Windows security: How strong is your password? Three ways to create a strong password are: 1) Choose a combination of at least seven letters and numbers; use both lower and upper case. 2) Avoid consecutive letters/numbers (eg, 123, pqr). 3) Don’t use obvious or significant strings of words/numbers (eg, your name, birthday, 1066). Write your password in a safe place but not on a Post-it Note on your PC, and change it from time to time.

E-mail attachments: Three ways to save everyone time are: 1) Don’t include attachments with meeting invitations; send them in a separate e-mail. 2) Limit the number of attachments with each e-mail to five. 3) For Outlook users, when working with people who are not on Outlook (eg, Notes), ensure that you send the e-mail in plain text, otherwise the attachment could be converted into a .Dat file that the recipient cannot open. To send in plain text when the new e-mail is open, click on Plain Text from the Format menu.

Reader feedback:

Accents: Tom in Manchester suggests: When in Outlook, switch to Plain Format (not HTML), hold down the Control key and press a character whose choice represents each of the accents. When you release these keys the accent appears on whichever character you type next. For example: Control apostrophe = acute accent á é, Control ^ = circumflex accent â ê, Control colon = umlaut ö ü ë.

Anna in Kingston upon Thames asks: “In Excel, I’m trying to type in the date in the format I want, which is just the month and year (ie, October 07) but it gets converted into figures (10-2007). What can I do to keep to my chosen format?”

Highlight the cell(s) and, from the Format menu, pick Cells. From the Format Cells dialogue box, select the Number tab and from the Category pick Text. Click OK.

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