Barbara J. Hamby

Computer “Aha’s”

Sometimes I am appalled at how little I’ve learned about how to use the countless features of modern computers. I have, after all, been using them for at least 25 years. I graduated from a magnetic card typewriter to a computerized word processing system while I was working for Multnomah County in the early 1980’s. Word processing is what I have used most during those years, although I learned several data processing programs for billing in law offices and a medical clinic.

Word processing is still what I do the majority of the time. I do keep a handle on my personal finances with a simple Quicken program, and I’m learning to read Google’s Analytic for its reports on the traffic to my website and blog.

I’m also in the process of organizing about a thousand pictures I’ve transferred to the computer. Most of them were taken on my travels in the last few years. My son-in-law helped me figure out how to speed up the process, rather than dragging them into folders one at a time.

So far, since I’ve loaded most of my work into this new desktop computer, I’ve managed to backup Quicken on a CD and do a total backup of the hard drive on a DVD.

My purchase of a copy of Vista for Dummies was a wise investment. It has helped me get thousands of files transferred, and smoothed out little glitches along the way.

What I saw as a big problem was the fact that many of my poems written over five years or more, were saved in Word Perfect. Unfortunately, when I transferred them from old computers, I didn’t know enough to convert them by saving them to a version of Microsoft Word, the program I use now. Word will not open those files as they are. Today I discovered that my Microsoft Office software offers me the opportunity to re-save the poems to Word. I just have to identify which ones need the conversion and tweak the right keys. That was today’s “Aha.”

I hope that more of these “aha” moments will occur in the future to speed up my learning process. A plaque in my kitchen states: “We are never too old to learn; there is some other reason.” True, we are never too old, but it does take a heck of a lot longer to pound stuff into our old heads.