skylark53

My boss wants me to send a colleague, Derek, some materials. So he needs to send me Derek's email address. He looked in his Contacts but Derek is not listed there. So he began an email to him by writing "Derek" in the To: line. Outlook obligingly filled in the rest. Boss then scooped this up with his mouse. He pasted it into an open email to me but instead of putting derek@hisemailprovider.com, Outlook translated this email address into the bloke's name. How can he get Derek's email address into a message to me? Thanks! We're going mad here... and Derek stil doesn't have his docs.

We need to reduce the size of our Outlook pst file and have begun experimenting with Archive. It looks like a promising solution except that archive files created by a particular person (in their own mailbox) appear to be visible only to that person. There are three of us in the office who all have full permission on each other's mailboxes, and who all need to be able to see each other's archives. Is there any way to set this up, for example on the server (running Mcrosoft Small Business Server and Exchange Server)? I can find no way of doing it within Outlook on our desktop PCs. Cheers.

Apparently it's some sort of security thing, added after composition by the sender's server, and intended to be undeletable. Anyone feel challenged by this? PM me if you have a solution you don't want to share here.

I recently received email from a local council, containing a page-long disclaimer notice at the bottom. It is policy in our office when forwarding messages to remove footers, signatures, disclaimers, taglines, images, copies of previous mail exchanges, etc, wherever possible, to save paper & carbon emissions when messages must be printed. When I forwarded this mail to others in my office, I was relieved to see that the text was not present and therefore did not need to be deleted. To my dismay, however, the forwarded copies contained the long, ugly disclaimer. So does the printed copy I made for our files. The "hidden text " box is ticked when I invoke Word 2003 to forward mail. But nothing appears; the disclaimer is invisible. There is also no attachment to the message. So my question is, how was this text piggybacked into the mail, and what can be done to remove it on forwarding or printing? Thanks for any suggestions. for info: we use Outlook 2003 on Windows XP Pro, SP3.

I would check the virtual memory allocation on this machine (either for Word or per task). Word with anything in it uses a phenomenal amount of memory (far larger than the size of the embedded object). I had a similar problem with a Word file that had a lot of images in it, whether or not the images had been compressed. Changing the virtual memory settings did fix it. Furthermore, once this had been done, and I had pasted in replacement copies of the images that were corrupt / would not display, the size of the Word file decreased significantly. And the file was fine, both on the screen and when printed out.

Just spent 2 hours recovering from an Outlook Express (OE) disaster. I think it’s all OK now but this wasn't how I'd planned to spend my Saturday afternoon. I want never, ever to go there again, and that means understanding what went wrong, so that I can avoid it in the future. If you read this and you have any ideas, please, please tell me. Thanks! For historical reasons I have several OE ‘message stores’. Let’s call my current store “store 2” and the old one “store 1”. So when I fired up OE today, it was using store 2. I’m accustomed to moving between the stores, via Tools\Options\Maintenance\Store folder. I instruct OE to start using store 1, and it reports it’s found some files there; do I want to use them? I say “yes”. This stops OE deleting the contents of store 1 and moving the contents of store 2 into it. As I say, I've done it many times, always without difficulty. So far so good. I re-opened OE and worked on the messages I needed to view. Then I reset the store to store 2, closed and re-opened OE. Some time later, on a whim, I navigated to store 1, wondering whether it could be merged into the current store. And immediately I could see that something was wrong: I spotted some folders I knew I’d created only recently, and long after I had last used this store (February). Worried, I checked a couple of the corresponding folders in OE and they were empty. I went straight to store 2 and saw to my dismay that although all the dbx files seemed to be there, many were of size 75kb - the size of an file containing no messages. Which dbx files were they? They were all the ones with names beginning 0-9 and A-F. Everything higher in the alphabet was fine. A quick check of file size in store 1 revealed that these files had been moved there. Everything I know about Outlook Express suggests this is impossible. I painstakingly checked each of my 100 or so OE folders, noting which ones were empty and copying the appropriate dbx files back from store 1 into store 2. When I fired up OE again, to my relief all my mail messages were present. So I seem to have recovered, but it absolutely was not fun and I don’t like it when inexplicable things happen.

Thanks, Jaclaz, I appreciate your suggestions. However, this is not a .doc file, it's .wbk. This is the problem. There are lots of text extractors (including Word's own "recover text from any file", which failed) which do often work on .doc etc, but not with .wbk. I tried the text extractor you recommended but it immediately says .wbk is not a recognised file type. Sky

Thanks, Allen, I appreciate your help - but this is not a .doc file.

Had been editing a doc with Word 2003 for about 3 hours when we had a power cut & computer went down. I went through the recovery procedure recommended at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099, but none of these steps succeeded. However, in the recycling bin I found a file with the right time, called ~WRA4072.wbk - evidently a ‘workbook’ file. This file cannot be opened using the procedure in Method 2: Search for Word backup files – the error is “Word experienced an error trying to open this file”. I was also unable to open it using the “Recover text from any file” option. I eventually managed to open the .wbk file using Wordpad. Along with a lot of unprintable characters it does contain some text - but it is the original text from the beginning of the edit. The changes you've made must somehow be stored in the 'gobbledegook'. So my question is, is there any way of recovering the edited text from this .wbk file? I really, really don’t want to have to input all this work again. Thanks! Sky

Had been editing a doc with Word 2003 for about 3 hours when we had a power cut & computer went down. I went through the recovery procedure recommended at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827099, but none of these steps succeeded. However, in the recycling bin I found a file with the right time, called ~WRA4072.wbk - evidently a ‘workbook’ file. This file cannot be opened using the procedure in Method 2: Search for Word backup files – the error is “Word experienced an error trying to open this file”. I was also unable to open it using the “Recover text from any file” option. I eventually managed to open the .wbk file using Wordpad. Along with a lot of unprintable characters it does contain some text - but it is the original text from the beginning of the edit. The changes you've made must somehow be stored in the 'gobbledegook'. So my question is, is there any way of recovering the edited text from this .wbk file? I really, really don’t want to have to input all this work again. Thanks! Sky

Gloom. But thanks anyway.

When you edit a Word document, Explorer places it at the bottom of the folder's file list - even though the list is sorted with the most recent file at the top. To see the new file you always have to click twice on Date Created. It there some parameter you can set so that the new file appears at the top by default? Thanks..

When attaching a file or image with Googlemail, Facebook, etc, does anyone know how to get the Explorer window to show the folder contents in Details format by default? (The default is List format, which is useless for searching sub-folders or finding the most recently edited file.) My default sort (which I've applied to all folders) is Details, but the Attachment software seems to have a mind of its own. Thanks.

Solved. It had nothing to do with Excel settings. It was something on the desktop setup. Under Properties\Appearance\Advanced, the colours of the item "ToolTip" had been changed to be white-on-white, hence the text was invisible. I changed it to white-on-purple, figuring I'd spot that. And I did - in an unexpected place. In my browser, Seamonkey, secure links (https://) took on the colours of ToolTips - whereas ordinary URLs remained the same. Well, well. Anyway, it fixed the Excel problem - so Excel is using ToolTips to report the X,Y values of graphical points. This may explain why it has proved impossible to switch off ToolTips, which I generally find extremely annoying - they are too widely used by MS, and too much would break if you were to turn them off. I am going to post this under Windows XP as well, and hope the moderators will allow that, since this factoid seems most useful there.

Solved. It had nothing to do with Excel settings. It was something on the desktop setup. Under Properties\Appearance\Advanced, the colours of the item "ToolTip" had been changed to be white-on-white, hence the text was invisible. I changed it to white-on-purple, figuring I'd spot that. And I did - in an unexpected place. In my browser, Seamonkey, secure links (https://) took on the colours of ToolTips - whereas ordinary URLs remained the same. Well, well. Anyway, it fixed the Excel problem - so Excel is using ToolTips to report the (X,Y) values of graphical points. As a side 'benefit' this may help to explain why it has proved impossible to switch off ToolTips, which I generally find extremely annoying - they are too widely used by MS, and too much would break if you were to turn them off. I am going to post this under Windows XP as well, and hope the moderators will allow that, since this factoid seems most useful there.

Several people use this computer, normally without problems. But I have just opened Excel after a month or so and suddenly the little boxes that appear when you float over things -- e.g. a data point on a graph -- are blank. I have checked tools\options\chart and "show values" is ticked, as ever. The boxes themselves appear as they always have - but they are empty / plain white. It's as if the colour table has been changed so that the (X,Y) values that must be in the box are written in white. But I can't find anyway of changing either the text colour or the box background colour. Please help! It's driving me absolutely mad. I need to be able to see data values when I hover over them. I should say that the rest of the graph looks absolutely normal - all the labels, lines etc are fine. Thanks...

Does anyone know how to stop files that are open in some application, but safely on the taskbar, from springing up into full-size windows when you open a second instance of that application? Examples are Word, Mozilla, Internet Explorer. I'm not looking for workarounds for particular applications, but a system-wide fix that keeps things on the taskbar until you call them up. Thanks! Sky

Luigi, No-one else has replied so I'm going to post the question again to see if anyone knows how to stop this globally, rarher than by finding a workaround for each application. No offence intended! S

Thanks again. Hmm.. Not sure how you add parameters like /n or -new. (This is Windows XP, btw, with Office 2003.) You seem to be saying, though, that there's no system thing I can set so that things that are on the taskbar stay there until called up? I'm not sure everyone in the office can be relied on to open an empty window first. What people tend to do is just click on a doc they want to open, and up it comes (along with any other doc that's open). Any other suggestions out there? This feels like a windows bug to me. S

Hi Luigi, Sorry but I cannot understand what you mean. The Word doc I want to keep on the taskbar (doc 1) is already open but the other document (doc 2) s not - it's when I open doc 2 that the embarrassing display of doc 1 happens. I dont see how opening a 3rd (empty) document helps. S

How do you stop files that are open in Word, but safely on the taskbar, from springing up into full-size windows when you open a second file in Word? It can be extremely embarrassing. Suppose you've been writing to the bank manager but you want to show a document to a client who's leaning over your shoulder. You open that file and hey presto, the other file springs up from the task bar into full view. (Ok, you can close the embarrassing file first but sometimes it's useful to keep it open e.g. if you're in the middle of an edit.) Solutions, anyone? It also happens with Mozilla - again, embarrasssing if you've been browsing a music website in yor lunch hour...

Thanks, Martin, thanks Team929. Sorry, I was was away on holiday. I don't want to sort the rows because they are (I assume) in arrival date order. (This is a download of the texts from my phone.) I accidentally deleted one of the msgs from my phone so that it wasn't downloaded when I did the dump. I know what it said, so I can type it in. But I DON'T know the time or date. So now I want to insert the missing text in what I think is the correct place, so that the time order is preserved. Any way to do this? Its sounds as if there isn't. If not can I easily get these data into an Excel spreadsheet (where you CAN insert rows)? Thanks again...

Does anyone know how to insert a new row AT A RANDOM POINT in an access database? I can only insert them at the end. But I want to insert them where they are relevant.

Hi Ponch, Here are the results of some tests I've just done. I don’t know whether this helps in your friend’s case, but it makes me feel safer to know what the possibilities and capabilities are. Best, Sky ________________________________________ I’m going to edit this little file (s***.doc) for test purposes. “Background save” is on, and I’ve got “auto-save” set to every 1 minute. We shall see what happens when I fail to save the file specifically, either as I go along or at the end. Now of course (although the file ~$s***.doc is present), no TMP files are appearing in the current folder because I haven’t specifically said “save”. Presumably the auto-recover file is somewhere, but it’s not here. Ok, now about 3-4 mins have gone by, so several saves have taken place – somewhere. I’m going to close without saving... => And of course, in the folder concerned, no new version was created. Nor, in a system-wide search, could I find any system or application files with the right date & time. So when you close the edit with “don’t save”, Word assumes you meant what you said and clears up all the temporary files. Now I’ll just type in this new line, wait a couple of minutes to allow at least one save, then I’ll cause Word to crash. Again, I have done no deliberate “saves” since opening this new edit. => And what happened was that no save files appeared anywhere, but the next time I opened a Word file (and it was a different one), I was prompted: did I want to recover the auto-saved version of the file I’d been editing when Word crashed? I said yes, and it then recovered the text into this foreign file. Then it offered options either to delete the saved version, or save it as a new file. (So the foreign file into which the text had been recovered was not affected.) Third test: what happens if, as I edit, I do specific saves every so often? I get a temporary (ordinary Word) file in this folder, ~WRL1234.tmp - note this doesn’t incorporate your most recent edits. (Note that these .tmp files are not created when auto-save is set to 1 minute, because Word realises it already has the text saved.) => And what happened was that 1) the ~WRL1234.tmp files remained (and each, even post-recovery, is an editable Word file), 2) when I next opened the file in Word, I was offered the recovery option, which I took, and everything then recovered. So, conclusions: 1) If you close the edit without saving, Word believes you know what you’re doing and deletes temporary files. This is true even if you have done specific saves (giving .tmp files). 2) If Word crashes, you will be fine whether or not you have done specific saves.

This doesn't sound like a Word problem to me, but something much more low-level. I see you aren't getting many responses on this board. Have you tried theeldergeek.com? They are very knowledgeable and also quick to repond. Good luck! That must be seriously frustrating.