OVER 2 YOU, 011 (04/01/01)

DENTAL NOTATION

As a dentist I am frequently required to write letters that include the notation of teeth, describing their position within the mouth to other colleagues. There are three methods, one is type the laborious - 'upper left first molar', another is by international code - '26', and the third is the UK convention ‘ /6', which requires keyboard skills but is by far the most easily understood.  Whilst underlining in Word works for upper teeth notations, is there a way to overline a number - needed when lower teeth are described? I have found nothing in the 'Symbols' library. It would also be useful to have a vertical ‘slash’, but using the letter ‘I’ can be confusing.

Malcolm Valentine, Hartfield, East Sussex

Malcolm Valentine should try what I have always done. UL6 for upper left first molar, LR6 for lower right etc. I have used this method for years in correspondence with consultants without any misunderstanding.

Dr Richard J Kelly,

As a dentist I have found a site - Dentagraphics.co.uk - to have all the fonts needed for all forms of notation, including Pamer notation. They also have excellent symbol fonts useful for practice leaflets etc. The fonts are available for both PC and Mac.

J. M. Musgrave,

As a fellow orthodontist, I understand and share some of Malcolm Valentine's difficulties with typing dental notations on letters to colleagues. He may find the following suggestions useful:

1. In MS Word, the vertical slash can be obtained by holding the shift key down before striking the forward slash key. Then, select and underline, and you get the perfect typed notation for extractions in the upper arch (e.g. 4 | 4 ). Because there is no overline facility (that I am aware of), this technique doesn't work quite as well for the lower quadrants.

2. There is a way of getting a perfect typed notation for both the arches, but you require MS Publisher. I'd be happy to let Malcolm Valentine have the details if he contacts me.

3. Finally, and simplest of all, he could start using the following
abbreviations now gaining use: UR, UL, LR and LL (upper right, upper left etc.).
M. Hajat,

It is easy to draw a line over text or numbers in Word.  Simply enable the drawing toolbar (view, toolbars) and draw the line to suit.  Vertical slash is available at the keyboard.  Shift and backslash will find it, thus |.

Mike Bond, Stafford

Use Word's Equation Editor to create a set of numbers each overlined.Back in Word, select each overlined number in turn and save as AutoText.Thus, save overlined '1' as '1' in AutoText. Then, to insert an overlined '1', key 1 then F3. There's also a vertical line in Equation Editor that can
similarly be saved as AutoText.
Roger Trigg,

It can be done by using the EQ field, which can be inserted into Word text by pressing Ctrl+F9. This brings up a pair of curly braces into which should be typed the following. EQ followed by a space, then \X\TO( ), Into the round brackets type the text or number to be overlined. Other modifiers can be added to the \X switch, \LE places a left vertical line, \RE places a right vertical line and \BO will place a line beneath the text or number within the round brackets.

Barry Cripps

In the symbol dialogue box, font dropdown list, scroll to symbol font, 3rd row, 9th box.  After inserting over-line place cursor against left side of over-line and type number.  Also lots of vertical slashes in same font on rows 4, 6 and 8. 

Tony Taylor, Cirencester Glos.

Use the auto-correction feature of MSWord. Go to 'Tools, Autocorrect' where the autocorrect tab allows you to create your own entries. Mr. Valentine might create his own code. For instance I added an entry to replace 'ul1m' with 'upper left first molar'.   Word is smart enough that it replaces 'ul1m' as described above, and 'Ul1m' as 'Upper left first molar'. There you have the best of both worlds, something that's easy to type, and easy to understand (if a little verbose).

Steve South,

ON THE ROAD

I do some investigations concerning road accidents. I cannot find a program that lets me draw roads, pavements with all the other paraphernalia. Someone suggested one of the garden planning discs but I haven’t found them very helpful.

Dave Lewis,

I think Visio will do the trick.  It has a full range of directional mapping symbols as well as the facility to construct your own. It is published by Visio Corporation of Seattle (www.visio.com) whose European company is Visio International of Dublin (00 3531 6612036).

Adrian L’Estrange,

What you need is a simple CAD (Computer aided design) program. There are a number available. I use EasyCad, largely because I am familiar with it and have used it for some years for architectural drawings as well as engineering drawings and also maps of gardens. However almost any cheap CAD program will do the job.  TurboCad is available free in its earlier versions. Garden design programs are not suitable; CAD programs allow you to put in exact dimensions. It is worth getting a program which will support .DXF  (Data Exchange Format) as this will enable your drawings to be read by more sophisticated programs such as AutoCAD. Michael Bennison,

We are currently working on software that will produce this kind of scenario. The user will select and position buildings, street furniture and people. It will be used as part of a consultative planning process to get young people involved in decision-making via schools etc. You will be able to take a virtual tour of the environment you create. It should be available in June of next year as a commercial product. Please feel free to contact me if this sounds useful.

Paul Madgin, NVisage VT Ltd,

DIARY DESIGN

Is there software available that will enable me design pages for my diary? My Quo Vadis planning diary has been declared obsolete, but I am still very attached to it and would like to print my own pages for 2001 and beyond. Nicholas Hall,

I had the same problem when QuoVadis stopped producing Plain 10, which has a day to a line, i.e. a month to one open page. I used that model for years as I didn't want to have to keep re-writing the address book, but in recent years it became increasingly difficult to obtain.

Previously I had written programs to print Year-at-a-glance in A3 and A4 formats, so I saw it as the ultimate challenge to do replacement pages for the diary. I printed my own refills for 1998 onwards and now have 2001 ready for use. I re-use the covers of previous years. They measure 160mm x 110mm and the pages are a few mms smaller. I stitch the pages together by needle and thread.

I wrote the programs in QuickBasic and then compiled them into .exe format, so they will run stand-alone on any PC. If you think that any of them would meet your needs I would be happy to send you a copy on a floppy. The only slight snag is that they require a printer, which can print DOS programs. Mine is an old Canon BJ200 series with an Epson LQ emulation. Most new colour printers don't have this capability.   

Ron Plater,

GOLF SOLUTIONS

Every year a group of 12 of us have a week playing play golf. We play in fours (3 groups of 4 each day) for 5 days. Ideally we would like to get it so that everybody plays with (within the group of) everybody else. No matter how we arrange it we cannot achieve this goal. Does anybody know a program or a formula (using Excel) to achieve our aim and make 12 old (ish) men very happy?

Robin Dent

One solution is as follows: Pair yourselves up. (Pairs A - F). Each pair then has 5 other pairs to play over 5 days.

Play as follows:

Day 1: A&B, C&D, E&F

Day 2: A&C, B&E, D&F

Day 3: A&D, B&F, C&E

Day 4: A&E, B&D, C&F

Day 5: A&F, B&C, D&E

This gives each person 5 games with 1 other and 1 game with each of the 10 others. I feel it must be possible to even this up a bit, but it does achieve your requirement.

R Archer, Bexleyheath

Numbering the players 1 to 12.

Day 1  (1,2,3,4) (5,6,7,8) (9,10,11,12)

Day 2  (1,5,9,4) (2,6,8,10) (3,7,11,12)

Day 3  (5,2,3,12) (1,6,8,11) (7,10,9,4)

Day 4  (6,12,4,8) (9,2,3,10) (1,7,5,11)

Day 5  (6,8,3,9) (1,12,10,5) (2,7,11,4)

This combination does have the disadvantage that 6 goes around with 8 every day. This result was derived manually; I am still working on the mathematical solution.

Mike Diplock,

The solution is simple, but has a downside. Pair every golfer with one other, and keep them together through all 5 rounds. As there will then be 5 other pairs to play, and 5 rounds in which to do it, everyone gets to play at least once with everyone else, though of course 5 times with one particular player. This draw could be entered in an Excel spreadsheet and the random draw of pairings made.

Kevin Hawthorn,

You need to think laterally. In Bridge the standard pairs competition revolves around the idea of each pair playing every other pair. If you get hold of a set of bridge movements then you could adapt them to the idea of each golf player representing a bridge pair and instead of playing against
the idea of playing with.

I used the same idea at a large dinner party where we wanted to move around between courses and allow each person to sit with and chat to everyone else during the course of the whole event.

There are different types of bridge movements for different types of competition. The everyone plays everyone style is referred to as a 'Howell' movement. Presumably after the inventor. Try an Internet search for 'bridge Howell movements' I found some that way. I'd guess that you want a
six-table Howell movement. In bridge that would be six tables times two pairs per table giving 24 people. You would want to treat individuals as pairs so I think that works for 12 golf players.
Richard Howells

JUST THE TICKET

I help to run a village music society and am looking for a software application that would enable me to print entrance tickets that automatically number each ticket from zero to 300.

John Bartlett,

Labels Unlimited by Softkey International is a label printing program which easily meets the needs of the situation. It allows printing of labels (or tickets) with many standard sizes of labels preset, or the layout may be user-defined. One of the options allows a field to be defined, which prints a serial number, which may be incremented from any starting number by any interval
Keith Walton,

I tried a number of programmes to do this including Word and MS Publisher before deciding upon Serif Page Plus.  My reason for choosing this program was to do with way it allows me to format text to produce headings rather than in its ability to produce individually numbered pages. I won't bore you by go into the details of the design of the raffle tickets but here is the knack to producing numbered pages.

In the first place a clear distinction must be made between Pages and Sheets. The size of each complete raffle ticket is 21cm x 6.93cm and as far as the programme is concerned is considered one page. The size of one raffle ticket is such that - allowing for print margins -four fit onto one A4 sheet. The numbers are produced by making use of the Page Number facility. In the case of Page Plus - but other programmes are very similar in many respects - the page number is inserted into a text frame which can be positioned anywhere on the page. It doesn't have to be in the Header or Footer. In most programs it is simply a question of selecting a Text Frame/Box clicking Insert then clicking on Insert Page Number or something similar. In the case of my raffle tickets, I put one text frame containing the page number on the ticket itself and one on its counterfoil. Both text frames will contain the same page number. The trick - or rather - irritation to all this comes in the printing. As far as the programme is concerned if one ticket/page is produced then that is just one page and even if you tell the programme to print that page 100 times each page will contain only the number 1 which is not much use. I therefore put 400 identical pages in my publication. This is not too much of an onerous task since the Insert Page facility can be set to insert pages with all the data of any other selected page, in this case Page 1. With the programme containing 400 pages the printer is set up to print four pages on one sheet of paper. Sheet one will contain pages 1,2,3 and 4, sheet two pages 5,6,7 and 8 and so on. This all sounds a bit of a fiddle but it works fine. I'm just looking for a small inexpensive tool to make perforations to separate the counter foil from the main ticket. The best I can do at the moment is to use a sewing machine. Anybody got a better idea?
John Tarry,

POWER SAVERS

Has anyone written an Excel spreadsheet to calculate which of the power companies will give the best deal for your area. What is required is a method of entering the number of units of gas and electricity used again the cost per unit of each supplier. This information is obtainable from the Ofgem.gov.uk web side. Standing order charges and direct debit discount also require taking into account

Peter Martin,

Rather than trying to do this is in Excel why not just go to www.buy.co.uk.  This excellent site gives calculators for gas, electricity, and dual fuel.
Chris Stokes,

CAN YOU HELP?

I want to file a large number of documents, which I would search using a keyword system. There seem to be plenty of encyclopaedia type programs, which have a search mechanism and I wondered if there was any reasonably inexpensive programme that might be suitable.

Geoffrey Marcoolyn,

I recently retired with a lump sum plus my existing savings and investments, and a pension.  I am trying to get a grasp on what my real financial position is, now and into the future. Does anyone know of a proprietary financial management package that can be used to project forward income and expenditure, but in particular to model investment income and growth performance? I have built my own model, with assumptions on stock market growth etc, and which allows me to move assets from shares to deposits etc, but I'd be happier with something less personal and more robust!

Alan Wood, Cheshire

Our charity runs three minibuses and we need a spreadsheet facility, which will record mileage (actually kilometres which can be changed to miles) fuel used (actually litres which can be changed to gallons) and costs. All of these need to be expressed on a monthly basis as m.p.g. and cost/mile, then a rolling figures for a year to date has to be equated. If I was clever enough to use formulas for spreadsheets it would be simple but I need a ready-made program.

Don Baxter