Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

There are many features in WhizFolders for editing in separate windows. I assume that you already tried the advanced editor that opens topics in a tabbed editor window. Now here are some more tricks that show how flexible WhizFolders is.

Please try all these neat tricks that show different aspects of starting an editor:

• When the two topics are open in the advanced tabbed editor, right-click on the menu “New Editor Window.” This will transfer that topic to a new editor window. You can then arrange the two editor windows the way you want, side by side.
• If you want these two topics to remember their position, right-click on “Pin this topic” on both of them so that the menu is ticked (switched on). Now whenever you open these topics, they will open in their remembered positions.
• Click on the menu “Tools–File Options–Desktop” and switch on the option “Open each topic in a separate editor.” Once you do that, each click on advanced editor opens that topic in a separate editor window.
• You can even have all such open topic editors automatically restored on the next open of the document by “remember everything” option on the File Options–Desktop.
• You might have noticed that if you double-click on a topic name in the topic list (or hit the Enter key on it), it starts a quick editor in the right pane. What if you always want to open an advanced editor on a double-click? To do that, you can switch off an option in “Tools–General Options–Editor.” The option is “Start Quick Edit on Enter key.”

WhizFolders must be using RichEdit 4.1 in order to allow unicode. You can make sure whether WhizFolders  is using RichEdit 4.1 by clicking on the menu Help–About and then see the report on the button Status. It shows the RichEdit version in use. It should be 4.1. If it isn’t, you need to follow these steps to switch it on:

• Click on the menu Tools–General Options–Editor.
• Switch on the last option that enables use of RichEdit 4.1 (msftedit.dll).
• Click OK to finish the options dialog.
• Exit WhizFolders by the menu File–Exit.
• Restart it and again check on the Help–About–Status whether RichEdit 4.1 was really switched on.

Smart quotes is a feature of Microsoft RichEdit control that WhizFolders uses for its editor. You can turn smart quotes on or off by keys Ctrl-Shift-’.

For other such key combinations, please see the following table that we borrowed from the Microsoft documentation. IMPORTANT NOTE: All of them may not work as some may have been assigned to the menus to trigger menu actions in WhizFolders.

Question: When I double-click a topic name in the list or press Enter key after selecting it, it starts the Quick Editor. I want to start the Advanced Editor instead. What option can I change?

Please click on the menu “Tools–General Options.” Then click on the Editor page of the Options screen. Look for the option, “Start Quick Edit on the Enter Key.” Please switch it off. Once you do that, the advanced editor will open on a double-click or Enter key. The quick editor can still be used when needed but only by clicking its button on the right pane.

In WhizFolders, we avoided using any other RTF or HTML editor control from other companies. We decided to use Microsoft RichEdit control as the note editor in spite of the fact that it is quite complex to use, especially for OLE stuff like displaying pictures. Why did we go to all that trouble? The idea is that we want you to easily exchange RTF text with Microsoft Word, Wordpad and other RTF editors. Unless you can exchange text easily, it is difficult to work with many software tools. And, using Windows effectively means being able to use many tools together, isn’t it?

There’s more. WhizFolders now uses the latest unicode-enabled RichEdit. This means even more RTF compatibility. For example, the tables copied from Microsoft Word now display very well in your WhizFolders Deluxe notes.

Using the RichEdit also means being able to insert OLE objects. Try inserting a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet by Insert Object in a WhizFolders note. You will be delighted. Moreover, we have made our own little innovations in RichEdit–easy hyperlinks that can be typed, nested lists and so on. We will continue to use newer RichEdit controls as they are released by Microsoft.

We think no one uses RichEdit as well as we do:)

In WhizFolders, after starting the quick editor, you can drag the Editor toolbar out of the viewer area as shown in the following picture.

This clears up more editing area in the quick editor. As always, you can remain in the edit mode while adding or editing more topics. The editor toolbar goes away only when you stop the editor. Also, WhizFolders remembers the position of the moved toolbar so next time, you don’t have to move it. With this feature, we have addressed the needs of those users who wanted to remain in edit mode for longer time without restricting the area available for editing.