Low Tech Hottie

We use them every day . . . and we hate them. Desktop staplers just don't reliably do the job. And it's no wonder . . . their fundamental design hasn't changed for the past 50 years.

Until now.

The desktop stapler has been created by (who else?) Staples.

The Staples One-Touch Stapler with Staple Gun Power is nothing short of amazing. Tapping the thing with one finger will cleanly drive a standard staple through 20 sheets of paper. That's what the ads claim, but my guess is that it will handle 25-30 sheets.

No cord. No batteries. No teflon-coated titanium staples. No pounding. Just an ergonomic design that does magical things with leverage.

Trust me. You'll never spend $14.99 more wisely. Check out the demo at the Web site.

Rein In Those MS Word RTF Files with Embedded Images

It's always perplexed me how huge Word documents can become when images are embedded in them. It doesn't seem to happen when files are saved in the default .DOC format--only when they're saved in the .RTF format.

An item on p. 79 of the 11/20/04 PC Magazine gave me the answer. Two copies of each image are saved within an .RTF file, including one in the bloated Windows Metafile (WMF) format.

There's a simple registry tweak to prevent Word from creating the WMF copy. If you don't have access to the issue (which doesn't appear to be online yet), check out Microsoft's Knowledgebase Article 224663.

The tweak works. I had a user manual with a lot of screenshots which was over 300 MB and took forever to load. After applying the registry tweak, I opened the file, made a tiny edit to it, and saved it . . . as an 8 MB file.