By Bruce Kratofil
Bruce Kratofil is President of BJK Research, Cleveland, OH. He also is NABE Webmaster. He can be reached at brucek@bjkresearch.com. I

Windows on the Web

January 2000 

Note: Beginning with the January 2000 issue, Windows on the Web and PC Corner will be moving from Business Economics to the web site, and will alternate bi-monthly. This month, we will look at a few browser secrets before looking at some news sites that cover e-business.

Internet Secrets

I've found myself in the same situation a couple of times in the past few months, talking to someone about the NABE web site or about using the Internet. I mentioned what I thought was a well-known technique for using the Web, but found  instead it was something the other person didn't know. So here are a few "secrets" that may make it easier to use the Web.

Search a Page

Sometimes you may come across a page, such as NABE's Consultant's Registry or Employment Opportunities, and want to look for a certain keyword or phrase. You don't need a search engine -- your browser already has this function built in.

In Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x and 5.x, click Edit, Find (on this page) to bring up the Search dialog, shown in Figure 1. You can enter either a word or phrase here, and then IE will search the page, showing one by one all of its finds.

Figure 1- IE 4 and 5 Find Dialog

The steps are almost identical in Netscape Navigator. Click Edit, Find in Page to bring up the Netscape Find Dialog. (Both IE and Navigator use Ctrl+F as shortcut keys for this.)

Figure 2- Netscape Find Dialog

A Sight for Sore Eyes

You may have been doing a lot of browsing, and your eyes are getting tired. Then you come on a web site (maybe this one) where you think the text is too small. You don't have to strain your eyes. Instead, let your browser increase the text size.

In Internet Explorer 5, click on View, Text Size. You will see a menu that gives you five sizes: Largest, Larger, Medium (the default), Smaller, and Smallest. Once you make your choice, IE will redraw the page with the new text size. (Text that is actually included in graphics won't change.) In IE 4, you click on View, Fonts to see the same menu. With Netscape, the procedure is a little different. On its View menu, you will see two commands: Increase Font and Decrease Font. You can use these to adjust the text size, and unlike IE, there does not seem to be an upper limit- you can click Increase Font six or seven times, giving yourself some really big fonts.

There is one potential drawback- if you change from the default font size, you may interfere with part of a page layout- text may break at the wrong spot or mis-align, or text may possibly scroll to the right of your screen. Moving back to the default font size will fix these problems.

More and more sites require registration and passwords. They will often send you an e-mail with your registration details, such as the user name and password. Or you may have signed up with a list-serv, which has detailed instructions for sending messages and unsubscribing.

One way to keep track of all these is to keep them in one place. Most e-mail programs allow you to set up additional folders to store e-mail messages. Create a folder, and call it something like "Details", "Misc" or even "Junk Drawer" and make it a point to save all your password and registration messages in there. When you then forget one, you know exactly where to turn to find it.

To create a new folder in Microsoft Outlook Express 5, you click on File, New, Folder. You then give your new folder a name, and decide the location of the folder. (Do you want to make it a subfolder of some existing folder?)

Figure 3- Creating a Folder in Outlook Express

In Netscape Messenger, click File, New Folder. Again you give it a name and a location, this time from a pull down menu.

Figure 4- Creating a Folder in Netscape

If you are using Eudora Pro, you click Mailbox, New to see a similar dialog. Once you have your folder created, any time you receive an administrative-type message, you can click and drag the message from your inbox to the new folder. This reduces the clutter in your Inbox, and keeps similar messages in one place.

Site Tour

The business world has changed when an upstart like America Online can buy an old, established firm like Time Warner, or when a three year old company, which has never had a quarter of profitability, can have a market capitalization of $10 billion because it is involved in "e-business" or the New Economy.

There are a number of magazines/web sites that specialize in this emerging segment. They tend to be headquartered in Silicon Valley, as opposed to the traditional East Coast media centers. These aren't tech news sites. They don't do hardware and software reviews, but look at the business side of things. You may want to check out these sites:

• Red Herring- strong coverage of venture capital markets and IPO's in high tech industries. A typical current story "Should Intel be paranoid about Transmeta: Silicon Valley's Most Secretive Startup Finally Takes Off the Wraps."
• Upside- same coverage as above, but tends to cover personalities a little more. A typical story "Upside's Elite 100: The Movers and Shakers of the Digital World."
• Business 2.0- it's focus is narrower: e-business, as opposed to high-tech. A typical current story, "A light-speed retrospective of ecommerce, the six major market sectors that paved the way, and what lies ahead."
• Wired - while the magazine itself covers technology, politics and culture as well, the online version has a separate business section. Typical story: "Food: The Final e-frontier."