Tips and Tricks

Save Pocket Word documents in other formats before e-mailing

You can attach documents to e-mails and send them to friends and associates from your Pocket PC. Unfortunately, some people can’t open documents saved in Pocket Word format. If you are at all unsure about the capabilities of the desktop PC you are sending the document to, save it in a more common format before attaching it to the e-mail.

Save Word and Excel documents in a more common file format before sending them to an associate as an e-mail attachment.

In Pocket Word, open the document and select “Save Document As...” from the Tools menu. Then save it as a Rich Text Document (.rtf) or Word 97/2000 Document (.doc). You can follow the same procedure with a Pocket Excel document and save it in Excel 97/2000 Workbook format.

How to do a hard reset

If your Pocket PC locks up and you can’t get it to do anything, you may have to do a hard reset. If you do, you’ll loose data and files you’ve saved in RAM. Fortunately, you have a recent backup—don’t you?—and you can restore it after you do the hard reset.

The instructions for doing a hard reset vary on different models of the Pocket PC. You should be able to find them in the user manual that came with your Windows Mobile device. If that’s not handy, check out this topic on the Pocket PC Thoughts forum (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=225725). It has the instructions for most devices from HP, Dell, T-Mobile, Viewsonic, and more.

Shortcut for entering uppercase characters

You may already know that if you use the soft keyboard to enter text, it will automatically capitalize the first letter entered after a period indicating the end of a sentence. You can of course hit the Shift or CAP key to enter capital letters within a sentence. But there’s an easier way.

Tap on the letter you wish to enter in uppercase and slide your stylus toward the top of the screen before pulling it off the screen. You can also use this technique on the top row of numbers, in order to enter the symbol associated with that number. For example, place the stylus on the number 2 and slide it upwards to enter the @ symbol. The trick is that you have to remember which symbol is associated with each number. I’ve memorized my most used symbols: 1=!,2=@, and 4=$.

Activating CAPs lock in a large soft keyboard

You can set the soft keyboard to display larger keys by taping on the input select button in the lower right hand corner of the display, selecting Options, and tapping on the “Large keys” radio button. However, this removes the CAPs lock key and some of the other keys to make room for the remaining larger ones. You can set CAPs lock by tapping twice on the Shift key.

Use the input panel options screen to display larger keys on your soft keyboard.

Tips and tricks for the T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition

Pocket PC Central has an excellent page of T-Mobile tips and tricks, many of which are applicable to any Phone Edition device. They show you how to set your device up to do the following:

• Answer calls automatically
• Call conferencing
• Call forwarding
• Change PIN code
• Lock and unlock buttons
• Manage memory
• Restrict phone numbers
• More…