Get a file to come to the top in Explorer by using non-alphanumeric characters to lead the name.

This week a bit of fun. Wordle is site that lets you generate “word clouds” from text or a URL that you provide. The clouds are graphical collections of the words in the source text or site. They give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

You can see the Slaw Tips Blog Word …

Most of the paid and free legal research products offer proximity search (i.e., the ability to search for documents that have keywords within a certain number of specified words or paragraphs).

And, to the surprise of most people, Google also allows you to do proximity searches with the AROUND(n) connector. AROUND must be typed in upper case and you replace the “n” with a number specifying how many words you want your keywords to be from each other.

For example, when you search malpractice AROUND(10) pinnington, you get 5,900 hits where malpractice is within 10 words of pinnington.

Remember to …

Moving text with the cut and paste commands, either from one application to another, or between documents within the same application, is one of the most powerful features of Windows. It can also be one of the most frustrating features, especially when the pasted text doesn’t appear as you had expected or wanted.

In many programs you can control how Windows pastes data with the Paste Special command. This tip reviews how this command works in Microsoft Word. The steps outlined for Word are identical for pasting text with Paste Special in many other Windows programs.

At one time or …

In Microsoft Word (including Mac versions) you can easily create a variety of horizontal lines by typing the following characters three times followed by Return or Enter:

• Minus (-) produces a thin line;
• Underscore (_) produces a thicker line;
• Equal sign (=) produces a double line;
• Asterisk (*) produces a thick dotted line;
• Tilde (~) produces a zigzag line;
• Number (#) produces three lines, a thicker middle line between two thin ones.

The lines will be the width of your page, or if you are using columns, the width of your column. Remember to use these shortcuts to create dividers …

Most of us have tons of personal info on various Google sites, and many lawyers have started using Google in their law practices. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t done everything we should to make our Google accounts more secure. Have you enabled Google’s Two Step Authentication on your Google account?

On his blog, Rick Klau has a fantastic post that outlines all the steps you should take to make your Google account more secure. This post is a must read for anyone using Google, and for that reason the SLAW Tech tip will shamelessly take to you another site …

How many of you remember the old days when you could only have one browser window open at time? Yikes! Thankfully, the current versions of mainstream browsers now let you open multiple sites and it is easy to switch between them by clicking on tabs.

But what happens when you accidentally close a tab and you want to get back to it? You can of course go digging around your History, but there is a faster way.

You can use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+Shift+T” to open the accidentally closed tab. This works in IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

A side …

Don't always work with application windows fully expanded. Make your computer's desktop work for you. It's a great resource.

Do you forget to include attachments when you are sending an Outlook email? I hate when that happens!

If so, try Attachment Alarm for Microsoft Outlook. This add-in is very easy to use. You just specify the words or phrases that occur in an email message and imply an attachment (“see attachments”, “see attachment”, “in attachment”, “the file attached” etc.). Attachment Alarm scans all outgoing e-mail messages and if it finds words or phrases from the Key words list, it raises the alarm and suggests inserting an attachment in a Microsoft Outlook message.

Attachments Alarm for Outlook works with Microsoft …

The next time you need to select most of the files in an open Explorer window don’t waste your time holding down Ctrl and clicking each file manually. It’s much easier to select the ones you DON’T need, and then let Windows reverse your selection.

Inside an open window, hold down Ctrl as you select the file(s) you DON’T want to select (sounds backward, but wait…). Select Edit, then Invert Selection, and Windows will turn your selection inside out leaving you with the files you wanted to select. You can then delete or copy them as needed.…