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Random Access

Instant Replay: July 1998

Bruce Preston, Moderator

 

LAST MONTH DACS initiated a new service for the many DACS members who are unable to attend the Random Access sessions at the general meetings. Now you may now e-mail your technical questions to askdacs@aol.com. Questions will be presented to the membership and responded to via this column. Please submit your questions by 6 p.m. the evening before the general meeting. Try to provide the level of detail as in the questions that appear in the column. We regret that we will not be able to answer individual questions personally.

ASKDACS: A placement firm has asked me to send a resume in ASCII. How do I convert from Microsoft Word to ASCII?

A. ASCII is the technical name for "plain text." From MS Word, select FILE, then SAVE AS, and choose from one of these four options: 1) TEXT ONLY, which will remove formatting but leave in some special characters such as typographic quote characters (open and close quotes). Each paragraph create one very long line of output--the recipient will have to do the "word wrap" on the file; 2) TEXT ONLY WITH LINE BREAKS, which will "fold" the lines at the same place as they were folded in Word; 3) MS-DOS TEXT, which removes formatting and will convert typographic characters to plain characters (i.e. no distinction between open and close quote marks); and 4) MS-DOS TEXT WITH LINE BREAKS, which will also preserve line wrap. Note that all of these files have the extension .TXT; you may examine any of the resultant files with the small word-processing program called Notepad found in the Accessories folder.

Q. I would like to remove HTML tags from a file. Is there a simple way to do this?

A. Select the text in the Web page, copy it, and then paste it into a word processor. There are also some freeware/shareware utilities that will strip the HTML tags from a document.

Q. When I try to run MS Office 4.0's Word or Excel under Windows 3.1, I get the message "Application Error: Call to undefined dynalink." Other applications, such as PowerPoint work fine. Reinstalling Word did not fix it.

A. Dynalink is an older name for Dynamic Link Library, or DLL. A .DLL file is a portion of an application or the operating system that is shared by several programs. Since reinstalling Word did not fix it, you might try the following: 1) uninstall Word and Excel. This will modify the registry (or .INI files) and mark the DLLs as being removed. Then reinstall Word and Excel. Note that installation will not always replace a file if it has been damaged. If that doesn't work, then try reinstalling Windows. You might also look for the utility FDDLLS.EXE, which was published in PC-Magazine and thus should be on the Ziff-Davis Website. This utility will examine your system and identify any missing DLLs, as well as DLLs that exist but are not used by any programs. Commercial utilities, such as the Norton Utilities for Windows will also tune up a system and often can find missing files and/or identify problems. Note, however, that some may not be able to identify a damaged file, since they are only looking for a file with the correct name and date.

Q. Every once in a while when my machine is processing MPEG video, I get skipping in the audio. The machine is a P333 with 64 MB of memory and a 32X CD-ROM, so it is not likely that the machine is under-powered.

A. Check that you have the most recent video driver, since there have been cases in which it can interfere with MPEG. Then check to see if you have Microsoft DirectX, Release 5 or greater. You can get the DirectX drivers from the Microsoft Website, and the prior releases had problems.

Q. In my Start / Programs menu, the items are not in alphabetical order. This happened after I converted to Windows 98. How do I fix this? The items list in the correct order if I examine the Start menu using Windows Explorer.

A. This is a new "feature" in Windows 98 and the Internet Explorer 4 interface. You can rearrange them by dragging items when you are looking at the Start / Programs menu!

Q. I have an HP-550C that will not pull paper into the printing area. Once paper is loaded, it works fine.

A. This is a commonly reported problem, found in other models (660, 800 were mentioned by members in the audience.) Try cleaning the rubber rollers with alcohol—this was reported by some to be a quick fix. Also make sure that the paper thickness lever (paper vs. envelope) is fully in the paper position. If it isn't beyond the detent, it won't work. Lastly, call HP: One member got his printer repaired/replaced under warranty after multiple complaints about this problem.

Q. When I download a very large file, my display goes into power saver mode. Moving the mouse, touching keys, etc., does not reawaken the display—I have to cycle the machine's power on and off.

A. Check in your system setup (CMOS Setup) and examine the power saver page. Check to see that it will wake when a serial port event takes place. This should keep it from going to sleep. (This is in addition to the settings available via the Windows screen property page.) Also, check to make sure that you have the latest driver for your video card, and see if there are drivers specific to your video display—the screen property page has provisions for drivers for both the video card and the display itself. Lastly, a simple workaround that will temporarily disable power saver is to just click on the START button. This will raise the Start menu, and while the start menu is expanded, power saving is disabled.

Q. Sometimes I E-mail a large PowerPoint presentation from my work location to my personal E-mail account so I can work on it at home. If the presentation is large, my E-mail account gets "clogged" and I have to call my ISP (Erol's) to have them reset it.

A. There are several things that might be happening here. Erol's may limit the E-mail maximum message size (or accumulated messages) it will contain. See if you can get it expanded. If you have an allowance for a "personal home page" that you aren't using, you might be able to exchange it for a larger capacity mailbox. Another possibility is that your E-mail client on your home machine may have a "do not download messages greater than X" setting. Such a parameter exists in Eudora, for example. Some users reported that Outlook Express times-out while receiving large files—it seems that it doesn't reset the timer when it is downloading files. Another possibility is to use FTP from your office machine to put the PowerPoint file in your personal Web site area, and then use FTP from your home machine to download the file. Use FTP's PUT and GET commands. There are also utilities such as WSFTP (from www.ipswitch.com) and CuteFTP (from www.tucows.com) that let you drag and drop files between your machine and the FTP site.

Q. Is there a way that I can have a "print-to-screen" capability without having to go through the clipboard and then pasting into an application such as MS Word?

A. Several shareware/freeware utilities were mentioned. All of the below will work with Windows 95, 98 and NT. They were found by searching www.winfiles.com using the keyword PRINTKEY: Printkey 3.0, http:// www.geocities.com / SiliconValley / Bay/ 3053/ Free, updated June 28, 1998, rated five stars by ZDNet Software Library; Ultra PrintScreen 2.7, (http://www.printscreen.com/) $19.95, updated June 3, 1998; and Hardcopy 10.1, http://www.sw4you.de/, Free.


Bruce Preston is president of West Mountain Systems, a Ridgefield, CT-based consultancy specalizing in database applications. A DACS director and moderator of the Random Access sessions opening the general meetings, Bruce also leads the Access SIG. Contact Bruce at bpreston@mags.net.

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