Once we'd figured that out, I used Ralph's equipment to show the audience a little Windows 95 trick that can make it very easy for you to work with files with extensions that Windows doesn't understand. For example, you may have a file named "readme.1st". You might know that it's just a simple text file that could be opened with Notepad-but Windows probably doesn't know that. So, double-clicking on its icon brings up an "Open With..." dialog instead of Notepad.

An easy way to solve this kind of problem is by customizing the SendTo menu in Windows Explorer. Here's how:

1. Start up Windows Explorer.
2. Left-double-click on the Windows folder icon.
3. Left-double-click on the SendTo folder icon.
4. The right side of Windows Explorer may show several icons for files in the SendTo folder. For example, there will probably be an icon for a shortcut to your A: disk drive.
5. Right-click over any empty area in the right side of Windows Explorer.
6. Choose New, then Shortcut, from the pop-up menu.
7. In the Create Shortcut dialog that appears, choose Browse..., then navigate to the Windows folder.
8. Find, and left-double-click on, the Notepad icon in the scrolling list of Programs in the Windows folder.
9. Choose Next in the Create Shortcut dialog.
10. Choose Finish.

What you've done is really quite simple: You've created a shortcut to the Notepad program. But you've created it in a special place: the Windows SendTo folder. Now for the magic part: use Windows Explorer to navigate to any folder that has some text files in it. (For my demonstration, I had already created a text file named "readme.1st" in the c:\temp folder.) Right-click on the icon for a text file, and then choose Send To from the pop-up menu. There will be a choice for Notepad.exe in the Send To menu; click on it, and the text file will automatically be opened with Notepad!

Furthermore, if you use the Find Files or Folders feature of Windows 95 (accessible from the Start button) to search for files, you can right-click on the file icons and use Send To to send them to Notepad. This also works when you double-click on the My Computer icon to browse your files and folders in simple, non-Explorer windows.

So, by putting a short cut to Notepad.exe in the Windows SendTo folder, any file icon that you right-click on can be sent to Notepad, even if Windows does not understand the file's extension.

But you can do even more with this trick. You can put shortcuts to ANY program in the Windows Send To folder. For example, if you put in a shortcut to Microsoft Word, you can edit many files easily: text files, Word documents, RTF files, HTML files.... If you put in a shortcut to Netscape Navigator, Mosaic, Internet Explorer, or any other popular browser, you can view JPEG image files as well as text and HTML files. If you put in a shortcut to a "hex file viewer", such as the excellent shareware WinBrowse program, you can view the insides of ANY kind of file. And so on. You can even put in shortcuts to PIFs for DOS programs.

I'll be showing more Windows 95 tricks at our next meeting. For example, you can right-click over the desktop, or over any empty part of the right side of Windows Explorer, to create new things, such as folders, shortcuts, and various kinds of files. I'll demonstrate how to customize the New menu to include blank "templates" of your favorite kinds of files, such as spreadsheet files or word processing files. That makes it easy to create and edit files in the directory that you are exploring.

The meeting will be at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 22. Please note that it will be in the small meeting room in the Davis public library, not in our usual large meeting room.

See you there!