Author Archives: admin

Restore the Show Desktop button to the taskbar

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Recently, probably due to a Windows update, I noticed that the Show Desktop option was missing from the Windows taskbar. This option is a small button that appears when you hover your mouse over the rightmost part of the Windows taskbar at the bottom of your screen. I’ve aways found this button very useful for quickly hiding/ minimising the loads of application I have open and letting me double-click another app shortcut on my desktop.

If you find the option is missing, these are the steps I took to restore the option/ button.

1. Open the Start menu in Windows and type Settings then select the Settings app.

2. In Settings, choose Personalization from the list on the left.

3. Then check the box “Select the far corner of the taskbar to show the desktop”.

4. Then close the Settings window.

I’ve shown the checkbox in the Settings window in the picture below.

Show Desktop Option in Windows Taskbar

Show Desktop Option in Windows Taskbar

 

How to Stop Outlook receiving emails for an account without deleting the account

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Sometimes it’s useful to have Outlook stop receiving emails for a specific email account. One way of achieving this is to delete the account from Outlook. The problem then is that if you want to receive emails on that account again you will need to reenter the account details like server, password etc.

A simpler way of stopping emails is to remove the email account from the Send/ Receive Groups in Outlook. You can do this by:-

1. Choose File then Options in Outlook.

2. In the Outlook Options dialog, click the Advanced options on the left.

3. In the Advanced options, click the Send/ Receive button to show the Send/ Receive Groups dialog.

4. Select the All Accounts group and then press the Edit button.

5. In the Send/ Receive settings dialog, choose the email account you want to disable on the left then uncheck the Include the selected account in this group box as shown in the picture below.

outlooksendreceivegroups

5. Press OK then back in the previous dialog press Close.

Outlook will now no longer try and download emails from the account.

To re-enable email downloads, repeat the steps above except at step 5 check the Include this group box.

How to always run a Windows program maximized/ in full screen

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On Windows 10 its fairly easy to make any program always open in full screen mode, i.e. fully maximized to occupy the whole screen. All you need do is change the properties of the shortcut you use to launch the program.

You might be launching a program from a shortcut in the Windows menu or from a shortcut on your desktop. The instructions below apply to a desktop shortcut.

Right click the desktop shortcut and choose Properties from the popup menu:

desktop-shortcut-properties

In the Properties dialog that appears change the Run property to Maximized:

program-properties-maximized

Then click OK to save. The next time you run your program it will start fully maximized, occupying the entire screen.

In Windows 10, if you are running the program from the Windows menu, right click the program in the Windows menu and choose Open File Location to browse to the shortcut. Then right click the shortcut and modify the Run property to Maximized as shown above when editing desktop shortcut properties.

Clearing your browser cache to make sure you are downloading the latest file

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Occasionally a browser may insist on caching a download file from a website, e.g. the installer for a program. If you are prepared to wait, eventually the cache will expire and the latest version of a file will be downloaded. However, a quick way of clearing the cache is by opening the browser and pressing the key sequence:

Ctrl+Shift+Delete

i.e. hold and press the Ctrl, Shift and Delete keys together. Your browser will then pop up aasking you which data to clear from the cache. Remember to check the option to clear Images and Files from the cache and from that point you should be downloading the latest file from a website.

MySQL: Find data entered on this date one year ago

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To find data entered into a MySQL database on this date one year ago you can use the MySQL date functions in your SQL query. The functions to use are:-

 

NOW – this gets the current date and time.
DATE – this extracts the date portion of a time value.
DATE_SUB – this subtracts an interval to a date/ time value.
DATE_ADD – this adds an internval to a date/ time value.

 

For example, if you have a field EntryDate in a table called Payments you can find all payment made on this day one year ago using a SQL query like this:

SELECT * FROM `Payments` WHERE EntryDate > DATE_SUB(DATE(NOW()), INTERVAL 1 YEAR) AND EntryDate <= DATE_SUB(DATE(DATE_Add(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)), INTERVAL 1 YEAR)

The parts of the query that look for EntryDate values between the start of the day one year ago and the start of tomorrow one year ago are:

 
EntryDate > DATE_SUB(DATE(NOW()), INTERVAL 1 YEAR) 

 

This expression gets the date part of the time now using:

 
DATE(NOW())

 

which gets the start of today, i.e. midnight, then subtracts 1 year using DATE_SUB. and then:

 
EntryDate <= DATE_SUB(DATE(DATE_Add(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)), INTERVAL 1 YEAR)

 

which adds 1 day to the start of today then subtracts one year.

Free Email Client for Windows 10

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For a very useful, free desktop email client for Windows 10, try out Mozilla Thunderbird available for download from this website:

https://www.thunderbird.net/

A number of desktop software programs need to be able to launch email clients, e.g. SliQ Invoicing requests Windows to launch an email client when you ask to email an invoice. In Windows 10, Microsoft have made this more difficult than in previous versions of Windows by no longer providing a free email client that supports a protocol called Simple MAPI for which free programs like Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail used to be available. A lot of people have bought Microsoft Outlook for email but, if you don’t have Outlook, we now recommend downloading and trying out Thunderbird as a free alternative.

Stop Snagit Editor Popping up When Snipping Tool Captures an Image

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Snagit is a great image editor and capture tool but sometimes it is more convenient to capture using the Windows Snipping Tool. However, by default, Snagit runs up its editor when it detects the Snipping Tool capturing an image. This can be somewhat annoying if all you need to do is quickly capture, copy and paste images into an email (for example) using the Snipping Tool.

To stop Snagit from popping up, do the following:

1. Run Snagit, i.e. run the Snagit Capture tool.

snagit-capture

2. Under the File menu, Choose the Capture Preferences option.

3. Uncheck the Open screenshots copied from System Tools checkbox …

 

snagit-capture-preferences

 

Now you can snip in peace without the Snagit editor popping up.

 

 

 

Why Develop an Online Invoicing Package

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We’ve recently been asked why we developed an online version of our SliQ Invoicing software. To be sure, it has been a significant effort with a need to learn and apply new, different technologies to those used for our desktop software. Having said this, we were able to reuse some components from our desktop software for things like template editing, PDF creation, printing and so on. Ultimately, we’ve implemented the online version to meet requests from our customers. We had many requests to implement multi-user access, multi-currency and mobile access, i.e. the ability to raise invoices while out and about. We took the decision that implementing an online version was the best solution to hit the majority of our customer requests. We’ve learned a lot of things along the way and will implement some of the major features back into the desktop version – multi-user and multi-currency for example.

From our point of view, a major advantage of the online software compared to the desktop software is that not only is there nothing for a customer to install in order to begin raising invoices but the online software is always right up to date – any changes or improvements we make can be made instantly available to all users without the need for people to be notified of an update, for them to decide to download and install and so on. Support also becomes much easier. With desktop software, our package may occasionally be affected by other software installed on a customer’s PC/  Mac/ tablet/ phone. With online/ cloud based X software the likelihood of an incompatibility reduces to almost zero since everything runs on a server in the cloud except for the web pages in the customer’s web browser.

Since launch we’ve been asked a couple of times why the online application looks different to the desktop application. In part, the difference is that it would take a lot of effort to make any web application look completely like a desktop application. We also took the opportunity to come with what we felt was a very clean user interface with the intention that keeping the interface clean made the application easier to use. Any user of our desktop invoicing software that tries out our online invoicing software should find the application easy to navigate. Users should also find that the features present in the desktop application are easily recognisable in the online app.

For the online invoicing application the help documentation is located at:

http://help.invoicing-software.com

We will continue to add more help articles to this website over time and will prioritise by first adding articles that address customer questions.

For more information on our online invoicing software, please visit:

https://www.invoicing-software.com

 

 

 

SliQ Invoicing Online

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Following our successful desktop invoicing system SliQTools have launched an online version. This is an expertly built tool that is perfect for the new start up business as well as the established business owner.  Features unique to the online system are the facility to invoice in what ever currency you need – yes it is a multicurrency package, and you can have multiple users accessing the company at any time – yes it is multi user package too – from any location.

SliQ Online software has been beautifully created by the experts at SliQTools Ltd.  It helps you produce your invoices using your own bespoke templates and engage closely with your customers for the ultimate goal – being paid on time.

Unique to SliQ Online is an invoice template designer. Do you already use SliQ Invoicing Plus, our desktop version – the template editor for SliQ Invoicing Online is very similar. You can get the new online template editor by downloading it from the Choose Template setup page while logged into SliQ Online. After entering your API key (found in the Setup/ Manage Account page in SliQ Invoicing Online), the template editor will let you edit the templates in your online account.

online-invoice-template-editor

 

SliQ Invoicing Online has a clever tool that enables you to set up a recurring invoice.  Say you invoice the same amount to the same person or business every month then you just need to set this up once, enter a few parameters and you are away.  SliQ Online  will do the rest for you.

To find out more, visit https://www.invoicing-software.com. Visit feature tour to get an overview of the features in SliQ Invoicing Online.

Make Life Easy by Invoicing Online

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I was chatting with a fellow passenger on the train from Barmouth. He owned a holiday letting business. He was telling me he had spent the day scanning in paper invoices from cleaners in order to then post all the originals to the property owners. Poor you I thought, how backward, I thought surely your time is better spent marketing your properties.  So I suggested to him he encouraged his cleaners to use SliQ Online. Out pops my iPad , thanks Arriva Trains Wales for the free wifi, and I gave him an on the train training demo of the software. Excellent he said.  He hadn’t realised how simple to set up it was.  And for £6 a month his cleaners would then email everything to him and cc the owners and he saves all that time.  No brainer he said.

That’s just one example.

The cleaners can now analyse which properties they make the most income from. They can produce reports for the tax man of how much has been invoiced

So if you have a business you can’t get out of raising invoices and the least amount of time you spend on it the less painful and costly it is. Your customers are happy because they know what they owe. If they lose your invoice you can easily send them a copy. Try out SliQ Invoicing Online at https://www.invoicing-software.com/.