If you’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms and missing the classic menu for Office, you’re not alone. For a company that normally puts backward compatibility at a premium, Microsoft sure got it wrong with Office 2007 and it’s successor Office 2010.

All the familiar menus you’ve grown to love or hate have disappeared and in their place is a new – supposedly better – system that would be fine if you were just learning to use Office but turns the air blue if you’re used to things being where they always have been.

Unusually there’s no option to switch back to the classic menu for Office. But fortunately there’s an add-on available which puts all your old, familiar menus back into your sparkling new copy of Office. Phew!

It saves headaches and relearning/retraining costs…

Which leaves you yearning for Classic Menu for Office

There’s actually not much to review about Classic Menu for Office.

It does exactly what it sets out to do (and, in my opinion, what Microsoft should have done anyway):

It adds back all your familiar menus and gets rid of that horrible looking, awkward to use, ribbon menu where even the simplest of tasks are buried somewhere completely counter-intuitive.

It saves all the hassle of wondering where all the shortcuts have moved to. So if you’re wondering where simple things that you use in Office every day have moved to, it’s a simple matter of installing the classic menu for Office and not having to go through all the re-learning.

So if you value your sanity but need to keep up with the times then:

Click here to download Classic Menu for Office.

Google recently seem to have a habit of adding new “exciting” features to their search results with so much as asking their users first.

The latest in this barrage of maybe helpful/almost certainly irritating ideas is the search preview. The little magnifying glass that pops up a preview of the website whenever you move your mouse even vaguely close to it.

So, if that bugs you and you’re perfectly happy clicking on the results link to see what the page looks like (and more importantly, says), what can you do?

The easiest option is to change your default search engine. Bing and Yahoo aren’t much different from Google in the results they deliver. And with Internet Explorer or Chrome, that’s probably the only option you’ve got. Google think this new feature is so cool, they don’t give you the option to permanently get rid of it.

If you use Firefox, there’s another option. It’s a bit of a pain to set up but once you’ve done it, those annoying search previews are banished forever. So you’re only waiting for the next “let’s see how much we can irritate our customers” feature that Google decides you absolutely must have.

Go to the Tools menu in Firefox and select the Add-ons option.

Click the button that says “Get Add-ons” and in the search box, enter:

AdBlock Plus

Select it and allow Firefox to install it. I also allowed Firefox to restart as soon as it was installed – not sure if that’s absolutely necessary but the second Add-on you need uses AdBlock Plus so better safe than sorry.

Once you’ve done that the other Add-on you need is:

Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus

(I haven’t put links in for these as in the past I’ve found that links to Add-ons change over time as new versions appear, so it’s just easier to let Firefox handle all that).

Again, restart Firefox.

Then get up a Google search. Press Ctrl-Shift-K and hover over anything you find annoying such as the new “helpful” search preview feature. Click on it – I had to make sure it was only the magnifying glass, not the whole of the search result that was highlighted, which might explain why the darned preview thing was popping up whenever I breathed.

Press “Add Element Hiding Rule” from the menu that appears and you’re done. Back to search results as you expected them to be before some over-eager boffin thought otherwise.

The Club Membership Software program is a simple software program to help club secretaries and anyone else who wants to keep an organized contact list.

Installation of the club membership software is straightforward: you download a zipped file, extract it to somewhere you’ll remember and then run the Setup program.

The club membership software program has been around in various forms since the 1990′s. If you have an earlier version (even if it’s a DOS one – some clubs use hand-me-down computers), there is a conversion routine that will convert your data into the latest format. There is also a conversion routine to import data from a range of other formats, so you shouldn’t need to re-type any existing data.

What does this Club Membership software do?

When you first run the program, you are given a list of options that you may want to set. These include missing out some of the data fields so that you are less likely to make errors when entering your member’s details. There are also options to set up most of the default program settings as well as renaming any data fields to be more meaningful.

Helpfully the club membership software capitalizes words for you, so if you’re not a proficient typist (or if you’re just a lazy typist), it will take care of capitalizing words. It will cope with Mc’s as well to an extent and if it guesses things wrong, you just overtype and it will remember. This kind of attention to detail is handy, especially as it’s likely that the program won’t be used as often as, say, your web browser.

You can list your club members from the report button.

This brings up a screen that allows you to narrow down your membership list by a variety of criteria as well as other things for the report orders.

Club Membership software shows all reports on screen in your standard web browser. This takes a little bit of getting used to at first but is actually quite sensible. Every computer nowadays has a web browser and this means that the program can make use of it for any printed reports. You could also take the files that the program outputs and place them straight onto your website, probably in a protected members area.

Club Membership software also allows you to bulk email your club’s members. You’ll need to find a few details to allow it to connect to your internet service provider – these are the same ones your email program uses.

If you’re thinking that this means the program could be used for bulk emailing purposes such as spamming, this isn’t likely as the software insists on other details being entered rather than just email addresses. And, anyway, spammers wouldn’t want to enter one email address at a time.

The program knows that most internet service providers nowadays place a limit on the number of emails you can send in any given time and allows you to place a delay between each message sent.

All in all, Club Membership software is an easy to use program that does exactly what it sets out to do. There is also the option of a 30 day trial so that you can check that it meets your exact needs.

Click here to download a trial copy of Club Membership software here.

It’s is a great program so long as you know how to use Excel. You can use it for all sorts of things, well beyond the original idea of a spreadsheet.

But this power has a problem associated with it: learning how to use Excel beyond the basics isn’t easy.

Even if you consider yourself a power user, chances are that you’ll learn new tips and tricks in How to Use Excel.

More about How to Use Excel

The How to Use Excel tutorial comes in PDF format, which makes searching a lot easier than flicking through a printed index and hoping that you and the book’s author agree on terminology.

If you’re not sure about some of the basic aspects of Excel, these are covered but the main emphasis is on speed of use.

If you’re using a program such as Excel on a regular basis, you’ll know that there are a handful of things that you use near enough all the time. And it’s here that this tutorial comes into its own…

As you doubtless know, you can format cells so that they look different and show up nicely on screen. But this tutorial shows you how to format them “on the fly” as you’re typing, without navigating the menu system.

Error trapping is essential when you’re using a spreadsheet. The tutorial talks you through how to use Excel’s built in form capability to streamline this as much as possible.

Another time saving trick lets you easily access different worksheets.

You’re also shown how to set up custom views for your spreadsheets as well as copying styles across workbooks.

All in all, the tutorial is excellent and I discovered an embarrassingly large number of tips and tricks that I didn’t know about Excel and I’ve been using the program to do lots of work over a number of years.

The tutorial covers Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, so whichever version you are using will be covered.

Click here to download your copy of How to use Excel.

The Perfect Keylogger claims to log absolutely everything that happens on a computer, without the user knowing.

So if you want to monitor activity on a computer, does Perfect Keylogger do everything it claims?

And would the computer user know they were being monitored?

More about Perfect Keylogger

The initial installation gives some confidence that no-one will know this program is running unless you tell them. Although it would be a good idea to change the default directory for the program when you’re installing it so that curious users don’t spot the folder “Perfect Keylogger” in the program files directory.

There are also instructions in the Perfect Keylogger help file for how to hide the program entry using Windows Explorer.

As you can see, the default Perfect Keylogger installation option is to make sure the program doesn’t appear on the Start menu. This gets over any issues that Windows Vista may have about programs that run at startup. There are also helpful instructions on making sure that the program logs information, even if people log in on a Windows Guest account.

Once you’ve installed Perfect Keylogger, it’s time to configure it. This had me slightly confused at first (but then I can be easily confused) as I’d somehow resized the window and was only given the top menu of the program, making me think that Options wasn’t working. But that was just me being dumb – resizing the window gave all the different options of what to log and how often:

This is the heart and soul of the Perfect Keylogger program.

The options you can see above are the defaults and they’re all quite sensible.

The program doesn’t automatically grab screenshots as this could slow down older systems and could also be a giveaway that the program is running if the PC is busy doing lots of things.

You can change the amount of information that is recorded by Perfect Keylogger as well as the location it’s kept in. By default, the program’s default log storage location is in a folder off its own directory but you can change this.

That said, the Perfect Keylogger log files are encrypted. Not too many people are likely to know what a line such as the one below is storing:

²°¯±±¯²°°¹ ±´º²µº³±ÝÛ×éîäï÷ ÃèáîçåäÝÛÒåáäíå¯ÈåìðÝÛ

I’ve blocked out the hot key selection in the above screen shot as when I was testing, I left it at the default and didn’t want to give anything away in this review.

The keystrokes logger logs everything. Even the typos and arrow key movements.

So you can spy on MSN Messenger chats and grab passwords if they were typed in whilst you were recording what was happening. Stored passwords don’t show up on the log, but that doesn’t really matter as you could log in using the password that had been stored on the PC.

The “programs” section shows you which programs have been launched, even down to telling you that a new tab has been opened in a browser, what was searched for and what was shown in the “title” section of the browser.

My log showed the subject line of my emails, the name of any files I’d opened or saved. Even the tool option I chose on my image grabbing program to block out the hot key shortcuts was shown.

“Websites” shows the web sites visited. Clicking on these brings the relevant website up, either in the program’s internal browser or in your default browser. The program also keeps copies of the websites viewed, so you can see them even if they wouldn’t normally be accessible – such as web based email accounts.

Optionally, log files can be emailed to you. The help file that accompanies the program explains the different settings and also what to do if your email provider doesn’t support this kind of email sending. Popular options such as Gmail are pre-set, so you won’t have to do much more than enter your email address and password.

In stealth mode – which is how you’d normally be running Perfect Keylogger – the program removes itself from the Application list that Windows offers.

Verdict

Perfect Keylogger does what it sets out to do: record anything and everything that  happens on a computer, including screen snapshots if you want them.

It’s easy and intuitive to set up. Other key stroke loggers that I’ve used seem to require a degree in computing before you can set them up but Perfect Keylogger worked as promised immediately.

If you’ve got children who are left unattended on computers or employees working for you or even a spouse you don’t completely trust, then Perfect Keylogger is well worth investing in as an excellent spy tool.

Click here to download a copy of Perfect Keylogger.

In an ideal world, you’d never need a program like Panic Button Pro.

Of course, the world isn’t ideal and there are times when you need to stop things happening on your computer instantly.

Sure, Windows has an option to “show desktop” and minimize all your programs and browsers to the system tray.

So what makes Panic Button Pro better?

When you first start the program, you’re offered a configuration screen:

But that’s all it does. Panic Button Pro goes a lot further than this and could be worth its weight in gold…

This is where you can:

• Set a password so that only you can change the settings on the program
• Always start the program when Windows starts – helpful, otherwise you can guarantee that when you most need to use Panic Button Pro it won’t be running
• Assign a hot key to the program so that when you press a key or combination of keys of your choice, the program will either pop to the top of your screen or hide itself. It’s really easy to set the hot key – you just click your mouse in the hot key box and press whichever key(s) you want to assign. You’ll get confirmation of these on screen.
• Whether or not you want the program to start “hidden” – you’ll probably choose this, otherwise some people would doubtless ask you what the icon means.
• Whether or not to keep a log file of what the program has done.

The next step is to manage hot key profiles. You can create as many of these different profiles as you like.

For instance, I set up a profile so that I can mute the sound on my PC when I press the F11 key. I often work with music playing in the background and being able to press a key to mute the music when the phone rings is great. It’s a lot quicker than hunting for the Windows Media Player icon, opening the program and then clicking the pause button.

Another option is to hide selected windows. Rather than the “all or nothing” option provided by the built-in Windows clear desktop option.

This is handy in all sorts of situations.

You can doubtless think of occasions when you’d rather other people didn’t see what you were browsing. Sports scores at work maybe? Or searching for a gift for your significant other? Or writing a report about someone’s performance that you’d rather was for your eyes only. Not to mention the occasional screen that you’d prefer your children didn’t catch you browsing.

You can choose as many or as few programs as you want, so you can have a selection of different hot keys to perform different duties for you.

The “enter conditions manually” option gives you even more flexibility depending on what’s in the title bar of the relevant windows.

You can also import and export your Panic Button Pro profiles, so you could use the same profile on your desktop PC and your laptop if you wanted.

Verdict

As I mentioned at the start, Panic Button Pro is the kind of program that in theory you don’t need. But in practice, it comes in very handy.

It’s easy to set up and easy to use. The most complicated part is remembering the hot keys you’ve set up for the different actions you’ve chosen.

It’s available for immediate download and comes with a one month money back guarantee.

Click here to download your copy of Panic Button Pro.

If you’ve ever accidentally pressed the “delete” key on your digital camera, you’ll know the heart-sinking feeling that your photo has been lost forever – but can Photo Saver come to the rescue?

It’s almost as if modern cameras were designed to help you lose your favorite photos.

Fortunately, there is an answer to this problem: Photo Saver.

What is Photo Saver?

This neat piece of software has just one purpose in life: recovering photos from your camera’s memory card.

Even if you’ve deleted them or accidentally formatted the drive or (even worse) the card has become corrupt.

The program is simple to use.

Just link up your camera to your PC or put the memory card in the appropriate slot.

Then run the software.

Because photo memory cards work in much the same way as computer hard drives, your photos haven’t actually been deleted when you press the delete key. Instead, the space is marked as OK to re-use.

Which is good news most of the time. (Of course, if you really did want to delete a photo forever, you need to use Photo Eraser to make sure it really can’t be recovered.)

Photo Saver asks you where you want to save your newly recovered photographs and then runs through your camera’s memory card, retrieving all the photos you thought were lost forever.

With the size of today’s memory cards, chances are this will include photos you took weeks or months or even years ago.

Verdict

Photo Saver is an inexpensive, simple to use, program that does precisely what it sets out to do.

If you’ve accidentally a photo or are suffering from a corrupt memory card, it’s well worth downloading and running.

Click here to download your copy of Photo Saver.

When you press “delete” on your digital camera, the photo isn’t actually erased as you’ll find out if you get hold of a program like Photo Eraser.

Deleting photos on your camera works much the same way as deleting files on your hard drive – for speed, the space is marked as available for re-use. But apart from a small indicator that shows the photo up on the available list, it’s really still there.

Which isn’t normally a problem…

Unless you’re a spy, you maybe don’t care what photos are left on your memory card.

But there are times when you don’t want everyone in the world to be able to see the photos you’ve taken. And all they need is a simple program like Photo Saver to be able to retrieve them. Even if you’ve formatted the card.

For instance, if you’re selling your camera and memory card, you’d want to use this program before handing it to the new buyer.

And with the size of the memory cards you can get nowadays, where even the cheaper cards can store hundreds of photographs, it pays to take a bit of care to delete every trace of your photos once you’ve transferred them to your computer, a CD or wherever else you store your masterpieces.

Photo Eraser is very simple to use. If your camera is plugged in to your computer with a USB lead, the software will recognize that and will let you browse to that drive. If you’ve got a card reader, it works much the same way. Just navigate to the correct place.

Then just press the “Next” button. The program will immediately go to work erasing all trace of your photos from the card. So obviously you need to make sure you’ve copied any photos you want before you start this process.

The program then sets about removing all trace of your photos, movies and any other information stored on your camera’s memory card.

Once it’s done, you’re taken to another screen that tells you the process has finished.

Verdict

Photo Saver is a simple to use program that does exactly what it sets out to do.

It’s easy to use and does exactly what it sets out to do.

The program works on all Windows computers and all memory cards.

Click here to download Photo Eraser instantly.

Ultimate Registry Cleaner gets to the Windows Registry, the dark heart of Windows. The registry is a bit like the boiler room in horror movies. And at least as scary.

It holds all sorts of information – program settings (Microsoft’s programs and other  ones as well), hardware settings (think hard drives, CD/DVD writers, graphics cards), most all of your user settings (it remembers where that window should open and what size it should be for instance).

And it’s not unheard of for  the registry to get confused…

What can the Ultimate Registry Cleaner do?

Uninstall programs often don’t tidy up properly after themselves. I’ve had to go into the depths of Regedit to fix problems occasionally and crossed my fingers before I made any changes. Anyone that has fought the registry before will have seen the dire warnings that if you get things wrong, your system could break, possibly horribly.

In fact, the registry gets messed up seemingly as a matter of the natural course of things.

Which is where registry cleaners come into their own.

There are lots out there and they all make much the same promises: you’ll make your system work better and faster; you’ll experience less unexepected and unwanted crashes; your PC will get faster again because the registry isn’t hunting through hundreds of obsolete – or just plain wrong – entries.

Ultimate Registry Cleaner makes much the same promises as the other programs.

It runs a scan on your computer – you can run the scan for free, buying the  software only if you want to fix the problems it will almost certainly find.

I keep my machine fairly tuned but by the nature of testing things, I do install and uninstall programs.

Ultimate Registry Cleaner took a couple of minutes to run andgave me a list of all the errors it had found. All 325 of them, split up into headings such as shared DLLs, program shortcuts, obsolete start menu items, file extensions and a heap of other things.

Because the registry is so important to the working of Windows, you should always make a backup before making any actual changes. Just in case the worst happens. Ultimate Registry Cleaner offers both backup and restore options and it’s definitely worth making a backup before applying the changes it suggests.

Then when you’ve done the scan and backup, it’s time to press the “repair” button.

And if you want to be sure that the program has cleared all the errors it found, scan your machine again.

I’ve done that with some registry cleaners I’ve tested in the past and they always seem to find at least one error in the time it took to fix. Which – being cynical – led me to question how much they were telling the truth about their numbers. But in the case of Ultimate Registry Cleaner, it gave a clean bill of health with no errors found.

Verdict

Ultimate Registry Cleaner works well.

It does what it sets out to do quickly and efficiently.

Most of the competition isn’t upfront about the cost of their program – always assuming you can find the price before you’ve downloaded the free scan and given away your email address. The prices I found for similar products ranged from $30 (renewable annually) to around $50.

Which makes Ultimate Registry Cleaner a bargain even if you pay the price on the main page.

But there’s also a discounted price which you can get here, making it an absolute bargain – half the price of the cheapest competitor I found and with lifetime updates included. These links will take you directly through to the purchase page, so check out the other links to see the features if you want to before deciding whether to use the Ultimate Registry Cleaner.

Computers are great time savers (at least sometimes) but there are times when they take short cuts to keep themselves running quickly and efficiently – Secure Delete can overcome one of the scariest shortcuts.

One of these shortcuts comes when you delete a file.

You likely already know that deleted files get sent to your recycle bin and can be undeleted from there with just a mouse click.

But what happens after they leave your recycle bin is a bit scarier if you’ve got confidential information that you’d rather keep secret.

Why use Secure Delete?

When Windows “deletes” a file it really only puts a marker in its file allocation system to say that the space on your hard drive can be re-used.

So anyone with a bit of computer savvy – or a file undelete program such as File Saver – can retrieve the file with little or no hassle.

Not good if your hard drive has confidential information about yourself, such as your passwords and credit card numbers, or about the company you work for.

Which means that you need to think about how to securely delete any files that you’d rather stayed permanently deleted. Especially before you give away your out of date machine to someone else  or even just loan it to somone while their machine is being fixed.

The best way to really, really, really delete a file is to overwrite the space it occupied lots of times. Which is boring and difficult to do on your own.

It’s much better to use a computer program specially designed to do the task.

Secure Delete does exactly that.

All you need to do is drag and drop the files that you never want to anyone to see again to the program.

Then press the “delete” button.

The space occupied by the file is overwritten 42 times. Which is double the US Government’s recommendation for deleting their confidential official documents.

It takes a second or two for the program to delete a file forever, never to be recovered. Or you can delete complete folders with a right mouse click from My Computer, Windows Explorer, etc.

Verdict

Secure Delete works simply and efficiently.

It performs its intended task of securely deleting files exactly as intended.

If you ever need to banish files from your hard disk forever this is a simple, inexpensive solution.

Click here to download a copy of Secure Delete instantly.