How to Extract Media Files from Word, Excel and PowerPoint

If someone sent you a Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), or PowerPoint (.pptx) file with images or other files embedded, you can extract them without having to save each one separately. The Microsoft Office XML based file formats - docx, xlsx and pptx are actually compressed archives that you can open like any normal .zip file with Windows. 

You'll need Word 2007 or later or another .docx compatible program, if it's a .doc file open it in Word and save as a .docx file. 

How to Extract the Contents of Office file (.docx, .xlsx or .pptx)

Make a duplicate of the file and press "F2" to rename the extension from .docx, .xlsx or .pptx to .zip, leave the main part of the filename alone and press "Enter". A dialog box displays warning you about changing the file name extension and click "Yes". 

To extract the contents of the file, right-click on the file and select "Extract All" from the popup menu. If you want to change the destination folder click on browse, otherwise click on "Extract".  

How to Access the Extracted Media files 

Open the extracted folder and find the folder named "Word" for Word document, "xl" for Excel document or "ppt" for a PowerPoint document. 

To access the extracted images in Word document, click Word > Media.

If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your PC, and you need to extract text out of a Word (or Excel or PowerPoint) file, you can access the extracted text in the “document.xml” file in the “word” folder.You can open this file in a text editor, such as Notepad or WordPad, but it’s easier to read in a special XML editor, such as the free program, XML Notepad.

To extracted embedded OLE objects or attached files, right-click on one of the embedded files and choose "Open PDF object".  This opens the PDF file in the default PDF reader program on your PC. From there, you can save the PDF file to your hard drive.
Note : To extract media files from an Microsoft Office 2003 or earlier, download and install Office Image Extraction Wizard to your PC. Now select document and output folder, click next and start.

How to Enable Facial Recognition in Your Google Photos

Facial recognition is one of the most popular features on Google Photos, Facebook Photos, Apple Photos, which recognize face and automatically arrange your photos based on people's faces. Facial recognition is available inside Android, iPhone, iPad and the web version of Google Photos. If you are not seeing it in your account yet, because your accessing Photos from outside the United States. 

Also See : List of best website offering free Stock Photos

A footnote on the Google Photos website says that “Facial recognition" feature isn’t available in all countries, probably due to privacy laws, but there’s a simple trick that will help you bring face detection in your Google Photos. 

Also See : Best apps to protect or lock photos on Your iOS 

How to Enable Facial Recognition in Your Google Photos

• Go to your Android phone settings, select “Apps”, then select “Photos” under the “Downloaded” section and click the “Clear Data” button to reset your Google Photos app.

• Go to the Google Play store and download Tunnel Bear or Hola or any of your favorite VPN apps.
• Also See : Best Camera Apps for Android  

• Open the VPN app and connect. It will essentially trick Photos into thinking that you are connecting from US, a country that is supported by Google Photos for facial recognition.

• Open the Google Photos app, scroll past the wizard screen and then under Settings, enable the option that says “Group Similar Faces – Auto Group photos by matching faces.”

Also See : How to manage App permission on Android Mobile or Tablets

Now you can uninstall or disable the VPN app, launch Google Photos again and tap the blue search button. You should see a list of faces that Google Photos was able to detect from your uploaded photos. And the feature will automatically become available on photos.google.com as well.

How to Monitor Your Windows PC by WinPatrol

Whether you are on your computer or not, as long as it is on and connected to the internet, it is at constant threat of harms, infection and the other turmoil of using the internet. WinPatrol boasts being one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal against threats while at the same time using the least amount of system memory. WinPatrol helps you monitor changes to your computer by keeping a watch on all the critical parameters. If some program tries to add a startup entry – or remove it, or if some software tries to change your default search or browsers settings, it will immediately bark and alert you.

There are two options to choose from when you download WinPatrol as with most programs online, the free, and the paid version. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on using the free version to monitor changes on your computer.Download the installation file from WinPatrol Page and install it. 

You will notice that the home screen for this program offers 14 different tabs with monitoring functions of which three are only available with the PLUS version.

Here are some excellent Winpatrol alternatives that frequently used by Consumers. You can use Emsisoft Anti-Malware, AnVir Task Manager, Process Hacker, Free Extended Task Manager and Task Manager DeLuxe.
 

How to Use WinPatrol to Monitor Windows PC for Changes

WinPatrol free offers a variety of options for you to monitor, change and work with. 

1. Startup Program : From the “Startup Programs” tab, you can monitor the programs that turn on when you start up your machine. To enable or disable any item that is currently in the list, simply click on the entry then click the enable or disable button. The orange arrow shows a box that, when ticked, will make WinPatrol to check for any changes to the startup programs.By clicking on the pink arrow, on the small clock icon, you will be able to change how often WinPatrol checks for these changes. I recommend that you leave it at two minutes, which is the default. 

If a new entry is added, such as when you install a program, you will be asked whether or not this task has permission to start with windows. You can either accept or reject the change from this window. You can also open the folder where the executable file is located or view the file’s properties. If you did not install a program or recognize the change, it is safest to reject the change. Since this is just a startup notification, it will not uninstall the program, just prevent it from automatically turning on.

 2. Scheduled Tasks 1.0 : This tab is where you can see any tasks that are scheduled to run on your computer. If you select an item and press the “info” button, you will also see any information related to the program’s schedule. To change how frequently WinPatrol checks for changes to this section, just press the stopwatch and change the timer.

3. Services : The services tab will show you a list of all the services on your computer that are running and stopped. You will also see details about the startup settings, executable name, and the company that it comes from. To change how frequently WinPatrol checks for changes to this section, just press the stopwatch and change the timer.
4. Cookies : On the cookies tab you can search for, and remove, cookies with specific text in their titles. This helps you to filter out cookies that you don’t want to keep on your computer. You can also select which browser you want to search and whether you want to remove them. For example, if you type the word “Facebook” in the “Add” section, you can prevent the selected browser (Mozilla Firefox) from storing them.

5. Recent : If you happen to know that you had a recent malware infection and you need to ensure that all residual traces of the program have been removed, you can use the “Recent” tab. This will show you a list of all programs and processes that were recently active. You can select any item in the list and kill the task. Before or after killing the task, you can right click on the item and select “Delete on Reboot” to delete all traces of the program the next time you start your computer.

6. Options : The options tab will present you with several report functions which you will see on the right side of the screen. On the left, you can click on the two stopwatches to edit the time it takes before the corresponding actions take place.

If you click on the “Repair and rest tools,” you will be taken to a new popup screen with several other tasks to choose from. These are user tools to undo changes, cleanup specific areas of the program, and delete any files that have been deleted with WinPatrol.

Is WinPatrol a good guard for your system when you’re not?

If you choose to use WinPatrol, get ready for a whirlwind of learning about just what goes on with your computer, especially in the background. WinPatrol gives you access to just about every area Windows would rather you stay out of. This gives you control over things that may be affecting your system performance that you have no idea was happening. Giving WinPatrol a shot is another way to take control of your PC instead of it controlling you and what you do when logged on.

How to Fix ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED Error in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is one of the most popular web browsers on almost all platforms and it is widely used across the globe. While browsing the Internet on Chrome, you might have seen multiple issues with page loads and error loading pages. If you are using Google Chrome and encountered this error, ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED code, it could be quite annoying to browse the internet.

But this error can be fixed easily using the steps mentioned below. We have compiled a list of options you can try out to fix this issue.

1. This error can happen if you have enabled Prefetch option in Chrome. Prefetch is an option in Chrome settings which enables loading of pages more quickly. In case you have enabled this in Chrome> Settings > Show advanced settings> Under Privacy, uncheck the option “Prefetch resources to load page more quickly”. Once you uncheck this, the issue with DNS would be solved.

In case this does not work, move to step 2.

2. Open command prompt on your Windows (Run command-> Cmd and press enter). Now type ipconfig /flushdns and press enter. This will flush the DNS resolver cache.

3. If the issue still exist on your PC, open a new tab and type chrome://net-internals/#dns. Now this will show an option to clear host cache. Hit the button and clear the cache.

4. One of the above steps should ideally solve the issue, but in case you are still having the issue, you might have to reset the Chrome to default settings or even uninstall and reinstall it back. You can also try changing the DNS server for your IP to Google DNS or Open DNS.

How to Lock or Password Protect Folders in Windows 10

With Windows 10, Microsoft has added lots of new features and also improvements to the OS when compared to previous versions of Windows. But one of the options still missing on Windows 10 is the ability to protect any folder with a password. Although you can hide a folder, it is not a secure mechanism. If you have confidential files on your PC, it is always good to have some security for it. 

How to Lock Folders in Window 10 without Software

1. Open the folder which you want to lock and create New Text Document > open it. 

2. copy and paste this code into the new text document. Download code from here

3. find where it says "Your Password Here" in the document and replace with your password to lock the folder.

4. Click on save as with file name "FolderLockder.bat" and save as type "All Files" to save the document.

5. Locker folder has been generated and move any file or Folder to lock in it.

6. Open the FolderLocker file, because its time to lock that folder up, a popup window will appears with sms like "Are you sure u want to lock the foler". Type Yes and hit Enter, the Folder Locker window will disappear along with the Locker folder itself. Your secrets are safe!

7. To unloack the folder, double click "FolderLocker" to open it and Enter the password and click Enter.

For More Information Watch Video

How to Lock Folder in Window 10 with Software

Lock-A-Folder is a lightweight and free app to password protect folders in Windows.

Note: This app is not under development anymore, but it still works fine with Windows 10 as we tested it on our PC.

1. The first time you use this tool, you will be prompted to enter a master password which will be used to unlock the protected folders. Once you have entered the master password, you can add folders to the app to protect. Click the Lock a Folder button and add multiple folders.

2. Once you exit the program, you will not be able to see the folder as it is protected and not visible to other users. To unlock the folder, open the app and enter the master password.

3. Now remove the folders from the list to unprotect it. The advantages of using the app is that it is simple and lightweight and does not consume high resources in the background. We tested the app with Windows 10 and it worked perfectly.

So if you are looking for a tool to password protect Folders, you can try out Lock-A-Folder.
 
Download Lock-A-Folder

Best Blu-ray Disc Burner Software for Windows

Blu-ray Disc (official abbreviation BD) is an optical disc storage medium that supersedes the DVD format. Althoguh the disc size is same as that of DVDs, the capacity of Blue-Ray discs are high, starting at 25GB for a single layer disc. Blu-ray discs have gained a lot of popularity among avid computer users, and we can now see its gaining popularity even in movies discs. If you want to burn Blu-ray disc, you need a burner supporting it, many of the newer laptops come with Blu-ray burners. There are lots of applications created to support Blu-ray burning.

Here is the list of best free Blu-ray discs burning tools for Windows.

1. ImgBurn:

ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application and also one of the most popular burning tool. ImgBurn supports a wide range of image file formats – including BIN, CCD, CDI, CUE, DI, DVD, GI, IMG, ISO, MDS, NRG and PDI. You can use it to build DVD Video discs (from a VIDEO_TS folder), HD DVD Video discs (from a HVDVD_TS folder) and Blu-ray Video discs (from a BDAV / BDMV folder) with ease.

2. CD Burner XP:

CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs. It is one of the most popular app for burning CDs and DVDs and supported on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It can burn any Data on CD-R/CD-RW/DVD+R/DVD-R/DVD+RW/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM/BD/HD-DVD, including double layer mediums.

3. StarBurn:

StarBurn is a free and powerful tool that allows its users to burn and master CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The program supports all types of optical storage media (including CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, BD-R/RE, HD-DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM) and a wide variety of burning hardware. The free does not have network burning capacity, but still useful for home users.

4. BurnAware:

BurnAware Free is a full-fledged disc burning tool – fast, lightweight, feature-packed and allows users to burns all types of CD, DVD and Blu-Ray discs containing data, digital photos, music and video. With BurnAware Free, you will be able to create bootable or multisession CDs and DVDs, high-quality audio CDs, make and burn disc images, copy and backup discs.

5. Express Burn:

Express Burn is yet another useful tool for Blu-ray burning. A free version of this software is available for non-commercial use only. It comes with features like ultra fast burning to save you time, Burn audio, video or files to CD, DVD or Blu-Ray and also drag and drop files straight into the application.

There are many more free tools available, but we have covered only the most popular ones. So which is your favorite Blu-ray burner for Windows?