Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 May 7

= May 7 =

The norm of "Save as" defaulting to same file where document was opened from does not work in Excel
Mac mini running Yosemite. Whenever I save a Word document or a PDF, or for that matter, almost any other type of document, where I have opened a pre-existing document from a particular folder in my computer to modify it, when I choose "save as" it always first defaults to saving in the same folder the document that was modified was opened from (I can then choose wherever I'd like). This is extremely useful because most of the time I do indeed want to save the modified document back to the folder I opened from. This is not at all what happens, however, for Excel documents. For them, the default "save as" location is always the last folder that I save an excel document to. Not only is this inconvenient but it can be confusing for me. For example, say I am working on a spreadsheet in the John Doe casefolder, that is in a sub-folder just labeled "finances. A few days later, I go to my long existing folder for Peggy Poe and open up an existing Excel in there that I'm going to modify and save in a sub-folder in her case also called "finances". When I click "save as" it defaults not the the place where I opened the Excel; from but to the "finances" folder from the totally unrelated John Doe case. I then save there thinking I am in the right place. You see the issue? So, is there a way to set the default opening location of "save as" for Excel documents to do what it does automatically for other types of documents? Thank you.--96.246.181.46 (talk) 19:34, 7 May 2015 (UTC) P.S. I am running an old version of Excel: Excel for Mac 2008, version 12.1.0


 * I've noticed this behavior before, in other applications. I agree that it's not ideal, but I can think of a scenario where it might be good.  Say you are an editor who takes documents, marks them up, and returns them to the authors with your suggestions.  You might very well have a folder for originals and another for those with mark-ups. StuRat (talk) 20:06, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks for responding StuRat. Yes, I can see that some might actually prefer it, and I probably wouldn't make this mistake, as I continue to occasionally, if all my documents saved this way, but the problem is that it's just Excel that does this so my normal expectation is sundered.--96.246.181.46 (talk) 22:32, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * P.S. after saving I tried to fix your name in the above post, as I mistyped it, and I cannot. I keep getting the message "An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially unconstructive, and it has been disallowed. If this edit is constructive, please report this error." I may report it.--96.246.181.46 (talk) 22:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * No prob. It's looks OK now, so maybe somebody else fixed it.  (And that bot is to prevent people from messing with the signatures of others.)  StuRat (talk) 01:40, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Can the email service companies ever read the private e-mails of their members?
How does e-mail work? Is the e-mail service company ever involved in the process? What if the e-mail service company has, for some reason, suffered from a major hardware failure due to overheating? Where is the mail really saved? Can the e-mail service companies actually read the mail of their members or use the e-mails to collect personal information for marketers? 164.107.182.34 (talk) 19:58, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Depending on the email server, the emails are stored either in ordinary text files (like mbox format), in a structured directory system of ordinary text files (like Maildir) or in a SQL database (like Microsoft Exchange Server). In each case, that'll be on some enterprise-level storage device (disk arrays, accessed in various configurations). It might be encrypted, but it might not be. Whether ordinary workers at the mail company can personally read your mail will depend entirely on how that company has structured its systems - in any event, any ordinary email hosting system will have the ability to allow authorised people at the mail company to read your email. Whether they chose do share that with marketing is a function of the contract you have with them. If you send encrypted email, then the body (the content) of the email will be visible only to you (and hopefully to the recipient), but the address information (TO, FROM, CC, BCC) will be visible to the email providers of both sender and receiver. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:09, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * If the storage devices that hold emails fail (overheating will just make them turn temporarily off, but fires, floods, earthquakes, wars, etc. can of course destroy them completely) then the emails may be lost, or the company may have a backup or a live replica (perhaps in the same facility, perhaps in another datacentre somewhere else in the world). The service-level agreement you have with your email provider will often cover what degree of replication they employ; you'd reasonably expect better reliability and durability to cost a bunch more. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 20:14, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * In the past, some companies that provided free e-mail have decided to discontinue the facility and just deleted all e-mails, usually with fair warning to users. The same thing used to happen to Hotmail users who didn't log on for a while.  The e-mail provider has full control of the e-mails, but companies that sell e-mail addresses to spammers are likely to become very unpopular, so most e-mail providers take reasonable care of the data they hold and don't sell it on.  As Finlay says above, the terms and conditions determine what they are allowed to do.  In some cases, advertising will fund the service.    D b f i r s   20:56, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Can activities be stacked on Firefox and Chrome?
Another complaint about Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. If I am on IE, regardless of whether there are several windows or just one, all the tabs appear in a stack when I click on the e at the bottom of the screen. For Chrome and Firefox, if there is just one window, it doesn't care how many tabs. It just shows me one. This gets frustrating since I can't switch between tabs at the bottom of the screen even if there are two.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:37, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I have tabs in both. They are at the top of the screen, though. StuRat (talk) 21:40, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but I've always looked at the bottom of the screen. Even after all these years of using the others when not at home, it's hard to remember.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:50, 7 May 2015 (UTC)


 * (twice) I use the top of the screen to switch between tabs in Firefox and Chrome, just as in IE. Are you complaining about tabs or separate windows?  D b f i r s   21:51, 7 May 2015 (UTC)  Sorry I misunderstood.  See Ben's answer below.  (My IE doesn't do that in Vista.)   D b f i r s   07:33, 8 May 2015 (UTC)


 * This thread says you can use the "show tab previews in the Windows Taskbar" option for Firefox, or the --enable-aero-peek-tabs command-line option for Chrome. -- BenRG (talk) 00:36, 8 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Yes, for many years everything was at the bottom of the screen. Tabs were a foreign concept.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  15:34, 8 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I thought that the bottom-of-the-screen multi-windows only appeared in Windows 7 (five and a half years ago).   D b f i r s   11:02, 10 May 2015 (UTC)