For publication in Herald Sun Technologic December 22 1993

By Jason Romney

Word processing series part 2

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Pick the right document format for your word processing job or watch your fonts fly off and your e-mail mulch. Jason Romney reports.

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One of the most important things to understand about word processing is that when you create a document you can choose what kind of file format it will use. The fancy formatting that you add to a document with your word processor is contained in that program's proprietory document formatting.

Some word processing programs come with filters to enable documents created by other word processors to be imported for editing and to allow documents to be saved in other formats. That is one important difference between word processing programs and desk top publishing programs. The latter are designed to handle many kinds of file formats.

If printing the documents you create is all you do, then your word processor's native format is the only one you will use and there is no need to worry about saving in other formats.

However, more computer users now enjoy the benefits of electronic mail. If you create a document intended not for printout with fonts and other enhancements, but for transmission as electronic mail to CompuServe or Internet, it must be saved in straight ASCII format.

The save format required for ASCII text is commonly called ``text only". When using this option, you can not store information about eg text size or fonts. The advantage, however, is that when you log on to an e-mail service, you can upload your already completed mail, saving money on connection time.

Technologic has often referred to the benefits of electronic mail but soon there will be an important additional benefit: the linking of e-mail and pagers.

Many people now have pagers that they keep on their belt and which display messages on tiny screens. Those messages come from people who call up an ordinary telephone number and leave a message orally at the paging centre. The operator who receives the call types the message into a computer which transmits the message via radio waves to a pager's screen.

Meanwhile, a person with a pager may also have an electronic mailbox filling with e-mail. Presently the only way to check whether there is mail in the e-mail box is to log on to the e-mail service with a computer and do a manual check of the mailbox.

Link Telecommunications likely will soon offer a service through which you can receive notification of arriving e-mail via the pager on your belt. The user will simply re-route messages received in his or her own e-mail box to the Link e-mail box and an operator will input the name of the sender and message subject as a transmission to a belt-based pager.

This becomes even more useful when instead of using a traditional belt-based pager, the Link customer uses a tiny Hewlett Packard 95LX computer attached to a cigarette packet-sized page receiver. The HP 95LX can receive much longer messages and manipulate them in clever, automatic ways.

The HP 95 LX has been adapted so that its built-in software (a diary, calendar, todo list, phone book etc) will integrate with incoming e-mail messages. If a message is marked by the sender as being eg a diary entry, it will not only be simply received by the HP 95 LX but also inserted into the existing diary commitments to appear on the right day and time.

This kind of function will even allow business people to replace obsolete Lotus 123 spread sheet information with fresh data - completely automatically. The new data can be transmitted either by Link or, using a modem, by your own secretary's computer equipped with the special software provided by Link. A company with eg a sales force working in the field can update client information and instructions or quickly relay complex information that might be misunderstood if transmitted eg by mobile phone.

But all this information needs to be in ASCII text format, and that is why it is so important that would-be word processors understand file formats. Hopefully you are getting an idea of why background word processing issues are so important and must be fully explored before getting into the specifics of word processing programs themselves.

Link Telecommunications enquiries: 625 8500.

Jason Romney can be contacted on the Internet through jromneyATariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au or on CompuServe at 100033,3457.

Compucorner for December 22, 1993

If you are still using a version of Microsoft Word for Windows before 2.0c (to determine what version you have, select the ``About" option under the ``Help" menu) one disadvantage is that you can not edit in ``full screen" mode.

This feature, introduced in W4W 2.0c, clears the display of all screen components other than the the actual text of your document and is excellent for focusing the mind in those extended writing sections when you are hammering out text rather than formatting.

For those who update to W4W 6.0 (and I recommend you do because it offers a feast of valuable features) full screen mode is splendidly integrated into the overall program. However, many users will still be using an older version and if that happens to be 2.0c you will find useful a special macro for automating full screen mode available on CompuServe.

In the MSWORD forum's library 4, the 25,612 byte file screen.exe gives you the ability to edit in full screen mode without menus, toolbar, ruler, scroll or status bars, giving a full 25 lines with a ``normal" VGA setting.

It has built-in hot keys - {Alt}+S starts the macro (pressing the {Esc} key returns your document to normal editing mode).

If you are using Lotus's Ami Pro 3.0, there are also plenty of macros to enhance the program. In CompuServe's LOTUSWP forum's library 2, try MACS30.EXE, a 133,144 byte file which contains numerous macros.

The updated macros are: Keyword.smm, Acodes.smm, Chgfont.smm, Charmap.smm, Dataman.smm, Findfile.smm, Opendocs.smm, Hpclip.smm, Menulite.smm, Toaremov.smm, Oldkeys.smm, Smartfld.smm, Toa.smm, Toashort.smm, Typechar.smm, Toagen.smm, Autorun.smm, Toalong.smm, and Framglos.smm.

It's a self-extracting file. If you need installation instructions, refer to the explanatory note in a file called AP9458.TXT (in the same forum library).