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Digital Genealogy
6/5/2001 - Archive
A Few More of My Favorite Things
In my previous
article, I spent some time discussing how to make the best use of the favorites
feature of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser (or its equivalent, the "bookmarks"
feature of Netscape). Based upon the amount of e-mail I got in response, it
seems that many of you still have a few remaining questions on how to make the
favorites feature work best for you. In this article, I'll address some of those
questions.
Once you have a reasonably large number of favorites, you're going to want to
rearrange them into a more sensible order. If you renamed them as you added
them (or after you added them), you may have put the most important term first
in its new title (such as a surname or geographic area). Favorites are usually
listed in the order in which you added them, but you'll probably want to alphabetize
them. To do this, click on the favorites menu choice in the Internet Explorer
menu bar. This will give you the choices to add favorites and organize favorites,
followed by your current list of favorites. Now move your cursor down on top
of any of your favorites (or folders), and right-click. This gives you choices
such as delete and rename, but we're not interested in those at the moment.
Instead, click on "sort by name." Voila! Alphabetized favorites.
If you don't want your favorites alphabetized, but you still want to change
their order, you can click on one and drag it to a new position in the list.
You can also drag and drop a favorite into a folder, or a folder into another
folder (and you can drag favorites and folders back out of other folders and
move them elsewhere). It might take a little practice to get it the way you
want it, but eventually, you'll have your list organized in the best way to
help you do your genealogical research.
Some of you are concerned about losing your favorites (such as due to a hard
drive crash). After all, it could take you months or years to create a really
great list of favorites, and you want to avoid having to redo all of that work.
Others of you use more than one computer (perhaps a desktop and a notebook),
and would like to have the same list of favorites on both computers. To backup
your list of favorites, or to copy it between computers, you'll want to use
the import and export feature, found under the file menu. This feature starts
up the "import/export wizard," which walks you through the process. You'll be
given a choice of "import favorites" or "export favorites." If you're backing
up your list of favorites, or copying it to take to another computer, choose
"export favorites." If you're restoring your list of favorites from the backup,
or creating the list from a copy you made from another computer, choose "import
favorites."
When you choose "export favorites," you can then choose to export all of your
favorites, or just one of your folders (this might be handy if you're just copying
one folder to another computer). Next you're usually going to select "export
to a file or address," and then browse to the location where you want to copy
the list, such as a new file on a 3.5" disk. Once you've decided where you want
to copy your favorites, and what name to give to the new file, you're pretty
much done! Importing favorites works much the same way, but in reverse.
Many of you are AOL members who use the browser built into the AOL software.
Although similar to an external Internet Explorer browser, the built-in AOL
browser requires a few different steps in order to accomplish some of the things
I've previously discussed. In AOL 6.0, you would click the "my favorites" choice
on the menu, which brings up the "favorite places" window. Here, you can highlight
a favorite or folder in order to delete it, or you can edit it. When you choose
"edit," you can rename the favorite or folder. To create a new folder, choose
"new," and then change the radio button from "new favorite place" to "new folder."
You can then give the new folder a name. As with Internet Explorer, you can
drag and drop favorites and folders in order to rearrange their order.
Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science
at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor
to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing,where he writes the 'Cybrarian'
column. The "Digital Genealogy" column appears bi-weekly on Ancestry.com's
site at: www.ancestry.com/library/view/columns/digital/digital.asp. Drew
can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com
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