Q. I have several identical machines, they are running Office XP with the multi-language supplement. As soon as I open a new Word document and type a single character, the background of the entire line that the character is on goes to a black background for the full width of the page. If I change the background of the page to gray it is readable, but I really don’t want to do this. Does anyone have any idea as to what is causing this, and what can be done to fix it? A. There were several suggestions – the first of which is that there was a problem with the default template file (NORMAL.DOT). That it is happening on all of the machine makes it unlikely that it is a corrupted file or template. It sounds more likely to be a problem with a video driver. Check to make sure that you have the most recent driver fore the video card. Alternatively, before you go searching for a new driver, you might try ‘dumbing down’ the driver by going to the display properties and lowering the acceleration settings. Follow-up: An e-mail from the questioner was received two days after the general meeting – he used Belarc Advisor to identify the AGP video card as being by Matrox, and found a newer driver. That resolved the problem. Q. Does anyone have any recommendations for a greeting card software package? A. Create-a-Card was the only one mentioned. Many people in the audience mentioned that there are several web sites that create cards. Q. If I need to create a new SQL ODBC connection on a client machine when I get to the list of servers, I often see the same SQL Server several times. This is inconsistent as I get different server lists depending upon which client machine I use. Does anyone know where these come from as I am seeing duplicates or ‘ghosts’ of servers that no longer exist. A. The server lists are found in the system registry. They are found at the key
It shouldn’t hurt to delete entries that are obsolete, at worst you may have to ‘re-register’ them. However this does not explain why you would be seeing duplicate entries. Q. When I get an e-mail message, I get an attachment with an .EML file extension. I can’t read it. What is it? If I try to read it, it appears to consist only of ‘wingding’ characters. A. That is the “E-Mail” extension and is used by some mail ‘agent’ programs when a ‘rich-text’ message is sent. Rich-text is text that is formatted with fonts, color, background, images, etc. It appears that you have a combination of sender/receiver mail agent programs that won’t talk to each other. Ask the sender to resend the message in plain text. Q. My church would like to send a newsletter to its members. I’ve seen e-mails that have embedded graphics, pictures, etc. How do I do that? A. Many e-mail programs are capable of creating messages that have backgrounds, images, etc. However, once you create the e-mail, you probably have a different problem—sending a message to a large distribution list will probably trigger anti-SPAM filters at several locations, starting with your local ISP. Many ISPs have restrictions as to how many addresses may appear on a distribution list for an outbound e-mail. Additionally, many delivering ISPs have restrictions as to how many ‘undisclosed recipients’ at their site may appear on a distribution list. A major example is AOL —if you have too many addressees with AOL in the distribution list they will decide that you are SPAM and block delivery. It was suggested that you would be better off generating the newsletter as a set of web pages and then publish the address of the newsletter via other channels, such as the church bulletin. |
| Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a consultancy in Ridgefield, CT specializing in database applications. A DACS director, Bruce also leads the Access SIG. Members may send tech queries to Bruce at askdacs@dacs.org. |
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