Software Highlights

Using iTunes it's easy to find radio stations you can listen to for free over the internet. In fact, you're spoiled for choice: there are literally thousands of stations broken down by genres available through iTunes. Just find one you like, minimize iTunes and you'll have your favorite radio station to keep you company throughout the day.

The iTunes Genius is a recent addition to iTunes that helps you to build a playlist by assembling music it thinks you'll like. This playlist is based on the data that iTunes has about your musical tastes and the more you use iTunes, the more information the Genius will have upon which to make recommendations.

Before long, you may have so much media that iTunes that finding the song, movie or TV show you're looking for becomes a chore. Playlists to the rescue! These little container files act like folders on your computer. You can sort your music and videos into numerous different playlists as well as create new playlists easily.

Podcasts are video and audio files that you can download, often for free, and watch on your computer or a media player like the iPod, iPhone, Zune and others. iTunes has an extensive library of video and audio podcasts available. All you need to do is subscribe and these podcasts will be downloaded and synced automatically as new episodes are released.

After searching for and finding the movie, music or TV show you want to purchase, you'll want to look at the price. While the cost of individual items is reasonable and largely universal, the price varies between different types of media. You'll also want to keep an eye out for the elusive "free" tag. More on getting free stuff from iTunes in a future episode.

As soon as you've installed iTunes on your Mac or PC, you can start looking around for movies, music, applications, podcasts and TV shows that are of interest to you. Whether you missed the latest episode of your favourite cop drama or you're looking for the slow song they used to play at every high school dance, you can probably find it in iTunes.

With iTunes you can download single tracks or full albums from your favorite artists, you can buy and rent movies for playback on your computer or iPod / iPhone, you can grab video and audio "podcasts," grab the latest episode of your favorite TV show, get games for your iPod or iPhone and much more. All for a nominal fee or, in some cases, free.

The cherry on top of the excellent Quicken Online Mobile (iTunes link) free web app is the similarly excellent free iPhone app. With Quicken Online Mobile, you can see all your transactions and get a look at your overall financial health anywhere you get a cell signal.

Quicken Online can send you updates to let you know how you're doing financially. Get an alert if you're nearing your spending limit on a certain category, get daily updates to let you know if you're on track, get bill payment reminders, warning calls as credit cards near their limits and much more. It's all here under Quicken Online settings.

In this Excel tutorial learn how to split a word and then count the characters.

Wang asks how to change part of one data label to be red. Unfortunately, the label is then broken. A macro should solve this, but it does not. Episode 1147 discusses this problem.

Doc Callahan continues the process of upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 and finishes up the installation of Microsoft's new operating system. In this tutorial, we'll continue the installation that we started. When we're finished, we'll have a fully functioning copy of Windows 7 running on our machine that, until recently, was running Windows Vista.

With all the important housekeeping taken care of, we're now ready to begin the actual upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7. If you've followed along with this tutorial series and looked after all the backup, defragmenting and cleaning up, the process of upgrading Windows Vista to Windows 7 will be a piece of cake. And who among us doesn't like cake?

Upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 will be much easier if you install to a defragmented hard drive. Defragmenting means pulling your data that's scattered across the physical drive into a logical and clean structure. Take the time to defragment your drive and your upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 will be a smooth and simple process.