Windows XP actually has a nice feature for controlling what happens when you insert a CD into your CD (or DVD) drive. The problem is, it's hidden ...

Open up My Computer by double-clicking on the desktop icon or selecting it in the Start Menu. You should see the drives that are visible from your computer; depending on your configuration that could include sections for hard disk drives, "drives with removable storage" and network drives. In this context, CD and DVD drives count as "drives with removable storage".

Right click on your CD or DVD drive (if you have more than one you have to repeat this process with each of them). Select 'Properties' at the bottom of the menu.

That will open a dialog box with a number of tabs along the top. Select 'Autoplay'.  You can see a picture at the bottom of this post showing what the dialog box should look like (double-click to enlarge it!).

Here, you set the action you want for each of the types of CD given in the pull-down menu, shown as "Music files" in the picture. (In its roundabout way, Windows describes a music CD as a CD with music files on it. "Mixed content" refers to a music CD with other "bonus material" on it.)

For each type of CD, you have two choices for what happens when you insert a CD into the CD drive:  you can have Windows perform an action automatically, or you can have Windows pop-up a dialog box which lets you choose every time.  To have Windows act automatically, select the first radio button ("Select an action to perform:") and click on the choice you want from the list below the radio button.  To have Windows ask you every time, select the second radio button ("Prompt me each time to choose an action").

Note that "Take no action" (i.e., do nothing!) is always one of the automatic actions you can choose if you select the first radio button.  You might not see it because it's always the last choice in the list.  It's also always one of the choices that Windows offers you when you insert the CD, if you choose the second radio button, but again you might not see it because it's last in the list.

You have to set up each kind of CD separately, including blank CDs, by going through each item in the pull-down menu.  If you like writing files and folders to blank CDs using the drag and drop mechanism now built in to Windows XP, the choice you want is "Open writable CD folder using Windows Explorer".  You can have Windows make this choice automatically when you insert a blank CD, or choose it from the dialog box that opens -- the effect is the same either way.

Suppose you have a table (or query) in Access with three columns:

LName - the last name of a sales person
Amount - the dollar amount of a sale by the sales person
Region - saleperson's region (South, West, ...)

How do you figure out the total sales for each sales person?  You need to combine (in this case add) the data from multiple rows.  The answer is to use GROUP BY.  To see how this works, imagine a table that looks like this:

LName             Amount       Region
Smith              $1,000.00         NE
Jones                $500.00           S
Smith                $200.00         NE
Edwards            $750.00         W
Jones               $250.00           S

You can see that the table can contain several amounts for a given salesperson - our task is to add them up to get the total amount for each salesperson.  First, start the query designer in Access by double-clicking on "Create query in Design view".

The first thing to do in the query designer is to add to the query the table you want to get the results from.  You can base this query on another query; in fact in Access it can be simpler to build up a complicated query in several steps, by using one query in another.

We'll end up using all three fields, so drag them all into the query.

We're going to build a query using GROUP BY.  The problem is that this feature is not visible in a normal query.  Go to the View Menu and select "Totals" (or "Show totals", depending on your version of Access).  A new row named 'Total' will appear in the bottom half of the query.

There are two main types of fields for a group by query:  the field or fields that IDENTIFY WHICH rows to combine, and the fields or fields whose values we want to COMBINE.  In our case, we want to combine all the rows from a given salesperson (which means using the LName field), and add together the sales amounts (which means using the Amount field).  The way we do this in Access is using the Totals row.  In the LName column of the query, set the Total row to 'Group By'.  In the Amount column, set the Total row to Sum.

But what do we do with the remaining field, 'Region'?  We hardly want to add these together.  We combined all the rows for a given salesperson together, but for a given salesperson the value of the Region field will be the same -- we can use any row we like in our result.  There's no way to say 'any' in Access, but we can get the same effect by setting the Total row of the Region column to 'First'.

Save the query and see how it works!

Two good questions from Kim Komando:

Are you still not backing up your data?
Are you doomed if your office computer tech quits?

Not that I'd quit or anything ...

Microsoft's Vladimir Rovinsky has an article on using Photo Story 3. You can take a single photo and turn it into a movie by panning across it.  Neat!

I should see if I can find some time to install Photo Story 3 on one of my many Windows systems.