Kiran Upadhyay

Windows 7’s  Homegroup  feature makes sharing printers on your local network easy, but what if you want to share a printer over the Internet? This has traditionally been very complicated, involving print drivers, firewall rules and IP addresses. Google Cloud Print, built into Google Chrome, simplifies online printer sharing. We’ve written about using  PrinterShare  to share printers in the past, but Google Cloud Print is a much easier alternative. After you share your printer with someone, they can print to it from their web browser – you can even print to your own printer from a browser if you’re away from your computer. Setting Up Cloud Print You’ll need the  Google Chrome  web browser installed to set up Cloud Print. After it’s installed, launch it and open its  Options  page. Click over to the  Under the Hood  tab and scroll down; you’ll find the  Google Cloud Print  option hidden near the bottom. Clic...

Whether or not you are a fan of Microsoft, one good thing that can be said about MS Office products, at least, is how easy it is to integrate each of them with one another. Just think of the power that comes from having incoming emails automatically generating new tasks or new calendar appointments, or having a completed task automatically email your boss with the updated status report from the task description. If you do it right, you can cut your entire day’s workload by a boatload just by automating things in an intelligent and efficient way. If you follow my writing here, then you know that in the past I’ve covered things like integrating web browser features into Excel, automatically maximizing application windows, or automating chart updates in Excel. Well, in this article I’m going to cover another automation task – actually one that I’ve used often more recently – to automatically update an Excel spreadsheet with all of your remaining active Outlook tas...

Chrome 17 has just been released, offering pre-rendered web pages and malware protection. If you’re a Google Chrome user (and haven’t blocked automatic updates) you’re now using version 17 of the browser. As is typical for Chrome, the update doesn’t add any drastic changes, but it does include a few new features. Most noticeable of these is pre-rendering. When you enter a URL into the omnibox and it auto-completes, Chrome will begin to load that site before you press enter. If you’re on a fast connection the page might seem to appear instantly because it has been rendered before you were done typing the URL. I’m a Chrome user myself, so I took this feature on a test drive. It works as advertised. Sites will sometimes load instantly. Your connection speed will determine how well this feature works for you. The other feature added by Chrome 17 is protection from files that contain malware. Whenever you download a file the browser will check it against a list of k...