The Computer Tutor

Do you have information in a Word document that you don’t want anyone else to see? Here’s how to put a password on it.

Some of my clients store all of their account passwords in a Word document. Some people use a Word doc to keep track of their medical information, or perhaps their bank account details. If you have private information of any kind in a Word document, it might be a good idea to add a password to that document so that it doesn’t get seen by anyone else.

And it turns out, adding a password to a Word file is pretty easy:

Open the document, then click File:

Next, in the left column, click on Info. Then, under “Protect Document” click the drop-down menu and choose “Encrypt with Password”:

Now you are presented with a window to enter the password you want to use for this file:

You enter the password, then it will prompt you to enter it again to confirm. Then you just Save the document and close it.

Now you can test it – double click to open that file, and it should prompt you for the password.

If you want to remove the password, use the same process as above, but leave the password field blank, then save the document again.

Keep in mind – this level of protection is not all that strong. Someone with a reasonable level of expertise could most likely get past that password protection. But for a lot of people, this simple password protection is sufficient.

Do you think there’s a time when a bad program requests permission to make changes to your computer, and you should allow it?

This question came in from Jerry, in Minnesota –

Hi Scott, I’m a long time subscriber.  We’ve “talked” in the past about your laptops and a couple other things.  Here’s a Computer Tutor topic for the future…I hope.  I have the Slimware cookie or whatever that keeps its window popping up.  The solution appears to be to uninstall it.  However, one of the first steps in the uninstall asks me if I want to allow this thing to make changes to my computer.  That just sounds like a very bad idea.  What do you say to that?   Thanks, and I hope you find this worthy of a Monday post.  Sooner rather than later I hope!

Thank you,

Loretto, Minnesota (near Minneapolis)

Great question, Jerry!

Logically, it makes complete sense to have concerns about this. Why would you let a known bad or malicious program make changes to your computer. Seems like that would be similar to letting a car thief borrow your car, or giving a scammer your credit card number. It just seems unwise, from a security standpoint.

But there is an exception!

When you realize a program is unwanted, the next step of course is to remove it from your computer. In most cases, this means you go to Control Panel, where you can look in the “Programs and Features” category to see a list of the programs installed on your computer. Then you can do a right click on the one you want to remove, and choose the option to “Uninstall”.

But then, you’ll likely get this pop-up alert:

And though it may go against your safety concerns and your intuition, the correct answer is “Yes”.

That’s because the change for which it’s requesting permission it to uninstall itself. And of course since that’s the whole goal of this operation, you want it to be able to do that. If you say “No”, then the operation will stop and the program will still be installed and able to run.

So, when you’re trying to uninstall a program and it asks you for permission to make changes, the correct thing is to allow that to happen. Once that “change” has been made, the program should be gone. At least, in theory. Some malicious programs make it seem like they’re going away, but they’re really sticking around. If you have a program that won’t uninstall, contact me. We’ll force it out!

You’ve probably heard the terms “Deep Web” and “Dark Web”. They are not the same thing.

In general, there are 3 internets, or 3 “webs”.

The first one is often referred to as the Clear Web. It’s also called the Surface Web. This is the internet that most people use every day – Google searches, reading blogs, watching YouTube videos, seeing what’s on a website. The Clear Web consists of the stuff that anyone can access with a regular web browser such as Chrome. It’s content that’s available to the public. This is, of course, the most popular web as it’s something just about everyone uses.

The second one is the Deep Web. Most likely, you have used the Deep Web as well. It consists of content that is hidden – and “hidden” can mean different things. The content might be your online bank account, and of course that is hidden by your password. The general public can’t go to your bank’s website and see your personal account, because it’s in the Deep Web and requires your password. Same thing for your Facebook account – only you can log in and post things on your Facebook account. This also applies to online forums where you have to register in order to post something. And it’s becoming more common to see newspapers put their content on the Deep Web, behind a paywall. This information is still accessible, but only to those authorized to see it.

The third web is the Dark Web. If you think about the internet in general as a big city, the Dark Web would be considered a really bad neighborhood. It’s not a place you want to go. This is where most of the illegal online activity takes place, including:

So you might be thinking – if the authorities know that all of this takes place on the Dark Web, why don’t they just go there and find these people and arrest them? Well, it’s not that easy, for a couple of reasons:

And of course, most of the buying and selling on the Dark Web is done using cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin – which is also essentially anonymous.

So, you use the Clear Web probably every day, and you probably use the Deep Web fairly often. But I’ll bet you haven’t accessed the Dark Web. I haven’t either – and I really don’t have any plans to.

Almost any book you can think of – available online for free. Same as your local library.

If you have a library card for your local library, you probably already know you can borrow digital books. You just need to create an account using an app called Libby, and that allows you to access lots of digital books that are available right there at your local library. And of course, all of this costs you nothing since it it part of the services at the library. It’s really pretty amazing, since you can borrow and read even recent, popular books. Books that if purchased, you might pay $10 or $20 for. But since it’s through the library, you don’t pay anything.

But there’s an online library that’s available to just about anyone – and this takes borrowing digital books to a whole new level.

It’s called Z-Library. You can view it at https://b-ok.cc/ (not sure what that domain name stands for though).

If you thought your local library had a lot of digital books available for download, you’re in for a big fat surprise when you check out Z-Library. As I write this, there are currently over 5.9 MILLION books available there for download.

If you’re looking for a specific book, you can most likely search for it and download it without even registering for an account.  You’re allowed up to 5 downloads per day without registering.

If you create a free account with your email address and a password, that increases your download limit to 10 e-books per day, and a faster download speed. But this only allows you to download and read books on your computer. Still, for some people that’s fine. I mean, how many people read more than 10 books a day?

But if you really want all the features, you can get a Premium Plan. To get a Premium Plan, you can donate as little as $1. That allows you to have digital books sent to your Kindle, and the downloads are free of any ads (the free accounts have advertisements).

Beyond that, there are additional benefits if you pay more. But you can always choose how much you want to pay.

If you pay $1 to $4.99, you get all the extra features but you are still limited to 10 downloads per day.

If you need more than 10 downloads a day, you can choose to pay more (but it’s still really cheap).

You’ll see the pricing structure listed after you create your free account with your email address.

Libraries have always been an incredible local resource. To give you an idea on how this compares to purchase, I looked up the complete set of Harry Potter books on Amazon. The Kindle version is $62.99:

But at Z-Library, you can just click to download the whole thing to your computer. Or pay a little bit of money, and have them sent to your Kindle e-reader:

If you’re wondering if they have a particular book you want, just go to the website and do a search on the title. With almost 6 million books to choose from, there’s a very good chance you’ll find it available.

So if you’re planning to make a New Year’s resolution to read more books, the Z-Library could play a big role in making that happen!

There are good reasons for hiding your list of Facebook friends on your Facebook public profile.

You’ve seen those posts from your Facebook friends:

“I’ve been hacked! If you get a friend request from me, it’s a fake!”

But, as I’ve written before, this is not a “hack”. Their Facebook account has not been compromised. The scammer has just created a new Facebook account, using your friend’s name and profile picture, and they’re pretending to be your friend. The plan for this scam is that they will send friend requests to the people you are already friends with, and some of those friends will just blindly accept (even though you’re already friends). Then they will try to scam your friends, posing as you in order to take advantage of their trust.

And THAT’S why your list of Facebook friends should be hidden from public view. If the scammer sees that he cannot find out who your friends are and try to contact them, he’ll move on to another Facebook profile to run his little scheme. So, having your Facebook friends hidden saves you AND your friends the hassle of dealing with it.

Here’s how you hide your list of friends. (This is how you do it in Chrome, on a desktop/laptop computer. The process on your phone may look different.)

Go to Facebook, and click the little triangle in the top right corner. Then, click on “Settings and Privacy”:

In the next window, click on Settings:

In the next window, look in the column on the left and click on Privacy:

Now look out to the middle part of that page, and find the section called “How People Find and Contact you”. You’ll see an option named “Who can see your friends list?” – click to Edit that setting:

In the drop-down menu, choose “Only me”:

Now just click “Close” over on the right hand side, and you’re done. There’s no “Save” button needed – Facebook has already saved your preferences.

Now, no one can see your list of Facebook friends except you.

You might see a notice pop up on your computer that Adobe Flash Player is being discontinued, and asking if you want to uninstall it from your computer. Here’s what to do.

I’ve had several clients ask me recently about this message they’ve gotten on their computer:

The questions that come up…

What is Flash? Flash is a programming language that used to be very common. Websites used it to display some of their content, such as animated images or games. An example of this is the original Facebook game of Farmville – remember when all your friends were always talking about playing that game? It’s actually still played by a lot of people, but that will end at the end of this year when Zynga (the company that owns Farmville) ends it. Only the original Farmville is being discontinued – newer versions will still be available, since they don’t use the Flash technology.

The end of Flash has actually been on the horizon for a while. Adobe announced the “end of life” for Flash over two years ago, to give enough time for websites to change over to its replacement (HTML 5). And why is it going away? Because of all the security problems it causes. Of all the malware in existence right now, about HALF of it is due to security issues in Flash. It’s really bad.

Do you need Flash? No. The vast majority of websites have already switched over to the much safer HTML 5, and you probably didn’t even notice. There are still a few sites that use Flash to display content, but it’s becoming pretty rare now. And those sites are going to have a big problem after December 31, when Flash no longer works.

Should you uninstall Flash? Yes. There’s a good chance you don’t even have it installed now anyway. I haven’t been installing Flash on new computers and the laptops I sell for at least a couple of years. If you have had your computer for longer than that, you might still have it installed. If so, when you get that pop-up on your screen offering to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player, you can go ahead and get rid of it.

If you have not seen that pop-up and want to make sure you don’t have it, you can go to Control Panel and look at the list of programs available to uninstall, and see if it is listed there as Adobe Flash Player. If you see it, you can go ahead and uninstall it. Or, you can use the Adobe Flash Uninstaller program here.

And if you still play the original Facebook Farmville game, enjoy it while you can!

This is a trick you can do with MS Word, that very few people know about. It can be handy in certain situations.

What we’re talking about is being able to select and highlight certain text in a Word document.

You already know that if you double-click on a single word, that word is highlighted (selected). You might also know that if you TRIPLE click, the entire paragraph is selected. (If you didn’t know that, there’s a bonus tip for you this week.) You can click on a certain word and drag the cursor across several words, and just those words are selected. You can even do CTRL + A and select the entire document.

Then, whatever you have selected, you can do whatever you want with that text. You can cut and paste, copy and paste, change the font or size, or even delete it. Whatever action you take, it applies to ALL of the text you have selected.

But here’s a different scenario:

Let’s say you have a Word document, and the text in that document is a list of names. Each line is the last name, then a tab, then the first name. Like this:

For your purpose, you need to select ONLY the first names (the second column) in that list. How do you do that? If you start with the first one, John, and drag to select, as soon as you get to the second line you’ll see that it’s highlighting the whole second line (not just the first name, Elizabeth). What is the fix for this?

Well, for a list that is short like the one above, you could just hold down the CTRL key and double click each first name. That would achieve the goal. But what if this list contained 150 names? or 1500 names? Double clicking on each first name would take quite some time. And there’s a risk – you could spend a bunch of time double clicking and have 89 first names selected, then accidentally click without holding the CTRL key – that means you have DEselected all of them, and you have to start over from scratch.

But there’s a little-known trick that makes this process much easier. With a certain keyboard key combination, Word will allow you to select text vertically.

In our example, you can place the cursor just to the left of the letter “J” in “John”. Then, on the keyboard, hold down CTRL + ALT + Shift at the same time, and drag the cursor straight down. This allows you to highlight ONLY the first names on the list:

Now you can copy  those names into an Excel spreadsheet column, or print them, or do whatever you want with them.

Shopping online for a used car? You need to be able to identify the scam ads – and there are a lot of them.

Everyone wants to score a great deal when they buy a car. If you go to a car dealer, you might be able to negotiate a fair price. But if you shop around and look for a car being sold by an individual, you might get a REALLY great bargain. Sometimes people have a car and they just want to get rid of it, and they aren’t really worried about getting the price that it’s really worth. That’s what a lot of potential car buyers are looking for. But that strong incentive to find an amazing deal is also what ends up costing the buyer a lot of money – because they fall for a scam.

There are a few things to look for when you’re shopping the used car ads – things that should pop up as a red flag that what you’re looking at might be a scam. Here are a few of them.

First, a ridiculously low price. For example, I went on OfferUp and just searched on the word Honda. This is one of the first ads that came up. A nice 2012 Honda Accord, only 86k miles, always garage kept and it has no mechanical issues. You might expect to pay $8000 to $10,000 for a car like this. But look, this one is only $1400!

And when an ad like this comes up, a lot of people will say, “No way that could be real” and they keep scrolling. BUT…there are a certain percentage of people who think, “I know that doesn’t really make sense, but what if it’s just a really good deal? I have to investigate further!”. That’s the exact response the scammer is looking for.

Second, look for the seller to include an email address in the description. They want you to contact them by email, rather than clicking the “Contact seller” button on the website.

Why is that? Because if you start a conversation using the website’s communication service, the scammer might have you believing the whole story and ready to make the purchase. Then, someone else sees the ad and reports it – and the scammer’s account gets immediately closed. That means he immediately loses his avenue of communication with you. If you start off using email, he can continue the scam even if his seller account gets shut down. Of course, his email account could also get deleted, but that’s less likely..

Really, those first two items should tell you to NOT pursue buying this car because it is definitely a scam. But if you do continue (maybe to just act as a buyer to see what happens, even if you know it’s not a real car for sale), here’s the next thing to watch for: an emotional story.

I emailed an ad a while back (research purposes), and this is the message I got back from the “seller” –

So I guess in this case, her potential scam victims aren’t just people looking for a good deal on a car, it’s also those who are willing to practically steal a car from a grieving widow. Nice!

The other very common story with these scammers is that they are in the US military. That is very deliberate, because it plants a subconscious evidence of honesty and credibility into the story. After all, would a United States soldier lie to you? In the case of the letter above, she claimed to be a recent widow AND a military doctor. Must be legit, right?

And finally – if you keep going this far with the fake seller – they will try to assure you that it’s all real, because the deal is going to happen through the security of eBay selling process. But wait a minute, you didn’t find the car on eBay, did you? It was listed on Craigslist or OfferUp or some other online classified ad site. So how is eBay involved? Answer: eBay is not involved at all.

The scammer wants you to feel confident that it’s all real, so they pretend that the whole transaction is going to happen through ebay Motors. They will tell you that you have no shipping costs, and you can even drive the car for 5 days before your money is even released from eBay to the seller. This is 100% false. If the car was not listed on eBay, and purchased by your bidding on the eBay listing, eBay has zero involvement with this sale and they will not protect you in any way.

What should you do when you see a scam car ad?

Well, in most cases I would tell you that you should report it so that the scammer’s account gets removed. But now I’m kind of leaning toward the notion that it’s not really worth your time. When I recently went on OfferUp and searched for the word Honda, the FIRST FIVE LISTINGS were all scams. I don’t think the websites can keep up with all the fake listings.

Check this out – on OfferUp, there’s a seller named Gianna who had a Honda Accord for sale for just $800. This was in Gulfport, Florida, about 30 minutes from where I live.

But when you look at her “other items” for sale, you can see she has the SAME CAR listed 19 different times. And that car is supposedly for sale in multiple cities in Michigan, Louisiana, California and Massachusetts (and other cities). And every ad I clicked on had just been created MINUTES earlier. The oldest ad I saw was 27 minutes old.

This means that the scammer can get their account shut down by someone reporting the scam, and they are immediately ready to open a new account with the complete set of listings posted almost immediately. It seems like the seller sites could come up with some kind of mechanism to defeat this, but so far it seems to all rely on the scammers being reported by other users. And that doesn’t seem to be very effective.

Bottom line – watch out for these things and don’t fall for the scams. Always deal with a seller face to face. Never send cash or Western Union (or iTunes gift cards). Don’t let your desire for a bargain override your common sense.

I used to have a routine whenever I would open Word and create a new document. I would always start by changing the font to one that I like, and also the font size. What a waste of time!

The default font in Word, if you don’t change anything, is Calibri. The font size is 11. It looks like this:

It’s not a bad font. Pretty clear and easy to read. But what if you want all of your documents to be in Times New Roman, size 14?

It’s also a nice font, very classic style. You could type your whole document in the default Calibri 11, and then highlight the entire thing and change it to Times New Roman 14. But that only fixes the document you’re working on right now. Using that strategy, you have to go through that process every single time.

There’s a better way! You can just change Word to automatically default to the font and size you want to use, every time.

Here’s how to change the default font and font size in MS Word:

First, open a new, blank Word document.

Up in the toolbar at the top, find the section labeled “Font”, and click on that little arrow in the lower right corner of that section:

That opens up the font dialogue box. You’ll see three columns – this is where you choose the font itself, the font style (regular, italic, bold) and the size. You can see I’ve chosen Times New Roman, regular, size 14:

And the final step is to just click the “Set as Default” button in the lower left corner:

Oops, one more step – you need to tell Word if you want this to be the default font for just THIS document, or for all future documents:

If you choose for it to be all documents, click OK and close Word. Then open a new blank document, and you should see that it’s already in your chosen default font and size. Easy!

Sometimes it’s the little things, you know? Why does Chrome, by default, only show part of a website address in the address bar? I don’t know, but here’s how to fix that.

This one is pretty simple. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about here, just open Chrome and go to any website. As an example, we can visit my own website, ComputerTutorFlorida.com.

The actual, full website address is this: https://ComputerTutorFlorida.com. But this is what is shown in the address bar in Chrome:

Why doesn’t it show the full URL? I don’t know. But for me, I just like to have the full website address displayed there. I like seeing the https:// to clearly show that the site is secure, and if a site is not secure, I want to see the http:// (even though Chrome will show a message that says “not secure” on sites that don’t have a valid security certificate).

Fortunately, it’s easy to force Chrome to show the full address each time.

Type the following line into the Chrome address bar:

Of course, you could just copy and paste it as well. When that text is in the address bar, hit Enter on the keyboard.

You’ll see some options come up in Chrome, and the first one listed will say “Context menu show full URLs”. Out to the right will be a drop down menu – in that menu, choose “Enabled”:

Now go to the bottom of Chrome and click on “Relaunch”.

When Chrome opens again, do a RIGHT click on the address bar, and choose “Always show full URLs”:

Now you’ll see the complete website address for any site you visit!