A Few Simple Things
(When you know HOW)

The use of capital letters for your messages is considered the equivalent of shouting your message
The 'Shift' key is the one with the upward pointing arrow and the 'Caps.Lock' key is the one above on the left of the keyboard.
Using the shift key is easy and improves the perception of you by the reader of your message.



It is considered good form not to send unwanted text in e-mail replies. It is good to receive a polite thank you for a message, but the joy is somewhat muted by the inclusion of 4 or 5 kilobytes of original message.

To remove unwanted chaff from your replies, just delete the bits that the original sender already knows, from the reply.

And here is how to do it

The big secret is to do any deleting to the message you are sending out, in the window, probably called  ' composition'  that you are typing your bit of the reply in. The least technical method is to put the cursor ( the blinking line where you are typing) at the start of the bit that you do not want to send and press the 'delete' key on your keyboard till it is all gobbled up.
A quicker way is to highlight all the text block you do not want to send and press 'delete' just once.
To highlight text, click the left mouse button at the beginning of the text, and hold down the button as you move the cursor to the end of the text. Let go of the button then and all the text will be highlighted  and may be deleted at a touch of the delete button.
If you write your reply above the original text, deleting the bit you do not want takes no more than a couple of seconds, as you can zip the cursor down as fast as you can, as the high-lighting will automatically stop at the end of the last text.

Remember, do this in the message you are writing, if you do it to the message that you have just read, the whole thing will disappear.



EDIT and UNDO

DO NOT PANIC

There is a handy feature that enables any mistake short of closing down a program, to be restored.
Look at the top left of your screen and you will see the word 'Edit'. Click on this with the mouse and you will get a menu , and if you click on the 'Undo' choice, whatever you have just done that you did not really want to do will be undone, and something you have deleted will reappear.



Your 'Back' Button.

This is at the top left of your Internet Browser, ( The program you are using to read this)
It will take you back to the last page you visited, and used with the Forward and Reload buttons it will enable you to swap rapidly between internet pages. These can be useful for many things, so try them a bit and see what you can do. Remember, if you go back to an internet page that had fully loaded in your computer, you will get the old version and this  may have changed since you looked , so a click on the Reload button will get the latest version. This is especially useful when watching the last few minutes of an ebay auction for example, as you can swap quickly between a list of objects that you have done a search for, and the individual items.


Pictures and attachments

It is considered good form to ask the recipient before sending any picture files or other large attachments to your message, and attachments of over 100kb should be avoided altogether. If you own a country estate, accommodating a visitor's elephant is no problem, but some folk have small town houses and they will find it a slow process getting the elephant into the house, what with the cutting it up into small pieces and all.


Your Internet Service Provider will have a page somewhere about Net Ettiquette, it is worth a quick read to find out what people generally do and how they do it on the internet.
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