We have made a video to show how to print gridlines and borders in your Excel spreadsheet. Below the video, you will also find step by step instructions with images.

1. Open the spreadsheet or worksheet you want to print with gridlines or borders.

2. Go to “Print Preview”

3. This is how your worksheet would look like in print preview.

4. Click on “Preview” and then click on “Page Setup”. This will open the page setup dialogue box.

5. Go to the “Sheet” tab, check the “Gridlines” option and then click “Ok”.

6. Now your spreadsheet would look like this in the print preview.

You can now choose to print your spreadsheet or close the print preview.

In the default view, you will notice that your spreadsheet is as it is and no formatting has changed on it. But it will print with the gridlines when you send it to the printer.

Also note that if you want to print a sheet without gridlines you can always go to the Page Setup and uncheck the gridlines option.

So you are happy with your fast internet connection and all the content that you can now download. And you are also happy that the great tools that you have installed which help you create cool documents, videos and much more. This is good unless you are forgetting something.

We often forget that computers need maintenance for better performance. Otherwise after a while they will get slower and you might face some serious issues. Here is a quick list of things you should do at least once a month to keep your computer healthy.

1. Run Disk Clean Up wizard once every month. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
2. Back up your files.
3. Uninstall programs you don’t need any more.
4. Delete unwanted files and folders.
5. Organize your files and folders.
6. Check your Hard Disks for errors. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
7. Open disk defragmenter and analyze your disks and then Defragment those who need to be defragmented. (Windows XP | Windows Vista)
8. Run an anti-spyware program to scan your computer for internet threats.
9. Run an anti-virus program to scan your computer for viruses.
10. Make sure automatic updates are turned on.

I don’t do all of these things once a month. I clean up disks twice a month and defragmentaion once every three months. How you maintain your windows PC? Please share your tips in the comment box below.

Due to some troubles with a few of my WordPress blogs. I have recently learned a lot about security and protecting my WordPress blogs from hacking. There is no way to be 100% sure that your website couldn’t get hacked. However, using the best practices described below, you can make it very hard for someone to crack into your WordPress installation. Taking these steps does not take much time but it saves you from a lot of trouble, even if your website get’s attacked you can fight back quickly and restore your website easily. Without these security precautions you not only make your WordPress installtion vulnerable, but you also make it difficult for yourself to recover from horrible accidents. So lets begin securing of your blog:

Back up often

You have heard this many times. Here it is once again, back up your website and database at least once a week if you update your website daily, or atleast once a month if you don’t update that often. But please back up. Do not trust your webhost when they tell you that they have back ups of your website created on a daily basis. It is very smart to have backups on hand just in case something goes terribly wrong with you or your webhost. There are many WordPress plugins to back up your database. I use WordPress database manager plugin called wp-dbmanager. Using this plugin you can schedual weekly backups to be sent to you via email.

Stay Updated

Whenever there is a new version of WordPress, upgrade your installation as soon as possible. Since 2.7 WordPress has automated the upgrade process or you can manually update to latest version. It only takes about ten minutes but it saves you from a lot of trouble. Older, outdated and upsupported installations often get hacked. Once hacked it is a very lengthy process to clean your blog and upgrade. So protect yourself now upgrade your WordPress.

Also keep your plugins updated to newest versions. If you notice that a plugin author has not released an updated version since a long time go to plugin’s home page and check its status. If the author has abandoned the plugin then stop using it right away.

Strong Passwords

If no one has ever stolen your password then it does not mean that no one ever will. There are some really bad people out there who randomly pick their victims and crack their passwords to take control of their websites. WordPress has strong password indicator which you can use to generate a strong password. A strong password contains atleast 8 characters a combination of alphabates and numbers and special characters. Avoid using words that can be found in a dictionary.

You should have strong passwords not only for your blog’s admin interface, but also for your site’s SSH shell and FTP access. Doing so you make it very difficult for hackers to crack your site and access your files via ftp. Try to use SSH or SFTP instead of plain FTP.

But strong passwords are difficult to remember. Well you should then read this wonder post from the blog herald that tells you how to create strong but memorable passwords. You can also generate a strong password using Aautomatic password generator tool.

File Permissions

One drawback of using WordPress or some of its plugins is that sometimes you need to make a few files writeable on your server. For security it is important that you keep file permissions as strict as possible. It is ideal to have your directories file permission set to 755 and your files 644. See WordPress Codex Changing File Permissions.

Default Username

At the first installation WordPress automatically creates a user account with the username admin. Now using the default username means that half of cracking is done without any guessing. Unfortunately it is not possible to change this username from the WordPress admin interface. However you can change it by running a simple mysql query.
Update tableprefix_users set user_login='newusername' where user_login='admin';

Replace tableprefix with the table prefix in your wp-config file. If you didn’t add a table prefix then it would the default one which is wp_ . You can run this query or manually edit table in phpMyAdmin or you can also run this query using wp-dbmanager plugin.

Other tips:

Remember, no website is 100% secure. But taking these precautions reduces the chances of your blog or website getting compromised easily. The following web pages has more tips on securing your WordPress even more.

Hardening WordPress
WordPress Security Tips and Hacks
WordPress Security Whitepaper

NoFollow and NoIndex Tags

If you have a form on your website’s contact page to collect user feedback. Then it would be wise to hide this page from search engines. If you are worried that what if there were visitors specifically looking for ways to contact your company or you then you should probably create another contact page with no form or provide the contact information on your main page.

You can hide your page from search engines by using a no follow tag on the link that leads to your form page and then by adding noindex meta tag. You can add this tag on the links and pages manually or add a few lines in your robot.txt file. This way the spammers wont find your page from search engines. Here is how to do that:

Lets say that your form is located at a page called “contact.php”, and you have links to your contact page in your site’s navigation menu and some pages. Then you will have to modify these links by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to your link.

<a href="http://www.example.com/contact.php" rel="nofollow">Contact</a>

Then create a robot.txt file and save it to your site’s main/root directory. Add these lines to your robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /contact.php


Then add a meta tag noindex in your contact page between <head> and </head> tags:


<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">


Using the meta tag on your page will tell search bots not to index your page. Read more about Robots Exclusion Standard or check out Google’s webmaster guidelines’ support page.

Human Identification validating techniques:

Using this technique you try to present a challenge to someone who comes to submit the form. This challenge is something simple like copying the code shown in an image file, or answering a simple question. The image verification is called CAPTCHA or reCaptcha. There are several hundered plugins and tools available that allow you to include CAPTCHA image verification to your forms. For example the official reCAPTCHA project offers you to sign up for an account and you can then add their image verification technology recaptcha on your pages. They also have plugins for various Content Management Systems such as WordPress, MediaWiki or phpbb. The site also has tutorials to teach you how you can add the code to your php pages and use it with other server side programming languages.

But if you are a total newbie and can’t configure an image validating script, then you should probably go for simple questions. In this method you add a field to your forms asking users questions like: “2+9=?” the user then enters 11 in the answer field and when they submit form you can check out their answer. If it is correct then the form gets submitted other wise user is taken back to the form. There are ready-made plugins available to do that too on various content management systems.

Do Not Use A Form

Just in case if you get tired of fighting spam or if you lack the skills to get spam protection configured properly. Then it is highly recommended that you use a contact page with no Form at all. Use the No follow tag for your contact page and your email address in image format like this:

If your users have something important to say they would email you. I know that people are lazy, they usually find it easy to just fill out a form and send rather than opening their email client and manually typing your email address. But trust me they will email you if they have something valuable to say. I personally feel that spending time and money on fighting spam is such a waste of resources. Millions of dollars are spent each year on sending spam messages and combating spam. I feel that if we start using techniques that do not give way to other people for exploitation then we would be indirectly adding to conservation of human resources.

CAUTION:
Easy life takes no responsibility if this method doesn’t work as expected or causes any damage to your computer or data so try at your own risk.

First Step:

• Open Explorer window and go to folder you want to customize.
• Click on Tools > Folder Options
• In the View tab under Advanced Settings check the radio button that says Show hidden files and folders.
  
  

  Folder options dialog box in windows xp

• Click Apply and then Ok.

Second Step:

1. Now in the folder, right click and select Properties.
2. Properties dialog box would appear. Click on Customize tab there under customize menu click on Change icon button and select an icon for your folder. Press Ok.

Third Step:

1. Previous process should have created a “desktop.ini” file in your folder.
2. Sometimes this file remain invisible so if you can’t see it don’t worry it is there.
3. Open this file with Notepad if the file is invisible go to folder and manually type desktop.ini in the filename field to open it.
4. Add these lines of code in your “desktop. ini” file
   
[ExtShellFolderViews]
{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}={BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}
[{BE098140-A513-11D0-A3A4-00C04FD706EC}]
IconArea_Image=C:\Windows\Greenstone.bmp
5. In this code line IconArea_image tells your explorer window to display a background image. In this example we are using Greentone.bmp you can change it with your image and provide the path to that image.
6. Save “desktop.ini” file.
7. Refresh the folder.

Now u can see your favorite image in your desktop background.