Internet guides

The new Google Docs Viewer helps you view files online that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. It gives you access to a range of file types and it can lend itself as a solution to some unusual problems. For example, it’s not unusual to receive a file that you can’t access easily because you don’t have an application to open it with.

Here we’ll take a look at two new tools in the file-sharing arena. First, there’s Diglo, a new site that successfully fuses file sharing with social media — kind of like Facebook merged with RapidShare. Second, we’ll take a quick look at Magic Player, a browser plug-in that lets you stream media torrents directly, without leaving your browser — just click on a link and press Play.

Dropbox has become extremely popular as an automatic way of backing up data to the Internet and making it accessible from multiple computers. While it works very well and on a wide variety of operating systems and devices, it has two potential annoyances. The first is that by default, it only duplicates files in the set Dropbox folder, which the software itself sets up. The other is that it only gives you 2GB of online storage for free. Here we'll show how sync files from outside your Dropbox folder, and how to gain some more storage for free.

Aside from the peer-to-peer (P2P) clients themselves, there are a host of tools you’ll likely find useful when you’re downloading from P2P networks. There are tools that create a virtual sandbox, block suspect IP addresses, access your P2P client remotely, stream video and audio, protect against viruses and more. Here’s our pick of the five best P2P helper tools.

One of the most frequent criticisms made of Facebook is that it doesn't do a good job of ensuring that your personal information remains private. Controls designed to ensure that your information remained private were buried in relatively obscure menu options and spread out over several places, and the default settings in many cases made all your information public and allowed applications to freely post to your wall. Adding to the general air of confusion, those settings often changed locations.

When you need to highlight information according to its value in a Google Docs spreadsheet, you can use the conditional formatting tool. While this tool isn’t as sophisticated as the corresponding feature in Excel, for example, it does have its uses and we’ll show you how to put it to work. In this example, we'll have a set of average temperatures for Melbourne and use conditional formatting to display different colours, depending on the temperature.

Last month we talked about some of the cool new features of µTorrent 3.0 (www.utorrent.com), the latest version of the popular BitTorrent file-sharing app. But one that we didn’t mention was µTorrent Remote, an excellent new feature for managing your µTorrent client remotely. With Remote, you can add torrents, control speed settings and start and stop downloads from anywhere, just as if you’re sitting in front of the computer itself.

Google dominates the world of online search, but so far it has not been able to translate its success in that area into the social networking sphere. That market remains dominated by Facebook, which has around 750 million users worldwide. Google+ is actually Google's second attempt at social networking. In February 2010, it launched Buzz, which used Google accounts and let users post status updates to followers (the central feature of most online social networking sites).

One PowerPoint feature that’s somewhat lacking in Google Docs Presentations is the ability to animate a presentation. We’ll show you how to animate a slide as well as how some people have created a workaround. The primary animation option available in Presentations is for animating an object or text box to sequentially reveal the text or object when presenting. To do this on a slide that contains a text area, for example, click on the text container to select it, right-click and select ‘Incremental Reveal’.

With µTorrent 3.0 now released (from www.utorrent.com), here we'll look at a few of a favourite new features in this latest version of the popular BitTorrent client. Top of the list is the ‘Drop files to send’ box, which makes sharing your own files using µTorrent much, much easier. You can literally just drag a file from Windows Explorer onto the box and it will automatically start seeding it for you and create a URL that you can send to anybody you want to have the file. It’s an excellent way to quickly share large files with friends and family.