Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2024 June 13

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 13

Microsoft Word: page numbering folios

Hello. Is there a way to get Microsoft Word to number pages not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... but instead 1r, 1v, 2r, 2v, 3r...? As in folio numbering? Thanks Amisom (talk) 13:46, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

I don't believe that's possible, at least as of Office 2016. There's no option anything like that as far as I can tell. It's hard to prove a negative from Google, but nothing useful is coming up when I search for word page numbering "folio". Keep in mind, Word is a word processing program; it has only rudimentary printing capabilities. What you likely need is Microsoft Publisher, which is a desktop publisher. From our article: "Microsoft Publisher is a desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and graphic design rather than text composition and proofreading. It's going to be discontinued in a few years, with its functionality moved to other applications in the 365 suite. Matt Deres (talk) 14:51, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Possibly by using a header or footer - "To show the document title, author’s name, or some other text with the page number, or to hide the page number on the first page, start by using Insert > Header & Footer instead of Insert > Page Numbers."  Card Zero  (talk) 15:14, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Redirect

I’m using Firefox, and after the last upgrade, I get the message below when I click a bookmark. Not all bookmarks, but almost all. Any ideas how to get rid of it? “The previous page is sending you to http://www … (the url where I want to go). If you do not want to visit that page, you can return to the previous page.” (the last five words are a url back to where I was.). DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 16:26, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Is that the exact phrasing, or is it this message?

=> yes, that is the exact phrasing. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 16:08, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Redirect Notice

The page you were on is trying to send you to [...].

If you do not want to visit that page, you can return to the previous page.

I found it on a thread on Mozilla support, where a moderator thinks Firefox is not responsible for the notice and that it's "likely a feature of the website that redirect[ed] the link you entered". But this is a typical software support reaction. I saw nothing on Bugzilla under bookmarks though it might be under some other component. You could open a ticket if you feel public-spirited.

What distinguishes the bookmarks that do load? Is this perhaps an issue about http vs. https? If you create new bookmarks, do those work OK?  Card Zero  (talk) 18:12, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

=> http vs. https has no bearing. Nothing I can determine distinguishes redirects from non-redirects. More, the redirects began all at once (but, as noted, not all websites). DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 16:08, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

If you want a quick fix, entering about:config in the address bar and setting accessibility.blockautorefresh = false will turn off the notice. But then you will have turned off the notice. (Worth trying anyway, because if it doesn't work, the mystery deepens - or it might somehow reveal a clue.)  Card Zero  (talk) 17:47, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Does the bookmarked URL look like, say,

https://www.google.com/imgres?⁠q=%22Zeng%20Shan%22&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F9%2F9d%2FZeng_Shan.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FZeng_Shan&docid=Harrumph666oid&tbnid=qWeRtY_uIoP&vet=1L1k3_8008s ,

instead of just

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Zeng_Shan.jpg ?

Google is tracking when its search results are followed.  --Lambiam 18:26, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

=> the simple version. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 16:08, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Follow-Up on Windows Storage Questions

Thank you for the various advice on my Windows storage question. Here are some follow-up comments and a follow-up question.

The Pagefile and other things

I think I know why the pagefile is starting at 12 Gb and expanding to up to 26 Gb, and it is all right with me. I am keeping an enormous number of tabs open in multiple windows with both Chrome and Firefox. I know that it is using a lot of RAM, and then using a lot of paging storage, and Windows 11 handles it fine as long as it has the disk storage to page to. That doesn't bother me, and is fine with me, as long as I am not about to run out of storage (secondary memory).

So what I want is to be sure that I have enough free space on my C: drive to accommodate the growth of my pagefile. That gets me to the question.

Utility to display disk usage

The comment was made that: There will be an app/utility which will find your biggest files.. Yes. What I specifically want is a utility that will show the total disk utilization of each directory on a drive, or each subdirectory in a directory. I can sort a listing of files by size, but File Explorer doesn't show the size of each of the directories in a directory. I can query the size of a directory manually from the Properties command, but that is time-consuming. Is there a utility on Windows 11 (not an older version of Windows) that displays the disk utilization of each directory? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:38, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

By the way, if I have any MP4 files or other three-dimensional monsters, I would like to be able to see and unload them. So a utility that searches for particular extensions such as .mp4 would also be useful. I know that video clips are three-dimensional and so are larger than two-dimensional things like .PDFs. I know that. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:38, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

The Unix utility 'du' will do this, and there are Windows versions of it (to be run on the command line). I use cygwin, which includes many such Unix programmes, but there's a standalone version produced by Microsoft available at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/du.-Gadfium (talk) 20:58, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Produced by Sysinternals really, along with other handy utilities such as Autoruns. Microsoft's role in this was to buy them.  Card Zero  (talk) 21:45, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

I use WinDirStat do to this. It shows the amount of storage each subdirectory uses, and what percentage this is of the parent directory. It also has a really cool treemap to represent a drive, with rectangles representing each file with the size depending on how much storage it uses, which are colour coded by file type. I'm not sure if it works for Windows 11, but it works fine for Windows 10. ―Panamitsu (talk) 23:28, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

WinDirStat is really useful, only problem is that it takes a while to analyse. Rmvandijk (talk) 13:23, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Do you mean that it doesn't give the answer immediately because it is doing the arithmetic? That is the same as the Properties command on a single directory at a time. I am willing to wait while the utility does the arithmetic on all of the subdirectories in a directory. Robert McClenon (talk) 13:48, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply, but yes. Windistat "scans" the directory/drive to get the file size for every file (and to build it's statistics based on that) Rmvandijk (talk) 07:07, 21 June 2024 (UTC)