| $ MASH YOUR CASH: If you use one of the popular financial programs [such as Quicken, MSMoney, etc.] and have a hard time keeping current with making the daily entries, you can consolidate multiple cash transactions into one daily, weekly or even monthly entry. Typically small cash expenditures account for the majority of financial transactions, and they can be a real pain to keep track of. |
| For example, suppose you had $50 at the start of the week, got $100 out of the ATM machine and now have $35. You went to the grocery store several times, the gas station, a few fast-food spots and the hardware store. You may have receipts for some of these items and remember how much some items cost, but other expenditures you don't remember; besides making a whole list of small entries into your financial program isn't the most efficient use of your limited time. |
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| Rather than trying to reconstruct [and estimate] these transactions, allocate them to various expense categories based on prior patterns of expenditures. Review one or two month's prior cash expenditures, calculate the percentages that constitute the major expense categories, and allocate current cash transactions by the calculated percentages. |
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97 CLEAN-UP: If you use financial software, before archiving
the 97
data set and starting a new data set for 98, review your account balances
for
accuracy and completeness. Even if not yet paid, record amounts you owe for
1997 as well as income you have earned in 97 but not yet received. Typical
unrecorded expenses/income include utilities, taxes, interest, insurance
as well as holiday purchases made by credit card and year end
bonuses. Make estimates if actual amounts are not available.
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CORRUPT DATA SETS: On occasion or even more often, a
data
set for a financial program becomes "corrupt"; the program's "exe"
file cannot open your personal financial data. There are various
solutions/ workarounds to this problem. Remember, although a fully
functional data set is the ideal condition, what you really are
aiming at is the recovery of your data which may be accessible
in another format.
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COMPRESS FINANCIAL ENTRIES: If you want to track
your profit/loss but can't be bothered with all the accounts and
myriad transactions, you can boil them down to two account types and
one entry per day or less. There are only two account types:
Since a net debit [increase] to Real accounts is a net credit [profit] to Nominal accounts and conversely a net credit [decrease] to Real accounts is a net debit [loss] to Nominal accounts, all financial transactions over a time period can be reduced to one. [The vernacular term "in the black" describing a Profit refers to the Real accounts; the simultaneous condition in the Nominal accounts would be "in the red".] Even if you only have a spreadsheet program or happen to use investment software [such as Fund Manager, Fidelity Investments, Wealth Builder, etc.], you can create a Profit/Loss account to emulate financial software that will track your ongoing financial activity. |
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EXIT ON CANCEL: When trouble comes, many of us blame the
computer, the operating system or the current program. But sometimes
the trouble is of our own making. There are a few simple routines you
can use to avoid these troubles:
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RE-TARGET SHORTCUT
When you click on a shortcut that gets a message that the target is missing, it may be because you moved the target to a portable disk. Windows will try to find the target and even suggest an alternate location, but Windows does not generally look on portable disks.
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| After correcting the Drive letter, check the related "ini" file [if any] in the Windows folder. References to the old drive letter should be changed to the new drive letter. |
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IDLE WEB SPACE?: Do you have empty web-space from your
ISP or other servers? {AOLers have 10MB available; several providers
offer from 200KB to 3MB for free.} There are a few ways to use it
other than storing a web-site. |
| E-MAIL COOKIES: If your E-mail server only supports plain text, then the URL addresses must be converted to live links to access the web-sites. But with an HTML E-mail server, the links are live; this is very handy and time-saving. But there is a price to pay - COOKIES. Since HTML e-mailings are much like web-pages, the sender often attaches "cookie" files with the principal "letter". |
The e-mail cookie
looks similar to a web-site cookie, such as this one received when
using the Netscape e-mail program:
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| For further information about "cookies", how to handle them, and how to set your browser preferences please see Are the Cookies Watching You? |
| STRIP THE PIX: Often when browsing the web, you run across banners that have some picture elements in animated gifs that are very attractive. You would like to incorporate these elements in a picture of your own, but, of course, you don't want the advertising or some other elements. With a little free software [such as an animated gif program], you can strip off those pictures you want. When you see a banner you like, either save it directly or snatch it out of your cache folder. Using the "animated gif" program, open the file and select the "image strip" function. The result will be an entire strip of all the individual pictures. Save the strip in a format you can work with [such as "gif" or "bmp"]. Now you can cut out the pictures you want from the strip using a standard graphics program and save them as individual files with which to build your own pictures. |
| V ARISE FROM THE DEAD: When a shareware program expires because of the time limit [commonly 30 days], if you reset your computer's date, often the program will work. Instead of making a shortcut to the expireware's "exe" file, make it to the program's folder. Inside the folder, create a "txt" file entitled "STOP-RESET DATE.TXT" whose contents enumerate operable dates. Before opening the expireware, reset your computer's date. A shortcut to the date/ time function [located in the Control Panel] can also be placed in the same folder. [Note: when making a shortcut from the date/time function, Windows95 will advise that the shortcut will be placed on the Desktop. From the Desktop, just copy or cut the shortcut and put it in the desired folder.] When you have finished with the program or just after you open it, reset the date to the current day. |
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{
WEBSITE WALLFLOWER?: Is your web-site lonely? Nobody but
you ever seems to stop by for a look. A little free
self-promotion is in order: |
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LOST DLLS: Sometimes after a "crash" or re-installation
of the Operating System,
certain system files may be lost which are needed by
some of your older programs. Old system files such as "mfcoleui.dll" or
"cmdialog.vbx" may
turn up missing. There are a few places you can look to obtain a
replacement: |
| 4 PAGE AFTER PAGE: When you get involved in reading a web article that goes on for page after page after page, there is a faster way to get the entire article into your system so you can read it later at your leisure. As soon as a page loads, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Next Page. Keep loading all the pages until the end of the article is finally reached. Now the entire article is "cached" where you can read it offline. [See Item #36 for instructions on how to use your cache files.] If you didn't have time to load all the pages of the article, when you are in the cache folder, right click on the "Next Page" of the last page loaded. Select the function that copies the URL to the next page in the article. Paste this URL to your Bookmarks/Favourites; next time you go online, you can resume downloading the rest of the article. |