Browser Shortcuts

Become a Browser Expert

The following advice can help you become a very effective web browser user! These shortcuts work with all web sites, not just TrackAbout. These tips apply equally to Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the two main browsers we currently support.

Something to think about: Browsers are designed to be used by people who are visually-impaired. This may not sound useful to you, but it is! The visually-impaired rely less on the mouse and more on the keyboard, so there are keyboard shortcuts for doing just about everything. These shortcuts, once mastered, will speed your work.

More information about using your web browser effectively can be found in your browser's built-in help system. Check the Help menu.

Use Multiple Browser Windows

Here's the one tip that will increase your TrackAbout effectiveness above all others. It sounds obvious, but you can have multiple browsers open and logged into the same web site at the same time. In TrackAbout, that means you could have, say, the Verification Page open in one browser and the detailed view of a particular record open in another. This will save you a lot of time, as you won't have to keep going back and forward, waiting for page reloads each time.

Here's how to do it: First, get logged into TrackAbout as you normally would. Go to any page that has a link. Instead of simply clicking on the link, hold down while clicking on the link. A new window will open up containing the linked page, leaving your existing page as-is.

This works in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but Firefox goes one better. Instead of , try . Firefox opens another "tab" inside the same browser window containing the new page. This reduces screen clutter by keeping both pages within the same window.

Search/Find Within a Document

Let's say there is a particular piece of text you are looking for within a large web page, perhaps a serial number. Rather than reading the whole page, you should use the browser's built-in Find capability to search for the text.

Internet Explorer: The keyboard shortcut is . This will open a Find dialog into which you can type the text you are looking for. Click Find Next to find the next occurrence of your search term in the document.

Mozilla Firefox: The keyboard shortcut is also . When you press , a Find toolbar appears at the bottom of the browser window. As you type your text, Firefox immediately begins searching and highlights the first occurrence it finds. To find the next occurrence, hit . You can search backwards with.

Scrolling

This web page you're reading right now is pretty long, so it makes sense to talk about scrolling. Web pages in general can get quite long (or tall), vertically speaking. You often need to scroll down to see everything on the page. Most users are familiar with using the "Scroll Bar" which appears along the right edge of the browser.

Other ways to scroll include:

• Space Bar: Pressing the space bar once will scroll the document down. will scroll the document up.

• Up and down arrow (cursor) keys: Move the page up and down one line at a time.

• Page-Up and Page-Down keys: These also work for scrolling.

• Home key Scrolls to the very top of the page

• End key Scrolls to the very bottom of the page

• Mouse scroll-wheel: Some mice have a scroll-wheel built in. From the Windows Control Panel, you can adjust how many lines are scrolled when you move the wheel.

Navigating Back

The "Back" button should be familiar to every browser user. But there are other ways to go "Back" without reaching for the mouse:

• Pressing the "Backspace" key on your keyboard

• Holding down and pressing the left-arrow (a.k.a. left cursor) key

• Some mice have extra buttons, and you can configure one of them for the "Back" function. If you like, you can configure your mouse so that when you press the Scroll Wheel, the browser will go Back. Look in your Control Panel for the Mouse utility.

Navigating Forward

If you've gone "Back" once too many times, you might want to go "Forward" to the pages you came "back" from. You can go forward by:

Using the "Forward" button to the right of the "Back" button in your browser.

Holding down the key and pressing the right-arrow (a.k.a. right cursor) key.

Some mice have extra buttons, and you can configure one of them for the "Forward" function. If you like, you can configure your mouse so that when you press the Scroll Wheel, the browser will go Forward. Look in your Control Panel for the Mouse utility.

Refresh

When you "Refresh" a web page, you reload the page. Your browser requests a new copy of the page from the web server.

You might want to refresh a page if you think the data on the page may have changed since you last loaded it.

How to Refresh:

• Press the browser's "Refresh" (or Reload) button, near "Back" and "Forward", or

• Press the , or

• , or

• Menu Item: View...Refresh

Important: Some pages refresh more easily than others. Specifically, most pages that result after submitting a web form do NOT refresh well. If you try to refresh on a result page, you will most likely be greeted with a browser-generated popup message asking if you want to re-submit data. This is the browser's way of telling you that it needed the information you put into the previous form to make this page, and it's going to need to re-submit that data to refresh the page for you.

In fact, on many pages that contain forms, TrackAbout completely prevents the same form from being submitted twice. This is protection against a common problem wherein users accidentally double-click on submit buttons. Without this protection, double-clicking on a submit button might submit the same information twice. In many cases, this would cause problems with your data. So we have taken measures to prevent it.

This may seem like an inconvenience. Sometimes you may find you have to re-enter all the information in your form if there was an error the first time. Please understand this is a necessary precaution to keep your data as clean and accurate as possible.

Working With Forms

Quickly Navigating Forms

TrackAbout, like most web-based programs, has a lot of web-forms. These are pages that contain text boxes, check boxes, drop-down lists, etc. Only one of these kinds of form elements can be worked at a time. The current form element is said to "have focus". Usually you can tell when a form element has the focus because its appearance changes. Text boxes get a cursor. Other controls get dotted outlines, or change colors.

When you're on a page with a form, you can quickly jump from field to field using the key.

• : Jump to next field

• Jump to previous field

Highlighting and Copying Text

Often while using TrackAbout, you'll want to copy and paste some text, perhaps a Barcode or Serial Number, from one page to another. Or perhaps you want to copy something into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet.

Highlighting: In most computer programs, including web browsers, you can use the mouse to select or highlight text. Try highlighting the first few words of this paragraph.

Position the mouse cursor just before the word you want to highlight. Press and hold the left mouse button. Drag the mouse in the direction of the text you want to highlight. Let go of the mouse button when you've highlighted all the text you want. The highlighted text should now appear in a reverse color, like this.

Double-Clicking: You can also highlight a single word (provided it is NOT a hyperlink) by double-clicking on the word. This is especially useful for grabbing Barcodes. Try double-clicking on this.

Copying: With the text highlighted, you can now Copy it in any one of several ways: You can use your browser's menu Edit...Copy. You can get there with the mouse, and also by pressing and releasing to select the Edit menu, then "C" for Copy. You can hold downand press the "C" key. With the mouse hovering over your highlighted text, press the right (not left) mouse button, and choose "Copy" from the popup menu.

Now What? If you're new to Copy/Paste, you may be saying to yourself, "Now What? Nothing happened!" When you copy text, it goes into what is called the "Clipboard." You can't see it, but it's there. Now that your text is in the Clipboard, we can paste it somewhere else.

Pasting: You can now paste what's in the Clipboard anywhere you like. You can paste the text you just copied into text boxes, address bars and even other applications!

Copying Tables into Excel (or Word)

Web pages often contain tables, like this:

Barcode	Serial Number
001277	XYZ001
001255	XYZ002

It's possible to select this entire table, then copy/paste it right into an Excel spreadsheet. The tricky part is selecting just the table and not other text in the page. The best approach is to start by placing the cursor just to the left of the first word in the first row and column, in this case "Barcode". Drag your mouse down and to the right, highlighting everything through the last row and column.

Once the table is copied into the Clipboard, you can open an Excel spreadsheet, click in any cell, and press to paste. You might have to resize the rows and columns in the spreadsheet.

You can also paste directly into a Word document in the same manner.

If you have one of the later versions of Word or Excel, you'll generally find that the table's style has been preserved.

Saving, Printing, Sending Pages

Your web browser has many built-in features that are useful whether you're using TrackAbout or not.

Saving Pages

Just about any web page can be saved to disk. Look for the menu item "File...Save As" or "File...Save Page As". When you select this menu item, a dialog should pop up. Pick the directory where you want the file to go, but don't save the file yet.

The next step is to decide what kind of file format you want to save the page as. There should be a drop-down list called Save As Type or something similar (browser versions vary). Some options that might be available are:

• Text File (*.txt): This will strip out all the formatting and graphics inherent in the HTML web page. This is a way to just get raw text into a file, but generally this isn't very helpful for TrackAbout pages.

• Web Page, HTML only: Due to the hyperlinked nature of the World-Wide Web, a single web page might consist of many, many files. Every graphic image in a page is actually a separate file. Saving a web page as HTML only will get you the text and basic outline of the page, with formatting intact (i.e. tables). However, you may not have graphics and possibly colors and font styles will not appear.

• Web page, complete: Where the "HTML only" option strips out graphics and other files, this option includes them. However, it does so by creating a new sub-directory below the directory you chose. The .html file goes in your chosen directory, and all the other parts of the web page go into the sub-directory.

• Web archive, single file: Microsoft must have realized the shortcomings of all the previous options, and invented this new one. This option appears in the latest versions of Internet Explorer.

This option packages all the necessary pieces of the web page up into a single file with an .mht suffix. You can send this single file to others. The catch? They have also have to be using Internet Explorer to view the page.

Your mileage may vary with each of these methods. We recommend trying them all and picking the one that works best for you.

Printing a Web Page

This one couldn't be easier. File...Print. also does the trick.

E-mailing a Web Page

Internet Explorer offers built-in support to e-mail a web page.

The two most often used options are:

• File...Send...Page By E-mail: This exactly the same as choosing File...Save As, choosing type Web Page, HTML only, and e-mailing the document yourself. All of the same limitations apply.

• File...Send...Link By E-mail: We don't recommend this method. This will e-mail only the web address of the page to the recipient. If the page was generated dynamically as a result of a form submission, or if the user does not have a login to the site, this just won't work.

Several of the report-style pages in TrackAbout offer an "E-mail This Page" link in the upper right. This link will copy just the results of the report into a new popup window and prompt you for the destination e-mail address, and send your page for you.

Faxing a Web Page

If your computer is equipped with a Fax-capable modem, then you likely have the necessary software installed to print directly to a fax number. Check with your local Tech Support department for more information.

If you do not have a Fax-capable modem, then we strongly recommend enrolling with the inexpensive eFax® service. See web site for details.

Once enrolled with eFax®, faxing a web page is as easy as sending e-mail. The installed eFax® software will place a new "eFax Send" button in your web browser's menu bar. You simply press the button and follow the instructions.

Generating a PDF from a Web Page

TrackAbout recommends the free and excellent PDFCreator tool. Once installed, PDFCreator acts just like a printer installed on your computer. When you choose to print a document, you may choose PDFCreator instead of your default printer. PDFCreator will then prompt you for a filename and will save your printout directly into a PDF file.

Download PDFCreator