WHERE HAVE ALL YOUR FAVOURITE SETTINGS GONE?
Find them with our help
Spring cleaning is a great way to lose things. You might end up with a spotless house, but wasn’t it easier to find stuff when it was scattered around gathering dust?
Same with software updates. Developers love ‘improving’ their products, but loyal users are left wondering where the devil their favourite options have been tidied away to – or whether they’ve been binned. Here we’ll help you track down those settings and tools that vamoosed.
Microsoft Office
When Microsoft dropped all support for Office 2007 last year, the Office button finally went to the great settings menu in the sky. Most of its options (Save, Open and so on) live on in the File menu in Office 2013, 2016 and 365, but the old Prepare option – which opened properties and security settings – has vanished. To check properties now, you need to click File, Info, Show All Properties. To configure security, click Tools, Protect Document.
Sadly, there’s not much you can do to bring back the old-style dropdown File menu. It lurches out from the side of your screen instead. You can avoid the lurch by adding your most-used options, such as Open, New Document and Info, to the Quick Access Toolbar instead (visit Microsoft’s site for instructions: www.snipca.com/27478).
You may also be mourning the big Change Styles button, which used to open formatting preferences in Word 2007 and 2010. The button has gone but the Style options are better than ever. To open them now, click the Design tab, Document Formatting, then More.
Libreoffice
Libreoffice 6, released at the end of January, gives Office a run for its money – without costing a penny (see our feature in Issue 522, page 58). Very few settings have been meddled with in recent updates, but one exception is the ‘Open/save Dialogs’ option. It used to let you switch on a more powerful ‘Save as’ window that contained all your PC’S folders, so you got complete control over where to save files and export PDFS.
You can still enable the window with a settings hack. Open Options (in the Tools menu) then click Libreoffice, Advanced, Open Expert Configuration. Type misc in the Search bar then press Enter. Under ‘org.openoffice.office.common.misc’, find Usesystemfiledialog and then click Edit so the Type column says false (see screenshot below). Click OK.
Chrome
Chrome now discards your familiar Extensions list in favour of a Material Design page, complete with fancy ‘cards’ and a ‘hamburger’ menu (three horizontal lines). A couple of Extensions links have shifted, too: ‘Keyboard shortcuts’ is now under the menu button, and ‘Allow in incognito’ is now squirrelled away under Details.
More infuriating is the loss of the ‘Plug-ins’ section in Chrome Settings. It let you block auto-playing videos – something Google said it would do in Chrome 65 (the latest version), but hasn’t. As a stopgap, you can block sites that foist Flash video on you. Type chrome://settings/content/flash into Chrome’s address bar, check the ‘Ask first’ slider is blue, and then click Add.
Chrome’s old ‘Customise and control’ setting in Tools was useful for increasing font size to make it easier to read. Happily, the option still exists: go to Settings, click ‘Customise fonts’ under Appearance, and then move the slider to the right (see screenshot below).
Firefox
If you’ve not used Mozilla’s browser for a while, you’re in for a shock. Settings have seen major changes in recent months – especially the sections that let you control the data that Facebook and other sites can collect about you.
Typing about:permissions into the address bar used to open Permissions Manager, where you could configure cookies, location access, offline storage and other permissions for individual sites. It’s not been moved or renamed – it’s completely gone. The shortcut now prompts an error page.
You can still manage permissions, but the process is more convoluted. Open the menu, click Options, ‘Privacy & Security’, then scroll down to Permissions (or type about:preferences#privacy). The simple list of sites has been replaced with configuration buttons for Location, Camera and Notifications and so on (see them compared side by side above). Elsewhere on the same page you can manage data tracking, security certificates, cached content and more.
We understand there’s even more mutation ahead for your cookiemanagement options. We’re sure Firefox knows what it’s doing, but it’s playing dangerous games with its users’ patience.
Meanwhile, the Customise option in the Firefox menu no longer lets you add or move menu items. Instead, they go on an ‘overflow menu’ (the new >> icon) or the main toolbar. The Share button has gone too: Firefox recommends using the free Share Backported extension instead ( www.snipca.com/27477).
Let’s end on a happy note. Firefox’s menu is now a neat list of text options – a relief for anyone who hated the childish icons of previous versions. Thank you, Firefox, for respecting our ability to read.
Gmail
Remember when Gmail was packed with easy-to-see options such as ‘Edit labels’, Contacts, and Report Spam? And you could see all your labels – including Bin and Spam. But then Google hid them behind a chat tool you never use.
All these settings are still available. ‘Edit labels’ is now ‘Manage labels’, and it’s at the bottom of your labels list - which unfurls when you hover over it. That can be fiddly, so point your cursor to the top of the Hangouts box until you see a tiny ‘drag’ icon (two lines and arrows), then drag it down to permanently un-hide all labels. The old links to Youtube and other Google services are now behind the grid of squares (top right), while Contacts is under the tiny red arrow next to Gmail at the top left (see screenshot).
Gmail is about to get a big overhaul, so
who knows what’ll come along to cover up your labels next. You could always insure against change by turning the clock back using HTML Gmail. It’s safe and takes seconds. Go to www.snipca.com/27458 then click ‘I’d like to use HTML Gmail’. If only you could do this with all software!
Ccleaner
Ccleaner tends to add features rather than take them away (except the junk it wipes from your PC, of course) – but the program window’s Online Help link recently went AWOL. It’s a very odd omission, because Ccleaner’s online knowledge base is as big and useful as ever. Here it is: www.ccleaner.com/support/ccleaner.
Avast Free Antivirus
The Passwords tool has already absconded from the front of Avast Free Antivirus, months after it first appeared. You can now find it in the new Privacy section, along with Secureline VPN settings. If you use the premium, paid-for version of Avast, you may wonder where Securedns and Home Network Security have gone. They’ve been renamed as Real Site and Wi-fi Inspector respectively.