How to Retrofit a Picture Or an Image Into Desktop Wallpaper For Your Computer

The term desktop wallpaper (as the name implies) refers to an image used as a background on your computer screen. The term wallpaper is the term used by Microsoft, while Macintosh avoids using this term not to mix the metaphors, and instead uses the term "desktop picture." In the public eye, "desktop wallpaper" terminology, or just "wallpaper" is mostly used to indicate a computer screen background image.

The desktop wallpapers are used to fill in the otherwise blank and monotonous computer screens with an image of your desire. Some people choose a picture of their favorite celebrity, car, or a vacation-desired destination. Others choose animated wallpapers, 3D wallpapers, nature scenes, computer generated images of some fantasy world, favorite movie, or a white sand beach with breathtaking ocean views. The desktop wallpaper is purely one's desire.

In the old days and even nowadays it seems like everyone keeps framed photos of family and friends on their desks. But the times are changing. What people begin doing recently in this computer age is taking those same photos and setting them as desktop wallpaper on their computer displays.

When having a physical picture or a digital picture, and you want to set it as wallpaper on your computer, here are the steps to help you do that:

A physical picture first needs to be scanned in. When you scan it, choose a high resolution for better quality. You can size down the picture after and still maintain the good quality. Save it as .jpg file.

Next, you need to minimize all windows and click with the third mouse button anywhere on your desktop. Then, click on properties, and then settings. See what resolution is your screen at (i.e. 1024 by 768 pixels).

Now open your favorite image editor, such as Adobe, and size down your picture to your screen resolution. Whether that was the picture you scanned in or a computer image, the procedure is the same. You may need to crop the picture to get it the perfect size. Also, think about sizing it lower than your screen resolution so you can have some empty space for your icons.

After you finish the modifications, save the new image as new file so you can always have the original. Save it as either .jpg or .png.

Next, minimize all windows again and click with the third mouse button anywhere on your desktop. Then, click on properties, and desktop. Click on the "Browse..." button to find the picture where you preciously saved it, then choose the center position, and click OK. You're done.

If you have a picture that's smaller than your desktop, you can skip all of the cropping and resizing steps above, and go right to the Properties Dialog box on the desktop, and just select your image file as your desktop wallpaper. Then use the Position menu to choose whether you want the image centered in the monitor or stamped in repeating tiles across the display. When you're done, click OK. You've just made a desktop wallpaper.

What Are DAT Files? ? ? ? ?

One of the most common questions concerning file extensions is what are .DAT files? DAT files are encountered frequently on many PCs and by many people. So what are DAT files? The simple answer is that DAT files are files which contain data. But that's all it tells us and, unfortunately, that's not enough.

The problem is that many applications use the file extension ".DAT" to indicate a file that contains a range of information which is usually stored in proprietary formats. Getting straight to the point this means that there is no standard way of interpreting DAT files, and no way of knowing how to open the file unless you know what program created it. DAT files can be music files, text, video, archives, binary data, or e-mail attachments in PDF format. A file with suffix DAT is just a file created to be read by the parent application that created it.

Let's see a practical example which is a common occurrence for most Instant Messenger users. I've read in a blog forum, that the Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM) saves the chat log files with a .DAT extension. Now imagine you want to check the message history of yesterday's chat log in Yahoo. The file has to be opened when you are logged in to YIM, otherwise it will display only gibberish characters and symbols. Some people might think that since the YIM chat log contains text characters, if they try to open the .DAT file using some word processor like Notepad or WordPad, the file will display correctly anyway. However this is not the case.

Change Your Tab Colors in Excel

After speaking with many people who use Microsoft Excel on a daily basis, most of them did not know that you can actually change the color of the tab.

The tabs are those items that distinguish worksheets within Excel. If you are not sure what a worksheet is then this article will more than likely be more advanced than what you need right now. I recommend checking out some sites on the basics of Excel before continuing.

Being able to color code your worksheet tabs can help you further organize your entire workbook making it easier to find information when you need it most. The steps are very simple.

You can do it a couple of ways. The first way which is what I find to be the easiest is to right click with your mouse on the tab that you want to change the color of. This will bring up what is called a pop up menu. In the pop up menu that is an option called "Tab Color". You'll never guess what that is for? OK maybe you will.

Click on the sub menu item labeled "Tab Color". This brings up a color palette where you can choose the color that you want. Select the color that you desire and then finally click the ok button.

At first glance it looks as if nothing has happened. However if you click off of that worksheet by left clicking a different tab, you will then see your new tab color. Just remember that a white tab always represents the active tab that you are working on.

The second way to change the tab color has a couple of more steps but the end result will still be the same. This is very typical of any Microsoft product which is the ability to do one thing in a variety of ways.

Up at the top of the Excel window you will see the main menu header. Click the header menu item that is labeled, "Format". When you do this a sub menu appears. You will see an item in the sub menu labeled "Sheet". Click that sub menu item. That brings up yet another sub menu. You will notice in this third menu an option that is labeled "Tab Color". When you click on this third menu item it will bring up the color palette as it did in the previous example. Everything hereafter is identical.

You can see that the second approach adds a couple more steps but the end result is still the same. Which way you do it is completely up to you.