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Thanks to JUJURAF who commented:
As to your other post #208634 about customizing charts (labels, etc.) You can easily change everything about a chart usually by right-clicking on the area to be changed (legend, axis, grids, etc.). Sometimes it’s not easy getting the appropriate menu to appear since there are seem to overlap. The chart wizard doesn’t give you every possible thing that you change, no wizards do that. Wizards by definition let you select the most common features to get you started then you customize it after that.

Thanks for encouraging me to explore Excel Graphs further despite initial frustration.

If I have been using a Wizard, I was unaware of it. I used this dialog box labelled Chart Options, obtained after right-clicking on the chart area. It offered a Gridlines Tab, but the available options are major only or major and minor (minor without major can be set, but sensibly doesn’t work) – only to this small extent was the interval between grid-lines under my control. I didn’t discover that more precise right-clicking would give a different set of options, but they still didn’t allow me full control of the vertical gridline spacing.

The answer to the gridline problem seems to be to use a scatter graph, not a line graph: I now have control over the x-axis, and have got the desired gridlines from spreadsheet to paper. Perhaps it was just a peculiar aberration when Excel printed only alternate gridlines, rather than all the major ones. Is there a way to draw lines from point to point on an Excel scatter graph?

Data-labels: The only available options I’ve found are Show Value (which shows the y-value) Show Label (hardly intuitive!) which shows the x-value, and None. Is it possible to get a third column of data, most often brief text, to be displayed as text labels beside the points?

Can one get at all this stuff via Visual Basic?

I would still like what I originally asked about- an affordable third-party or other program that allows the user a fair degree of control over graphs that use data residing in Excel spreadsheets?

Have you never, ever, made an unintentional change to a cell and not noticed it straight away?
Believe me, these things can happen, and they can cost you dear.

Thanks MaryJ – Tomsterdam certainly seems to know his stuff, and his instructions are easy to follow. The secret to moving OE message ‘folders’, i.e. .dbx files, appears to be to know that folders.dbx is an index to all the other folder-files and if it’s not there then OE says there aren’t any messages to be moved. In my case, I had deliberately renamed folders.dbx as foldersold.dbx to avoid a conflict with the one already in the active OE – dug my own grave, as it were.

Net-Medic is certainly a big step in the right direction: I’m sure the Health Report is going to prove very helpful – everyone should have Net-Medic in their first-aid box! Net-Medic would be worth having as a model user interface even if it did nothing!

Thank you for your advice. I’m about to try Net.Medic. I got a new line put in months ago, and never hear any ghost echoes etc, but maybe line quality further away could be the problem. I’m suspicious of rising ground water tables being a factor, since a dry spell has been particularly trouble-free. But as for the modem disconnecting, I don’t know: it could be servers along the line?

THanks for your comment: if your IE6 is an up-to-date one, as it should be on a new machine, then your experience proves my hypothesis is wrong.

But yes, I tried File/Import from OE6 store and from OE4 store as well as from an OE identity. Ah well. At least I can read the vital messages by searching for the sender-name in the appropriate folder using Wordpad.

I’ll try Notebook, and MSDos’ Edit.

Here’s a hypothesis: perhaps my new OE6 is so new that it has what Woody calls the draconian security measure that rejects all attachments, and to make sure any old attachments don’t slip past it refuses to import any messages received by older subversions of Outlook Express 6.

Thanks, Beryl.
But I still get rejected by File/Import with the following message, as before: “No messages can be found in this folder or another application is running that has the required files open. Please select another folder or try closing applications that may have files open.” Of course there were no open applications.
So I copied the .dbx folders to a new root directory and tried again: same result.

It occurs to me that I don’t actually need the contents as messages, I just need to refer to them, perhaps quoting parts, or just using the information in them. So I don’t absolutely need them back in OE. Do the .dbx files just consist of a mass of pointers, or do they actually contain the messages? What file format are they in?