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It is odd indeed! When saved on a HD the name doesn’t change. It only happens on a flash drives and we have tried several different branded flash drives with the same outcome. The drives have no drivers as Win XP has flash drive support built-in. The same drives work fine in other computers and you can save Office files to these drives without any problems. It seems there is actually something peculiar about the settings in Office on this one particular computer. Nothing fancy is going on during the save (that I can detect) such as saving the document as a Web page. Even re-installing Office wasn’t sufficient as the setting somehow persisted. Perhaps a clean install of Windows is the only solution, but I hate to see such an unsatisfying end to a tricky problem.

Well, at least we know that this feature works with a regular email server now. The user unsuccessfully tried to make it work by turning off Word as his email editor and using plain text for the message. He didn’t mention if he had double checked the “remove personal information” check box. If that is checked it would almost certainly break the routing feature, I’d think.

If we have any more luck with this we’ll be sure to post back a solution. Meanwhile, if anyone has another suggestion or experience, I’d be happy to hear it.

Bradley Ross

Interesting. Thanks for delving into that mystery for me. True enough, that single empty paragraph seems to be the culprit. I used the Reveal Formatting Task Pane to try to see if there were any differences between that paragraph and the ones above or below it. It reports there are no differences.

Now my problem is that there are probably dozens of these paragraph marks in the document (before I cropped it to a single page). They may be in other documents where I have a similar problem. How do I recognize them to delete them when they crop up again? There must be some searchable attribute they have set which I can find and replace without manually deleting each paragraph to see if it solves the problem.

I wonder if there is a way to view more information about the paragraph than is visible even with Reveal Formatting. Where are good old WordPerfect reveal codes when you need them? Do you think there is a setting in the Format->Paragraph dialog that has something tweaked? I can’t imagine what that would be, but it is something that automatically updates when you open a document!

Any other ideas?

I was doing it with the Insert | Object dialog box and doing it from file. I tried for while and never made it work. A coworker was able to do it, but he had to edit the properties of the object and put in the absolute path of the movie file. It all seemed a little to cumbersome, so I just dropped it.

BTW, I was shocked to see your picture on the post! I have come to know and love the little jolly skull icon you were using before!

Bradley Ross

Correct you are. Thanks for solving a stumper for me!

Bradley Ross

I did a little more digging. I admit I was skeptical when I heard about the problem. I figured they probably just didn’t know how to do it. Well, apparently I don’t either.

The issue turns out to be with footers applied in View–>Header and Footer. This type of footer I don’t think I can move. And I couldn’t move it in either 2000 or 2002. I understand that you can move a footer that you apply on the slide master, but is there a way to move footers applied in this location?

Bradley Ross

There is a setting for IE (Tools, Internet Options, Advanced tab, Reuse Windows for launching shortcuts). I just learned (in this forum) the trick to shift-click URLs to get them to open in a new window when you are clicking in IE. However, this doesn’t seem to work from Outlook for me. The only way I can figure to achieve what you want it to make this setting in IE which will affect all programs.

About signature is Word, see this edition of Woody’s Office Watch:
http://www.woodyswatch.com/office/archtemplate.asp?v7-n37%5B/url%5D

Bradley Ross

Hi Tammy,

If you want to send a contact or any other Outlook item to someone else, you just send it as an attachment. To do this:

1. Open a new email message
2. Find the Insert menu and select Item from that menu.
3. Find the item (in this case a distribution list) you want to attach by selecting the folder in the top pane and the actual item in the lower pane.
4. Finish the email as normal.

Perhaps you already solved your problem, but if not, I hope this helps.

Bradley Ross

Are you talking about a feature for MSN/Windows Messenger? (I am referring to the Net Send memo.) Can you explain this feature? I have never seen or heard of it. I don’t see any mention of it in my copy of Messenger which I just updated today.

Great tip! It worked like a charm and was WAY easier than VB scripting the colored blocks to do the right thing!

All you need to do to reset the hyperlinks is close the document and open it back up again and you’re ready for another class. I like it!

Bradley Ross

I know this isn’t an answer to your question, but I just had somone ask me how to do this in the office and I thought it might be worth it to post here. If you want to add people to a distribution list by copy and paste from an Excel spreadsheet, it is possible, but not obvious. Also, these steps are for 2002, but I don’t think they are much different for 2000.

So for those of you that are willing to accept the manual process rather than the VBA script, here we go.

To add multiple people to a distribution list all at once:
1. Create a new Distribution list with File–>New–>Distribution List
2. Give a name to the list in the Name field, such as the name of the class.
3. Click the button Select Members…
4. In the dialog box that appears, click your mouse in the region marked “Add to Distribution List”.
5. You can enter email addresses here by hand, or you can copy and paste a column of email addresses from Excel. Each address will be on a new line.
6. Click OK.

The trick is knowing where to paste the names which is what baffled the person I was helping. That box doesn’t look like something that is normally editable by direct typing.

Bradley Ross

My experience matches this as well. We run 15 machines with WinXP and both Office 2000 and XP so that we can answer questions about and teach both versions. The only trick was that we weren’t able to have Outlook running in both versions.

Bradley Ross

You haven’t had many encouraging responses, so I thought I’d chime in. I work in the IT training department at a university. We have 15-20 student employees. These employees can be in the office we all share or in one of the classrooms somewhere across campus. It has been so useful on many occasions for an instructor to be able to ping someone back at the office to get a bit of information about paperwork or whatever. There is no phone available and email lacks the immediacy they are looking for. Our supervisor is in another office down the hall and can easily hit us with a question without trying to get the right person on the phone we all share.

IM is somewhere in between email and a phone call. Email can go for days awaiting a response. A phone call demands that the person drop what they are doing and turn their attention to you. I often use IM to ask questions where I need the answer quickly, but not now.

IM requires that everyone understand the etiquette. You should try to respond within a few minutes of receiving a message, but you should know you aren’t expected to reply immediately. It is less intrusive than a phone call!

We also use the functionality to send files back and forth. Again this can be convenient if someone isn’t in a place where they have access to all the normal network resources and finds they need something from there. This happens to us often when we are in meetings across campus or in instruction labs. IM has saved the day.

All the IM clients will let you do a quick File->Save if you want to keep the conversation. Otherwise it is fleeting, just like a phone conversation. And that is just fine with me. If you are worried about the security, you probably shouldn’t be using email either.

For what it’s worth, I think IM will be a very essential business app in the coming years. It fills a useful niche.

Bradley Ross

Sure!

1. Right click anywhere in the monthly calendar view on the white of the days on the calendar.
2. Choose “Other Settings…”
This should bring up the “Format Day/Week/Month View” dialog box.
3. Be sure the “Compress Weekend Days” doesn’t have a check mark.

Bradley Ross

It is easy, but it isn’t where you might expect. Open Internet Explorer and goto Tools–>Internet Options. You will find a Connections tab there. You should be able to set whether your computer will dial never, when there is no connection, or always. I just checked this in Win XP Pro with Outlook 2002 and it worked great. Hopefully that will work for you too!

Bradley Ross