definition, 638 overview, 476–77 prerequisites for, 477–79 reconciling accounts, 477, 497–99 signing up for, 479 transferring funds between accounts, 477, 490, 491, 492–93 online bank statements approving transactions, 494–96 corresponding with bank, 496–97 downloading records, 493–94 glossary definition, 638 overview, 477 reconciling accounts, 497–99 retrieving, 493–94 setting up in Quicken, 491 signing up for service, 490


online bill payment caveats, 478 describing electronic payees, 481–82 glossary definition, 638 making recurring payments, 485–87 overview, 476–77 paying bills, 482–83 security issues, 484–85 setting up accounts, 479–80 stopping payment, 487 troubleshooting, 487–89 online brokers. See brokerage accounts online catalogs. See Web stores online discussion groups. See mailing lists online financial services. See online banking; online investing online Help for electronic bill paying, 488–89 for Netscape Navigator, 543 online investing buying and selling online, 506–11 connecting to brokerage Web site, 505–6 cost considerations, 502–3 downloading transactions, 512–13 glossary definition, 638 how it works, 504–11 keeping manual records in Quicken, 512–33 overview, 501–2 picking broker, 502–3 reconciling accounts, 524 recording fees, 521–22 record-keeping, 512–33 services available, 503 setting up investment account in Quicken, 514–15 signing up for brokerage account, 504 tracking market value, 523 updating prices online, 524 Web information resources, 274–75, 511–12

online meetings. See NetMeeting online ordering. See Web stores online payroll service, 476–77, 639 online portfolios, 504 online shopping. See Web stores online transfers glossary definition, 639 overview, 477 setting up in Quicken, 491 signing up for, 490 using, 492–93 opening Address Book, 102, 112–13 bookmarks folder, 551 Internet Explorer (Macintosh), 561–62 Internet Explorer (Windows), 57–58 NetMeeting, 160 Netscape Navigator, 541–42 Outlook Express (Macintosh), 592 Outlook Express (Windows), 93–94 PowerPoint outlines, 382 Opera browser, 352, 353 opting out, 172–73, 179, 180, 639 Options dialog box, Outlook Express. See also Internet Options dialog box, Internet Explorer Compose tab, 122–23 Connection tab, 125–26 General tab, 96, 118–19 Maintenance tab, 100, 126–27 Read tab, 119 Receipts tab, 120 Security tab, 125 Send tab, 121–22 Signatures tab, 106–7 Spelling tab, 123–24

Index

665

order forms adding ordering instructions, 414 creating in FrontPage, 411–17 customer use, 417–18 editing form information, 414–15 processing, 418–19 Redmond Technology Press example, 417–18 running Form Page Wizard, 411–14 saving to Web servers, 417 specifying formatting for form results, 417 specifying how to transmit orders, 415–16 organization charts. See Microsoft Organization Chart .org domain type, 58, 338 OR operator, 194, 195 Outbox folder, Outlook Express, 94, 102, 121 outlines, PowerPoint collapsing and expanding, 379 copying text in, 377 creating using AutoContent Wizard, 372– 75 editing text in, 376 entering text in, 376 moving slides in, 379 moving text in, 377, 378, 379 opening, 382 overview, 376 promoting and demoting text, 379 rearranging slides in, 379 saving, 381–82 spell-checking, 380–81 summary slides, 380 Outlining toolbar, PowerPoint, 378–80 Outlook Express, Macintosh edition Address Book, 598, 618–20 configuring existing accounts, 594–96 creating e-mail messsages, 606–7 creating folders and subfolders, 601 customizing, 622–24 Deleted Items folder, 598 deleting e-mail messages, 605–6 Drafts folder, 598 666

e-mail housekeeping, 625–26 and file attachments, 609–12 finding contact information for people, 621 Folders List, 598 formatting message text, 608–9 forwarding e-mail messages, 604 how e-mail works, 590–91 importing settings, 592–94 Inbox folder, 598 marking e-mail messages, 603 opening, 592 Outbox folder, 598 overview, 590 Preview pane, 599 printing e-mail messages, 602 reading e-mail messages, 599–600 replying to e-mail messages, 603–4 rules for filtering e-mail messages, 615–17 saving e-mail messages, 600–602 sending e-mail messsages, 606–7 Sent Items folder, 598 setting up, 592–97 signatures for e-mail messages, 612–14 signing up for Hotmail, 596–97 sorting e-mail messages, 599 spell-checking e-mail messages, 624–25 using HTML in e-mail messages, 608–9 using identities, 617–18 window elements, 597–98 Outlook Express, Windows edition blocking e-mail messages, 107–8 creating e-mail messsages, 101–4 customizing, 118–29 Deleted Items folder, 94, 100, 126 deleting e-mail messages, 100 Drafts folder, 95 e-mail housekeeping, 126, 127–28 and file attachments, 104–5 Folders List, 94–95 forwarding e-mail messages, 99 glossary definition, 639 how e-mail works, 92–93


Inbox folder, 94, 95 location for message folders, 126 marking e-mail messages, 98–99 and newsgroups, 131–38 opening, 93–94 Options dialog box, 118–29 Outbox folder, 95 Preview pane, 95 printing e-mail messages, 98 reading e-mail messages, 95, 119 replying to e-mail messages, 99 rules for filtering e-mail messages, 107–10 saving e-mail messages, 97–98 sending e-mail messsages, 102, 121–22 Sent Items folder, 95 sharing the application, 36–38 signatures for e-mail messages, 106–7 spell-checking e-mail messages, 123–24 stationery for e-mail messages, 104 using HTML in e-mail messages, 102–3 using identities, 111–12 using to publish e-mail newsletters, 439 window elements, 93–95

P packets, 5, 6–7, 639 pagers, 321–22 pages. See Web pages Palm OS devices, 322–24 passwords for Content Advisor, 85–86 glossary definition, 639 using wisely, 182–83 payees, electronic, 481–82 payroll. See online payroll service .pcl files, 317, 639 PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), 322–24, 639 .pdf files, 297, 298, 301, 302, 311, 317, 640 PeopleFind.com, 176, 179 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), 322–24, 639 Personal Finance Web Center (AOL), 280–81 personal information databases, 176–80, 640

Personal toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 549 Personal Web Manager, 431 Personal Web Server, 428–32, 640 PGP Security Web site, 184 Phone And Modem Options dialog box and Add/Remove Hardware Wizard, 21–22 setting up calling cards, 50–52 setting up dialing rules, 24–26 setting up modems, 21, 23–24 phone calls 10-digit dialing, 25–26 and calling cards, 50–52 and dialing rules, 24–26 Internet, 153–56 placing using NetMeeting, 160–61 placing using Phone Dialer, 153–54 placing via computer, 153–54 receiving via Phone Dialer, 154 and remote computer access, 48–50 Phone Dialer adding directories to list, 154–55 using to place phone calls, 153–54 using to place video calls, 155–56 using to receive phone calls, 154 photo CDs, 345 photos, adding to PowerPoint slides, 388–89. See also pictures pictures. See also clip art; images adding to PowerPoint slides, 386–89 editing in PowerPoint, using Picture toolbar, 389 positioning on PowerPoint slides, 388, 389 Picture toolbar, PowerPoint, 389 Place A Call dialog box, 161 placeholders, PowerPoint, 369 plain text vs. HTML electronic résumés, 465 e-mail messages, 101, 102–3 Plug and Play, 21, 640 Pocket PC-based devices, 324–25 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), 6, 641 POP (Post Office Protocol), 6, 38, 640 Index

667

portals, 192, 640 portfolios, online, 504 port numbers, 36, 38, 40. See also COM ports ports, 23, 640 posting messages, 138, 641 Post Office Protocol (POP), 6, 38, 640 PostScript, 317, 641 PowerPoint. See also presentations, PowerPoint; slides, PowerPoint glossary definition, 641 key terms, 368–70 overview, 366–70 publishing presentations to Web sites, 401–2 viewing Web versions of presentations, 402–3 PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol), 6, 641 Preferences dialog box, Internet Explorer, Macintosh edition, 622–24 presentations, PowerPoint blank, 396 changing the look, 396–400 creating using AutoContent Wizard, 370–75 defined, 368 editing in Outline view, 376–82 publishing to Web sites, 401–2 saving, 381–82 spell-checking, 380–81 steps in creating, 366 title slide, 398 viewing Web versions, 402–3 Pretty Good Privacy, 184 previewing Web pages in various browsers, 351–53 Preview pane, Outlook Express, 95 printing Address Book, 116 e-mail messages, 98 maps, 117–18 Web pages, 68–70

668

privacy issues, 165–85 privacy policies, 174–76, 641 Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), 185 product support Web sites, 275–79 profiles, Address Book, 88. See also identities, Outlook Express properties, connection, 33, 34–36, 42–43, 47 properties, defined, 641 protocols, 5–6, 641
tag, 330 publicizing Web sites, 355–63 Publish As Web Page dialog box, PowerPoint, 402 publishing intranet Web pages using IIS, 428 intranet Web pages using Personal Web Server, 431–32 presentations as Web pages, 401–2 as reason to have Web site, 334 Web sites to Web servers, 354–55 Publishing Wizard, 431–32 Publish Web dialog box, FrontPage, 355 puts (stock market), 525–26, 641

Q Qspace, 171–72 QuickBooks, 475, 476, 477 Quicken annual return calculations, 532–33 approving online banking transactions, 494–96 corresponding with bank via e-mail, 496–97 describing electronic payees, 481–82 downloading investment transactions, 512–13 keeping manual investment records, 514–33 making online bill payments, 482–85 making recurring online payments, 485–87 and online account transfers, 477, 491, 492–93 online banking overview, 476, 477


online bank statement overview, 477 online bill payment overview, 476 online security issues, 484–85 overview, 475 Portfolio View window, 523 reconciling investment accounts, 524 reconciling online bank statements, 497–99 recording bond interest and distributions, 528–29 recording bond purchases, 526–28 recording bond sales, 530 recording margin interest, 525 recording mutual fund distributions, 518–19 recording securities purchases, 515–18 recording securities sales, 520–21 recording short sales, 524 retrieving online bank statements, 493–94 setting up for online bank statements, 491 setting up for online bill payment, 479–82 setting up investment accounts, 514–15 signing up for online banking, 479 troubleshooting online bill payment, 487–89 updating security price information online, 524 Quick Launch toolbar, 93, 642 Quote.Yahoo.com, 512

R radio, listening to Webcasts, 66–67 Radio bar, Internet Explorer, 66–67 Radio tool, Netscape Communicator, 537, 642 ratings system. See Content Advisor reading e-mail messages, 95, 119 RealNames Web site, 216 receipts, e-mail message, 120 receiving faxes, 152 reconciling bank statements, 497–99 investment accounts, 524 Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi), 86

Recruiter’s Network Web site, 460 recruiting online Boeing instructions for résumé submitters, 454–55 creating electronic job postings, 450–55 finding résumés, 456–57 publicizing job openings, 458–59 reasons for using Internet, 450 tips for recruiters, 460–61 Web site resources, 459–60 recurring bill paying transactions, 485–87 Redmond Technology Press Web site online order form example, 417–18 as simple Web store example, 408–10 remote access and calling cards, 50–52 defined, 47 enabling automatic connections, 38–40 and office LANs, 47–53 using phone lines, 48–50 using VPN tunnels, 52–53 Remote Access Auto Connection Manager Properties dialog box, 39–40 repeaters, 7, 642 replying to e-mail messages, 99 research, doing, 226–30. See also search services resizing clip art, 388 tables, 385 Restricted Sites zone, 82, 84 ResumeBlaster.com, 457 résumés. See electronic résumés return of capital, 528–29 The Riley Guide Web site, 460 rings, Web, 360–61 routers, 7, 642 rows, adding to tables, 384 RSACi (Recreational Software Advisory Council), 86 rules for filtering e-mail messages, 107–10. See also dialing rules Run dialog box, 428

Index

669

S sales mutual funds, 520–21 stocks and bonds, 520–21, 530 saving e-mail messages, 97–98 images from Web pages, 68 outlines and presentations, 381–82 portions of Web pages, 68 Web pages as files, 67–68 Web pages in Internet Explorer, 67–68 Savings Bonds, 531 schedules, IRS. See Internal Revenue Service Scrapbooks, Internet, 574–75 Search bar, Internet Explorer, 71–75 Search.com, 204 search engines. See also search services crawler-based, 190, 356–57 vs. directories, 190–92 glossary definition, 642 HotBot example, 190–91 overview, 190–91 submitting Web sites to, 356–57 searching. See finding; job searching; search services search services. See also metasearch software AltaVista, 193–96, 197–99, 216, 359 Ask Jeeves, 199–201 for business users, 197–215 choosing, 215–17 directories vs. search engines, 191, 192 directory-type, 191, 192, 357–58 Dogpile, 202–4 glossary definition, 642 Go2Net site, 208 Go/Infoseek, 204–5, 210, 359 Google, 205–7

670

HotBot, 190, 191, 209–10, 216 how they work, 190–92 international, 216–17 in Internet Explorer, 70–75 list of major search sites, 359 list of metasearch engine sites, 204 lists of sites for specific purposes, 216–17 LookSmart, 210–11, 216 Lycos, 192, 212, 216 Northern Light, 213–14, 216 role of keywords, 193–96 submitting Web sites to, 356–59 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), 341, 643 securities. See also bonds; brokerage accounts; mutual funds; stocks buying and selling online, 506–11 reconciling accounts, 524 recording purchases, 515–18, 526–28 recording sales, 520–21, 530 setting up Quicken accounts, 514–15 tracking market value, 523 updating prices online, 524 Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR Web pages, 302–8 security issues and “always on” Internet connections, 29, 31, 33 and cable modems, 29, 33 and DSL lines, 31, 33 and e-mail, 125, 180–84 encryption, 170, 180, 183–84 tips for password use, 182–83 Security Settings dialog box, 84 Security zones, Internet Explorer adding security levels, 84 adding sites, 82–84 changing security levels, 84 and e-mail, 125


glossary definition, 642 overview, 82 setting security levels, 84 Status bar display, 60 Select People dialog box, 109–10 Send Fax Wizard, 151 Send File dialog box, 158–59 sending e-mail messsages, 102, 121–22 faxes, 151 Sent Items folder, Outlook Express, 94, 121 Server Extensions. See FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions servers, 5, 642. See also Web servers share splits, 522 sharing, defined, 643 sharing Internet connections, 34–47 Sherlock search tool, 579 shopping carts, online, 411, 419. See also Web stores shortcut menus, defined, 643 shortcuts, defined, 643 short sales, 524 signatures, e-mail, 106–7, 643. See also business cards slide master slides, 396, 398 slides, PowerPoint. See also presentations, PowerPoint adding charts to, 390–93 adding organizational charts to, 393–95 adding pictures, 386–89 adding tables to, 382–86 defined, 368 examples, 366–67, 368 moving in Outline view, 379 rearranging in Outline view, 379 relationship to master slide, 398–99 spell-checking, 380–81 steps in creating, 366 summary, 380 title slide, 398

SmartDownload, 539, 643 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), 6, 38, 92–93, 643 Social Security Administration Web site, 16–17 sound, modem, 23 spell-checking e-mail messages, 123–24 PowerPoint presentations, 380–81 spiders, 190 splits, share, 522 spreadsheets, 293, 297 SSL (Secure Socket Layer), 341, 643 Standard Buttons toolbar, Internet Explorer, 59 start page, Internet Explorer changing default, 79 glossary definition, 643 MSN page as default, 57 state departments of motor vehicles, 179 statements, bank. See online bank statements stationery, for e-mail messages, 104, 644 Statistical Resources on the Web, 11 status area, 644 Status bar, Internet Explorer, 60 stocks buying and selling online, 506–11 recording purchases, 515–18 recording sales, 520–21 recording splits, 522 tracking market value, 523 updating prices online, 524 stock splits, 522 stop orders, 508, 644 stop words, 313, 644 stores. See Web stores subdomains, 340–41 subscribers, 139, 644 subscription address, 141, 644 summary slides, PowerPoint, 380 Switch Identities dialog box, 112

Index

671

T T-1 connections, 12, 19–20, 644 tables adding content, 384–85 adding rows or columns, 384 adding to PowerPoint slides, 383–84 creating, 383–84 defined as objects, 382 filling with information, 384–85 formatting, 386 moving, 386 overview, 382 positioning, 386 resizing, 385 specifying size, 383 Taco Bell intranet example, 421–22 tags, HTML, 330–32 taskbar, defined, 644 TCP/IP (Shared) Properties dialog box, 42 TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), 4, 5, 36, 47, 645 TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), 5 technical support. See product support Web sites telephone calls. See phone calls Telnet, 6, 40, 149–50, 645 templates. See design templates temporary Internet files, 76–78, 79, 645 10-digit phone dialing, 25–26 terminal emulation. See HyperTerminal; Telnet testing hyperlinks, 350 usability, 354 Web sites, 350–54 Texas Department of Public Safety Sex Offender Registration Database, 166–67 text adding hyperlinks, 349–50 adding to Web pages, 349 entering, using Web-authoring tools, 349 formatting, using Web-authoring tools, 349

672

importing, using Web-authoring tools, 348– 49 for PowerPoint slides, 368–69 spell-checking (See spell-checking) Thomson Financial Securities Data, 230 .tif files, 645 Title bar, Internet Explorer, 59 title master slides, 396, 398 titles for charts, 392 for presentations, 398 for Web pages, 332 tag, 332 toolbars Location toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 549 Navigation toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 548 Personal toolbar, Netscape Navigator, 549 PowerPoint Formatting toolbar, 400 PowerPoint Outlining toolbar, 378–80 PowerPoint Picture toolbar, 389 Topica, 440 top-level domains, 338–39 transaction processing. See also Web stores glossary definition, 645 as reason to have Web site, 335 transferring files using FTP, 148 using HyperTerminal, 158–59 using NetMeeting, 162 Web host support for, 341 transferring funds. See online transfers Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), 4, 5, 36, 47 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), 5 Trans Union credit reporting agency, 171, 174 travel Web sites airlines, 267–70 biztravel.about.com, 272–73 Biztravel.com, 271 biztraveler.org, 272 for business travelers, 270–74 executiveplanet.com, 273–74


Expedia example, 264–67 online travel agents, 264–67 overview, 263 TRUSTe, 175 Trusted Sites zone, 82, 83

U uniform resource locators (URLs). See URLs Unix, 5 uploading, and modem speed, 20 URLs entering in Internet Explorer, 60 glossary definition, 645 how they work, 58–59 in HTML code, 332 overview, 58–59 U.S. Company Reports, Dun and Bradstreet, 235 U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis Web site, 290–93 Census Bureau Web site, 298–301 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, 293–98 U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 181 U.S. Federal Reserve System Web site, 309–11 U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 179 U.S. Government Printing Office Web site, 311–14 U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Web site, 11, 15–16, 315–17 U.S. Savings Bonds, 531 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR Web pages, 302–8 U.S. Social Security Administration Web site, 16–17 usability testing, 354 Usenet, 131, 645 user accounts, 646 user profiles. See identities, Outlook Express; profiles, Address Book users, defined, 645. See also business users USSEARCH, 177–78, 179

V vcards, 123, 646 verifying hyperlinks, 350 video calls, 155–56. See also NetMeeting View menu, Netscape Navigator, 545–46 virtual private networks (VPNs), 52–53, 646 vision impairment, 81 VPNs (virtual private networks), 52–53, 646 VT-100, 150

W Wageweb, 452 WAIS searches, 304, 305, 307–8 The Wall Street Journal online, 11, 252–61 Wall Street Research Net Web site, 275, 512 WANS (wide area networks), 4, 646 Web. See Web pages; Web sites; World Wide Web Web-authoring tools adding hyperlinks to Web pages, 349–50 adding images to Web pages, 350 adding text to Web pages, 348–50 entering Web page text, 349 formatting Web-page text, 349 importing text to Web pages, 348–49 publishing Web sites to Web servers, 354–55 Web-based storefronts. See Web stores Web browsers. See also Internet Explorer, Macintosh edition; Internet Explorer, Windows edition; Netscape Navigator glossary definition, 646 how they work, 56–57 role in Internet history, 8–9 testing Web sites in, 351–53 Webcasts, 66–67, 646 Web crawlers, 190, 356–57 Web hosting services Active Server Pages support, 340 assessing Web server speed and reliability, 341 choosing, 340–41

Index

673

comparing features, 340–41 database support, 340 data transfer limitations, 341 disk space allotment, 340 domain hosting support, 340 FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions support, 340 local, 343 mailing list support, 341 publishing of Web sites to servers, 354–55 signing up for service, 343 and SSL security, 341 subdomain support, 340–41 technical support, 341 virtual domain support, 340 where to find, 342–43 Web pages. See also content, Web site; Web sites adding hyperlinks, using Web-authoring tools, 349–50 adding images, using Web-authoring tools, 350 adding text, using Web-authoring tools, 348–50 changing colors in Internet Explorer, 80 checking hyperlinks, 350 creating, 347–50 entering text, using Web-authoring tools, 349 formatting text, using Web-authoring tools, 349 how they work, 330–33 importing text and images, using Web-authoring tools, 348–50 new technologies for, 333 number available, 189 PowerPoint presentations as, 402–3 previewing in various browsers, 351–53 printing, 68–70 publishing presentations to Web sites, 401–2 role of HTML code, 330–32 saving as files, 67–68

674

saving in Internet Explorer, 67–68 sending in e-mail messages, 65 Web rings, 360–61 Web servers assessing speed and reliability, 341 for intranets, 425–32 publishing Web sites to, 354–55 Web sites. See also business information resources; content, Web site; intranets; Web pages adding to Favorites list, 62–64 advertising site online, 359–61 browser compatibility, 351–53 bulletin-board methodology, 337 checking hyperlinks, 350 collecting existing content, 343–44 creating, 347–50 creating new content, 345–46 database support, 340, 408 importance of useful content, 336 as means of advertising, 334 methodologies for developing content, 337 navigating, 61–62 publicizing offline, 363 publicizing online, 355–62 publishing presentations as Web pages, 401–2 publishing to Web servers, 354–55 reasons to have, 333–35 role of aesthetic appeal, 336 role of navigation, 336 strategies for, 333–37 submitting to search services, 356–59 testing, 350–54 for transaction processing, 335 as type of publishing, 334 types of uses, 333–35 usability testing, 354 viewing PowerPoint presentations, 402–3 wireless access, 319–25


Web stores Amazon.com example, 406, 407 features of, 335 non-interactive option, 408–10 overview, 405–7 Redmond Technology Press example, 408–10, 417–18 shopping cart systems, 411, 419 simple interactive option, 411–19 WebTV, 352 wide area networks (WANs), 4, 646 wildcards, 196, 313 Window menu, Netscape Navigator, 546 Windows 98, and Personal Web Server, 428–32 Windows 2000, 30, 34, 426–28 Windows Components Wizard, 426–27 Windows Explorer, saving e-mail messages in folders, 97 wireless Internet access overview, 319–20 using cell phones, 320–21 using e-mail capable pagers, 321–22 using laptops, 325 using Microsoft Pocket PC-based devices, 324–25 using Palm OS devices, 322–24 using PDAs, 322 wizards Add/Remove Hardware Wizard, 22 AutoContent Wizard, 370–75 for creating Web pages, 347–48 Form Page Wizard, 411–14 glossary definition, 647 Internet Connection Wizard, 26–28, 44, 88 Network Connection Wizard, 48–50 Publishing Wizard, 431–32 Send Fax Wizard, 151 Windows Components Wizard, 426–27 .wks files, 293, 646. See also spreadsheets The World Factbook Web site, 11 World Wide Web. See also Internet; Web pages; Web sites navigating with Internet Explorer, 61–62

role in Internet history, 8–9

X XML (Extended Markup Language), 333, 647

Y Yahoo! Business and Economy Directory, 287–88 Careers site, 459 Cisco Systems search example, 227–28 as e-commerce provider, 419 as example of directory search service, 191, 192, 214–15 listing of airline Web sites, 268–69 People Search site, 179 Quote site, 512 submitting Web sites to, 358

Z ZDNet, 185, 192 zero-coupon bonds, 529, 531 Zip2 Web site, 216 Zip files, 292–93, 647

Index

675

T

he manuscript for this book was prepared and submitted to Redmond Technology Press in electronic form. Text files were prepared using Microsoft Word 2000. Pages were composed using PageMaker 6.5 for Windows, with text in Frutiger and Caslon. Composed files were delivered to the printer as electronic prepress files.

Interior Design Stefan Knorr

Pr oject Editor Project Paula Thurman

Indexer Julie Kawabata

Layout Minh-Tam S. Le

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