Handy hints and tips from your fellow readers
Email us your tips: letters@computeractive.co.uk
TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Skim through magazines in Google Books
Google Books is a great place for finding out-of-copyright classics, as your ‘Free Ebooks’ feature pointed out (Issue 659, page 60 – buy it from www. snipca.com/46665). But it’s not just great for books – there are thousands of old magazines to browse also.
I always start at www.snipca. com/46666, where you can scroll through A-Z listings. It’s often easier to search for a specific title or subject. I often look for old issues of Computerworld, Life and Popular Science ( 1 in our screenshot). Unlike with books, where you’d probably want to read page by page, it’s easy to flick through magazines as you would in real life. You just need to click the correct icon at the top 2 and you’ll see the whole magazine laid out below 3 . It’s then easy to cast your eye over the pages to see what interests you.
Another little tip is to use the keys J and K to move forward and back through a magazine or book.
Peter Cobb
Peter wins a copy of our 2022 Back Issue CD Buy it from us at www.snipca.com/44660
FILES Convert Word documents to read on Kindle
I was recently sent dozens of Word documents that I had to forward on to a Kindle. I dreaded having to work out how to convert them so they’d be readable on the Kindle, so I was relieved to discover an incredibly simple method. All you have to do is email the document to your Kindle’s unique email address and type convert in the subject line (see screenshot below left). Amazon recognises this as a command to automatically convert the file, then adds it to your Kindle library. How clever!
Sam Hutton
SOFTWARE Digitise notes using OneNote’s OCR
Digitising handwritten text using Google Keep’s OCR sounds easy (Issue 662, page 48), so I’ll certainly give it a go. I’m curious to know whether it’ll improve upon my current method of using the OCR function in Microsoft’s OneNote. I receive lots of written and typed notes that need digitising. I download them from the email, then simply drag them into OneNote. Then I right-click the image and click ‘Copy Text from Picture’. Finally, I click in OneNote where I’d like the text and press Ctrl+V. Note that I use the downloadable desktop version of OneNote, not the app.
Nicholas Johns
SMART TV Perform a ‘System restart’ to fix Roku problems
In Issue 661’s Cover Feature (‘Smart TV Problems – Fixed’) you gave instructions for returning a faulty Roku player to its factory settings. That might be necessary in extreme situations, but when my Roku is playing up I’ve found that a system
