FAQS! FACTS! FAX!  237 (08/11/00)

WH@T’S IT CALLED?

What is the name for the @ symbol? So far all of the reference books, web sites and even people I have tried have been unable to help.
Roger Warwick, Denton, Manchester

It goes by the rather unglamorous name of ‘Commercial At’, in the English-speaking world at least. In Afrikaans it’s known as an ‘aapstert’ or monkey’s tail, whilst the Czechs call it the Zavinac, which apparently means Rollmop. More on this fascinating little character can be found at: http://www.herodios.com/herron_tc/atsign.html

SAW POINT

Since having an argument with an electric saw a year ago (which it won…) I have lost sensitivity in several fingers and I make a lot of keyboard mistakes, the worst one is accidentally hitting Caps Lock and subsequently finding half a page of Capitals, sometime later. In Word is there a quick way of converting this error to lower case without the obvious hassle of re typing?

Tom Maxwell

Highlight the capitalised text and press Shift + F3; on the first press it changes everything from upper to lower case, press F3 again and it capitalises the first letter of every word, press it a third time and it capitalises the first letter of each sentence.

AUTO INCOMPLETE

Re your reply to John Winter (F!F!F! October 26th), concerning the removal of the list of visited sites in Internet Explorer. I have found "Cache and Cookie Washer" available from www.webroot.com a must have accessory, which does this job automatically. It also cleans up Cookies, temporary files etc. There is a "free" version available and if my memory serves me right, the full, registered version costs about £15 - cheap at the price!

John Taylor

To delete sites visited and shown in the address box in Internet Explorer do the following: click Start > Settings > Taskbar & Start Menu, select the Start Menu Programs tab, click the Clear button then OK and the drop down box will now be clear.

L. R. G. Aldhous

I'm surprised that you didn't mention your old favourite Paranoia in Tweak UI, which does the job very easily.
David Lowe

Thanks for those tips. Several readers berated us for not mentioning the AutoComplete switch in Internet Explorer (Tools > Internet Options, Content tab, AutoComplete). Whilst unchecking the options shown does indeed switch the feature off, unlike these methods and our Registry editing solution, it doesn’t tackle the privacy issue and remove the list of previously visited Internet sites hidden in the Registry, which was what John Winter was asking about.

LOST BUT MAYBE NOT FORGOTTEN…

Is it possible to retrieve text that I seem to have erased? Working in a Word document, I was spell checking and amending pages of script. I did this for 17 pages, and then suddenly I lost the whole lot! The screen told me I was on page one of my document, which was totally blank. I have no idea what I did wrong, or that it was possible to even do this. I am most distressed as this was months of work. Is it still anywhere on my computer where I can get at it please?

Margaret Bass

You might be lucky. Word has a feature called Auto Recovery, which automatically saves a copy of your work every 10 minutes, in case of a power failure or system crash. Use Open on the File menu to have a look in the following folder: Windows/Application Data/Microsoft/Word. Try opening any files created at or around the same time as you lost your work. To stop it happening again always make regular backups and enable the Auto Save feature in Word; go to Tools/Options, click the Save tab and check the 'Always create Backup Copy' option.

METRIC MUDDLE

I see the margins in my version of Word 2000 are referred to in inches, as is the ruler. I am sure you can change this to metric but cannot find an easy way of doing it. Any suggestions?

Steve Wakefield

Go to Options on the Tools menu, select the General tab and at the bottom you’ll see the ‘Measurement Units’ box.

MEMORY STEALER

A colleague's PC displays '8Mb shared memory' (64Mb in total) shortly after the power on self-test (POST) sequence. Please advise where the setting for this is located and the likely reasons for it.

Michael Nairne

Some motherboards with built-in video adaptors steal a chunk of memory from the PC’s RAM; it’s a sneaky way for manufacturers to be able to claim that a PC has a ‘8Mb’ of video memory. The allocation is usually best left alone but if you know what you are doing and want try another setting you’ll have to access the PC’s BIOS. Look in the Advanced Setup section, where you should see an item labelled ‘Shared Memory Size’. Changing the allocation probably won’t make any difference on text-based office type applications but it could cause problems on graphics-intensive software and games.

THE RIGHT CHEMISTRY

For a new study course I need to type chemical symbols in Word. So far I haven't worked out how to do the small numerals spaced fractionally below the chemical symbol letter. I am sure it's a simple procedure, but…
Liz Sutherland

In Word highlight the numbers, go to Font on the Format menu, select the Font tab and click next to Subscript, or use the keyboard shortcut (after highlighting the numbers) Ctrl + = (the Ctrl key follow by equals). 

FASTER FLOPPY LABLES

With reference to the question about printing out the contents of a floppy disk to a 3.5 label, (F!F!F! October 26th) there is a very good shareware program called flplabel from www.ziplabel.com.

Ron Mitchell

Try the following:  Go to DOS (Start, Run, type "command" – without the inverted commas -- and press Return). At the C:\> prompt, insert one of your floppies, type "A:" then hit the Return key. At the A:\> prompt, type "dir" then hit the Return key and you should get a list of the files on the screen. Type "dir > C:\filedump" then hit the Return key.  (There is a space either side of the '>') When the A:\> prompt re-appears, type "exit" to close the DOS window. Using Word or any suitable word processor, open the file 'filedump' on the C: drive, change the font to Courier or Courier New then chop and change to fit.
Alan Corb

1.  Show the "My Computer" Window for the 3 1/2 disk on the desktop. Size to show all floppy directories and file names.
2.  Press "Print Screen" on the keyboard.
3.  Open PaintShopPro or some other similar programme.
4.  Paste - this creates the window as a new image.
5.  Resize the image as necessary to achieve the floppy disk label size
requirements.
Tony Dyer

With reference to David Morgan's question in f!f!f! of 26 October on how to print a directory listing of a floppy disc to a label.  I find the easiest way is to open a DOS window.  You can then print the directory listing to a text file using the > symbol (greater than) i.e. dir a:>filelist.txt. The file filelist.txt will now contain the directory listing, which can  be imported into any word processor and formatted to any font size etc. to fit on labels.  If only the filename is required without the date and time stamp, use dir/b a:>filelist.txt
Penny Scharning

Some useful suggestions, thanks to everyone who responded.

NUMBERS UP, AGAIN…

Further to recent enquiry regarding removal of page numbers in Word (F!F!F! October 26th) I use the following quick method: Double click on the page number (on any page) this will bring up the footer box you can then simply delete the number and click close.  Hey Presto no page numbers!

Sue Knight

Thanks to Sue and everyone else who came up with alternative methods.