Tips 2 and 3 dealt with organizing your H drive folders and files. Obviously, you can apply these same techniques at home whether you are using Windows '95 or '98. But unlike working at home, you may want to force certain programs to remember where to put things, once you decide to save them. In this article, we will show you how to configure one of Microsoft's Office programs - Word '97, to remember where to save your files!

Saving Options - What is the Problem anyway? Microsoft applications save your files in a standard folder called My Documents, located on the local hard drive. Because the default location for file saving is the local hard drive, your files remain on the local workstation - not the network. The problem here is obvious - if you need to retrieve an important document that is saved in the My Documents folder, you must return to that particular workstation to retrieve it. With more than 600 machines at the High School, this could be a chore if you forget on which machine you were working!

Definitions: Preferences/Options: Preferences and options allow the user to modify the existing program for his/her personal style. A separate software file is used to keep track of such housekeeping items including standard fonts, colors, toolbars and file saving locations.

Local Hard drive: The non-removable drive (usually called the "C" drive) located inside the computer or workstation. For example, each computer on the High School network has one hard drive that is capable of storing more than 4.1 GB (GigaBytes) or approximately 4,100,000,000 bytes of information.

I. Saving Locations in Microsoft Word: Word '97 allows you to change many of its local options to make the software more user-friendly. To locate these options, launch Word '97 for Windows using either: the Tools folder on your desktop or pressing the Start button, move to Programs and then to Microsoft Word.

The Word '97 menu bar appears at the top of the screen and looks like the following:  

Select Tools, Options... The following tabbed screen appears:

Choose the File Locations tab. Your screen changes to:

Highlight the Documents choice in the list box and click the Modify... button.  

In the Folder name field, type in: H:\ Press the OK button. Now, press on the Modify... button once more. The following appears in the Modify Location window:

At this point, you may wish to choose a specific folder to save your work. For example, if I chose to save my work in the Training folder, I would double-click on that folder. Then I would press the OK button. Or, to halt this process, press the Cancel button.

One last tip while we are here: The Folder name drop-down box remembers previous saving areas for you. If you choose to change your saving locations frequently, you can locate them with this drop-down box. To activate this option, click on the Folder name box's down arrow and then click on one of your previous choices.

Finish out by clicking OK on the Modify Location screen followed by OK on the Options tabbed Window.