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    Welcome to...                                                       
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                       W  I  N  D  O  W  A  T  C  H                     
                                                                        
                                                                        
             The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet            
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
   ͵
    May 1997                                              Vol. 3  No. 5 
   


  page 2
                            WHAT'S    INSIDE
   Vol.3  No.5                                                 May  1997
  

                                              Part  One
      
                                       Editor's Soapbox   Lois Laulicht
                   A Quick Guide to Wave and Midi Sound   Herb Chong
              IE ver 4 Beta: Are the Browser Wars Over?   Stefan Assmann
                                      The  Browser Wars   Jack Passarella
  Is the Internet Staggering Toward the Same Old Stuff?   Lois Laulicht


                                                   HTML
      
     Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: An HTML Tutorial-VII   Gregg Hommel
                                       FrontPage Report   Linda Rosenbaum


                                               Features
      
                      Outlook Part IV: The Task Manager   Stefan Assmann
                                              Headliner   John Campbell
          The Ultimate Faxing Experience: WinFaxPro v.8   Stefan Assmann


                                            First Words
      
       Introducing a Place for Microsoft Word Beginners   Jack Passarella
                  Microsoft Word: A Definition of Terms   Jack Passarella
                       The Five Steps to Microsoft Word   Michelle Lundquist
                           Introducing Word for Windows   Tony Lima
                                  Oldies for New  Users   Internet Humor


                                                Reviews
      
    Net Lessons: Web Based Projects for the School Room   Frank McGowan
                    ConfigSafe for NT: A Product Review   Linda Rosenbaum
          Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail   Lynn Alford


                                                Columns
      
                                        The ModemJunkie   Leonard Grossman
                                Windows Tips and Tricks   Stefan Assmann
                                           The LastWord   Ben M. Schorr
                                        The Art Gallery   Herb Chong



  page 3
  WindoWatch              The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
   Volume 3 No.5                                                May 1997
  


                          The Editor's Soapbox


The New Look of WindoWatch

If you've gotten this far, then you've already seen the new face of
WindoWatch. When we first started thinking about using the art form of
stained glass as the focal point for the front page, some decided that
the stained glass image had to be justified -- well at least explained.
And so I will!

It's beautiful !

We think it's more appealing than a picture of a computer or a printer,
and far more handsome than Bill Gates.

We could come up with tortuous and ingenuous phrases about a Windows
magazine and a lovely stained glass window but we'll spare you that.

Originally, I was going to talk about connections from the past and the
tradition of excellence from its most famous artist and proponent, Louis
Comfort Tiffany to modern day artists. Comparisons to the evolution from
CPM to Windows NT 4 have already been done and are getting old. So we'll
skip that, too and repeat, - It's beautiful!

It goes without saying that the same plain jane no nonsense approach to
content will continue to be our standard. There are two other teeny-tiny
changes, however. Jack Passarella, our very own Wordman, is a budding
cartoonist! Go look now! Also, the debut of a section we call First
Words for the many new people who have come onto the Internet. Everyone
is a beginner the first time they take the leap of faith and certainly,
most of us have needed a leg up from time to time. We hope those of you
new to WW will enjoy all of the magazine very soon. lbl


   The Front Cover

   Mike Savad is the creator and owner of the lovely stained glass
   window Butterflies. He has generously permitted us to use his
   work. You might want to pay him a visit, look at his other fine
   art, and say hello at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1141



   ww page 4
  Computer Sounds                                           All That Jazz
  


                  A Quick Guide to Wave and MIDI Sound
                      Copyright 1997 by Herb Chong


When you buy a sound card or read about the one you received with your
computer, have you wondered how that stuff really works? In this
article, I'll show you the basics of how sound cards work.

At the end of the article is a simplified block diagram of a fairly
sophisticated modern computer sound card. It shows only one channel.
There are two channels required for stereo sound. It also doesn't
directly correspond to any real sound card. There also is no mention of
a joystick port. However, it shows all the features you are likely to
see in a consumer sound card.


Waveform Data

A typical sound card accepts two main types of input from outside your
computer: analog signals from a variety of sources, and MIDI data from
MIDI devices. The analog signals are divided into two categories Those
that can be directly converted to digital form, and those that need to
be amplified before being converted to digital form. Despite being a
digital device, the sound signal from a CD-ROM drive is analog. When you
place an audio CD in your drive and play it, the digital data is read by
the laser and converted to analog inside the drive. This allows the use
of a headphone connected to the jack on the drive and also amplified
speakers into the headphone jack. There are CD-ROM drives that can
directly read the digital data on an audio CD, but they are not common
and also require something to convert the digital data before you can
hear it again.

There is a standard for regular audio frequency analog signals. It is
commonly known as line level audio signals. This standard allows you to
plug any CD player into any stereo and get reasonable sound and
distortion levels without any adjustments. The analog signals from both
the CD-ROM drive audio connector and the Line Input jack on your sound
card are supposed to be line level. A microphone is incapable of
producing the voltage required to be at line level. It requires some
amplification before it is at the right signal level. Consumer sound
cards have this amplifier built into them. It outputs a line level
signal inside the sound card.

Each of these line level signals goes into the analog to digital
converter (ADC) of the sound card. Later on, as we will see, there is
also a corresponding digital to analog converter (DAC) to get sound out
the other end. One of the most important specifications of a sound card
is the number of bits used in these converters. Early sound cards were
8-bit cards. Their ADC and DAC sections used 8-bit to represent each
sound sample. This means that each instant of recorded sound has 256
possible levels. This really isn't all that much. In fact, it is exactly
half of what is used in encoding audio CDs. They use 16-bit ADCs at
recording time and at least 16-bit DACs at playback time. This allows
65,536 (64K) distinct signal levels.

Audio engineers studied the problem of high fidelity digital audio
intensely in the early and mid-70's and concluded that 16 bits was the
smallest number they could get away with and produce audio reproduction
superior to the top end consumer audio equipment. More was too
expensive, and less was audibly less good. Sixteen is also one of the
magic numbers of computers and digital equipment, so it made the
equipment easier to manufacture.

Another very important specification of a ADC or a DAC is the sampling
rate. It is generally acknowledged that high fidelity sound reproduction
can't occur unless a frequency range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz can be played
back without audible distortion. Because digital data is discrete, that
is, it has a definite value at a given time, but an analog signal isn't,
it means that converting from analog to digital form means taking
samples of the analog signal at small, evenly spaced intervals.

There is a famous theorem from Information Theory that states that if
you want to reproduce a band-limited analog signal exactly, you need to
sample it at least twice the highest frequency you need to reproduce. In
the case of audio signals, this is 20 kHz. That means that to be able to
digitally play back an analog signal whose highest frequency component
is nor more than 20 kHz, you need to sample it, at least 40 kHz. CD
audio disks are sampled at 44.1 kHz. There are a variety of reasons for
such a strange number, but at least one is because it's a lot easier to
come close to theory than to achieve it. The higher frequency gives some
margin of error. Professionals use 48 kHz for more margin of safety.
Most consumer sound cards don't support that, but they frequently
support 22.050 kHz and 11.025 kHz sampling rates. Similarly, most sound
card also allow you to switch between 8-bit and 16-bit sampling.

If you are doing your own sampling of sounds, you can reduce the
sampling rate if you know that your signal is more limited in frequency.
For instance, a telephone line is usually limited to 3 kHz and so
recording a phone conversation using your computer can be done at 11 kHz
with no loss of quality. The result of sampling an analog signal is a
stream of digital data. It will be sampled at a certain number of bits
and at a certain sampling rate. This information is typically stored on
your Windows computer as waveform data in a WAV file. These files can be
quite large if you are recording for a long interval or at high sampling
rates and bit resolution.

MIDI

Waveform data makes no attempt to understand what type of signal you are
recording, whether it is musical or not, or for that matter, even if
there is sound or not. There is just a continuous stream of samples.
MIDI data is radically different. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument
Digital Interface. It was designed in the 60's and 70's as a way to
connect keyboard instruments to the first synthesizers and personal
computers. Since then, it has evolved into a very sophisticated way for
various types of digital musical control devices to sound generators
(synthesizers). The control devices are as varied as digital guitars,
drums, wind instruments, and string instruments. They transmit MIDI
messages describing what they are doing and the synthesizers interpret
those and other signals to generate sound. MIDI first started as a way
for keyboardists to control their sound generators. Thus the data that
is sent back and forth is strongly biased to keyboard instruments, in
particular, the piano. MIDI data deals exclusively with events. The
information sent from a keyboard to a synthesizer is a sequence of
events happening at specific times. The spacing of the events can be at
regular intervals or nearly random, depending on the instrument being
controlled. The most common two events you see in MIDI data are the Note
On event and the Note Off event. Note On corresponds to the instant you
strike the key of a piano. Note Off signals when you have released the
key. With Note On event is the exact pitch being played and how hard you
struck the key (velocity). Thus, to play middle C for 5 seconds, you
would send a Note On event for middle C with a certain velocity, and 5
seconds later, you send a Note Off event. There are two key things to
notice: first is that there is no hint as to what instrument you
actually played, and the second is that only two events were sent. If
you wanted to change from 5 seconds to 3 seconds, you just send the Note
Off event two seconds sooner. The number of events doesn't change.
Contrast this with waveform data. A WAV file's size depend on how much
time you record. A MIDI file's size depends on how many notes there are.

A commonly asked beginner question in MIDI discussion areas is how to
convert a music WAV file to a MIDI file to save space. The most common
and useful answer is that you can't. This is not strictly true. You can
hire someone to transcribe by ear to notes on paper or by finding the
sheet music, and then playing it into a program that records the MIDI
data. You'll get something that sounds close, but isn't exactly the same
for a whole lot of money and possibly a lot of aggravation.

MIDI is able to control several instruments at a time. Included with
each event is a channel number. MIDI allows up to 16 channels on a
single connection or port. This means that in theory, you can have 16
different instruments playing simultaneously. Most modern sound cards
allow all 16 channels to be playing at once. The limit you have depends
on the timbrality of your sound card. First of all, every sound card
made today is multitimbral. This means that they can play the sound of
more than one basic instrument at a time.

For instance, a piano and a guitar might be playing at once. At every
place where the sound of a one note can be heard uses up a "voice" of
timbrality. This does not depend on whether the note is on or off, only
that the sound for the note is playing or not. Thus, playing several
notes quickly on a piano can use up as many voices as there are notes,
even though a note is "off" when you begin to play the next note. To
MIDI, a Note Off event is like when your finger leaves the piano key.
There is still sound being made by the synthesizer for the dying note.
This is especially true if you use the sustain pedal on the piano a lot.
Depending on the age of your sound card and its settings, you may have
anywhere between 11 and 32 voices of timbrality.

What happens when you exceed the limits while playing a complex piece?
All sound cards will do "voice" stealing. They assume that any recently
played sound is more important than ones that are already playing and so
they choose one, cut it off, and use the freed up voice to play the new
note. Which playing voice gets cut off changes from vendor to vendor,
model to model, and sometimes even hardware revision of the card. It
also strongly depends on how your sound card produces sound from the
MIDI event.

There are two basic types of MIDI synthesizers inside sound cards. The
most common one is something known as an FM synthesizer. The well known
Yamaha OPL chip used in Sound Blasters is an FM synthesizer. These work
by taking several pure signal sources and modifying them using certain
mathematical combinations of the signals to produce an output signal.
This doesn't take up much room because the parameters for a given
instrument are few, especially on a sound card synthesizer. The sound
you get is MIDI that many of us know. All the instruments sound a lot
like each other, even if they are radically different, and in general
don't sound very realistic. Yes, they hint at the musical instrument
they are supposed to resemble, but not really. The advantage of an FM
synth is that they are relatively simple to construct and program by the
hardware designers.

Lately, wavetable synthesis has become popular. A wavetable synthesizer
takes as its basic input a set of carefully recorded digital samples of
the real instrument, usually several pitches from each octave. Using
fairly recently invented digital pitch shifting technology, it is
possible to change a given pitch slightly, say a quarter tone or two,
and still have it sound very much like the real instrument playing the
correct note. For professional synthesizers, they frequently sample at
different key velocities too. For a given instrument, far more data and
signal processing power is needed to play back a given note than in a FM
synthesizer. The benefit is that instrument fidelity is much higher,
especially if the people who record the samples take extra care. Until a
few years ago, the computing power and memory requirements for storing a
complete set of instruments was too expensive for a sound card.


General MIDI, Enhanced and Basic MIDI

During the mid-80's, manufacturers of MIDI devices began to realize some
of the first headaches of their success. MIDI files became a popular way
to exchange compositions between people working on a piece. However,
everyone's MIDI setup was different. Instrument 5 on channel 1 at Studio
A almost never was the same as at Studio B, and moreover, was usually
radically different. Also, multimedia computers were beginning to be
designed and soon there would be hundreds of thousands of people needing
to play MIDI files. They needed to standardize on what instruments were
at a given instrument number. This became known as General MIDI. When
you play instrument 40 on any General MIDI device, you know that it will
be a violin. The violins may sound different on different synthesizers,
but they will all be recognizable as a solo violin.

Back when General MIDI was designed, computers were a lot slower than
they are today, and sound cards both less capable and more expensive.
Cheaper sound cards did not have a lot of timbrality and so complex
music could not be played. Meanwhile, people with expensive external
General MIDI synthesizers would hear only a very limited version of the
piece. Microsoft compromised by defining two subsets of General MIDI
which they named Enhanced and Basic MIDI synthesizers. The difference
between them is in what channels they use and in how many simultaneous
channels can be playing at a time. Today, there is no reason to use
Basic MIDI. At the very least, on Windows 95, you should be using
Enhanced MIDI or General MIDI. Any recent 16-bit sound card will support
at least Enhanced MIDI.


Software Synthesizers

In the past few months, as more powerful computers are becoming
mainstream, software synthesizers are becoming common. They use the CPU
on your system itself to read MIDI data and generate wave data that is
sent to your sound card. Generally, you are looking at a Pentium 133 CPU
as the slowest practical machine to run this on. Also, only a few sound
cards come with this software, although there are some shareware
synthesizers available. The idea is that all the sample selection and
pitch shifting done by dedicated MIDI hardware is done by the system
CPU. It generates from the samples loaded from disk into a single wave
data stream that is sent directly to the digital sound portion of your
sound card. If you have a hardware wavetable synthesizer built into your
sound card, you effectively have two 16 channel MIDI synthesizers on
your system. The software's one capability is limited only by the speed
of your CPU and the amount of RAM you have. The drawback is, that with
today's software, you can't play digital sound effects at the same time.
Because exactly the same techniques are used in software as in hardware,
you have the same freedom of control as with an external synthesizer but
much more to choose from more easily. Most software synthesizers allow
you to take a WAV file and turn it into an instrument without anything
more than what comes with the sound card. For the foreseeable future,
only the most powerful systems will be able to take advantage of this
technology.


Odds and Ends

In my diagram, I show a digital mixer as the place where all the input
analog signals go. Some sound cards have a way to pass the analog
signals through to the outputs without going through the digital mixer.
Some sound cards also have either before or after the mixer, and
sometimes both, signal processors that can process the digital sound as
it is being played. Common effects are adding reverberation to the
signal. Certain 3D cards can carefully modify the phase of the left and
right signals to make them seem to be coming from farther to the right
or left than the actual speaker's locations. The best might even have
Dolby Surround sound decoding.

I show a power amplifier as part of the sound card. This is the mark of
a consumer sound card. It can drive headphones or speakers directly
without the need for a separate amplifier. Such a sound card is almost
never suitable for professional use because the amplifier distorts the
signal as it passes through. On many Sound Blaster 16 and 32 cards, you
can disable the amplifier using a jumper. Professional sound cards will
not have such an amplifier.

A modern consumer sound card is a sophisticated combination of digital
and analog hardware working together to get sound into and out of your
computer. Each of the building blocks works differently to capture or
create sound, but the goal is to tie everything together so that you
don't have to worry about how sound gets produced, only that it sounds
good.


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Simplified block diagram of a modern computer sound card (one channel.)
[Diagram is best viewed using a font that can display line draw
characters, such as MS LineDraw.]


            Ŀ
                               Computer                      
            
                 ^         Wave      MIDI           MIDI  
                          data      data  v         data  v
            Ŀ               Ŀ    Ŀ
    > MIDI                 Wavetable      FM     
    MIDI in  serial                 synth        Synth  
             port                     
                                           
                Ŀ      v          v         v
      >               Ŀ
     CD ROM in                                         
                Analog to>     Digital Mixer       
                 Digital                               
      > Converter     
       Line in                                     
                                   v                v
                   Ŀ    Ŀ
                    ^                                      
                              Analog to          Power    
                 Ŀ      Digital          Amplifier  
       >Mic         Converter                   
        Mic in   Preamp                                  
                          
                                   Line           Speaker 
                                    Out               Out 
                                        v                  v

------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Herb Chong is the Contributing Editor of WindoWatch. Among many other
  things. He is a programmer, research man. writer and artist for
  openers! A visit to his homepage http://acheron.cilla.org/~herbie
  provides some insight into the man and his accomplishments. A visit to
  the WindoWatch Art Gallery will provide a splendid visual treat in
  Waiting for Godot.



   ww page 5
  Internet Explorer 4.0
  

                       Are the Browser Wars Over?
                    Copyright 1997 by Stefan Assmann


In the small hours in the morning of Sunday, April 6, someone in the
newsgroup microsoft.public.inetexplorer.ie4 mentioned that Internet
Explorer 4.0 had finally arrived. The post came complete with the
necessary URL's. It didn't take me very long to click on the URL to
begin the download. Only the standard installation files were available
then and until Microsoft officially released the platform preview of IE
4.0 several days later.

Internet Explorer 4.0 (IE 4.0) comes in three different flavours:

 - Standard: this will provide you with the browser itself, the optional
   integration with your desktop, the necessary multimedia extensions
   (ActiveMovie 2.0 and a bunch of ActiveX controls) and Outlook
   Express. Contrary to previous reports, Outlook Express has absolutely
   nothing to do with Outlook from Office 97, it's only an enhanced
   version of the previous Internet Mail and Internet News offering.

 - Enhanced: this provides you with the browser, Outlook Express,
   multimedia enhancements, FrontPad (a stripped-down version of
   FrontPage 97) and NetShow (streaming audio and video over Internet/
   Intranet connections).

 - Full: all options from the enhanced download and NetMeeting 2.0.

There are separate versions for Windows 95 and NT 4.0. The NT 4.0
standard installation file was 10.6MB in size when I downloaded it, the
Windows 95 version clocked in at 12MB.

   Note: you can choose to download a small file before actually
   downloading IE 4.0 itself, called "Active Setup". With this
   program, it is possible to continue installing where you left
   off in case your Internet connection gets severed.

If you're a first-time user of IE, it's best to opt for the full
installation, as this comes with a wealth of handy programs. If you
already have downloaded some or all of the additional components as I
had, the standard installation will do.

Before I begin a detailed overview of the browser, I'll discuss the
other programs, so that you can decide for yourself which installation
to download:

  - FrontPad is a stripped-down version of FrontPage 97. The purpose of
    this program is to design HTML pages quickly, efficiently and
    without worry about HTML syntax. FrontPad is targeted for the casual
    home user, while the full FrontPage 97 is geared towards heavy-duty
    HTML production.

  - NetMeeting is a communications programs: you can chat via text,
    audio and/or video, there's a whiteboard, you can share applications
    with others (under NT 4.0 this requires SP 3 installed, which yet to
    be released) and you can collaborate of course.

  - NetShow is for streaming audio and video in real time, much like
    RealPlayer Plus.

Now let's turn to the browser itself!


Installation

Like most current Microsoft software, installation is simple to do.
After double clicking the self-extractable cab-file, a dialog box pops
up informing you that you're about to install Internet Explorer 4.0
Standard with the Shell Integration option. After having viewed the
license agreement, just click on I Agree, sit back, and enjoy the show!
Shortly thereafter, depending upon the speed of your computer, you are
asked to reboot your machine. Click OK, wait a few minutes and prepare
to be surprised!

   Note: It is imperative that you close all active programs before
   installing IE 4.0. This includes disabling the screen saver, emptying
   the tray as much as possible, and cleaning the taskbar. The IE 4.0
   installation does this for you, but I've seen some error messages on
   a Windows 95 OSR2 installation when you let IE 4.0 do the job. Also,
   when installing on this platform, you have a distinct possibility of
   encountering a message box saying that a few DLL files have been
   changed and that you should restart your computer to remedy this. On
   NT 4.0, there are no such problems.


First Look

After having rebooted your computer, your desktop will have been changed
and looks like the following[**]:


   [**The graphic images described in this article can be viewed in
   the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch.]


You'll notice an item on your desktop that's missing from mine because I
have deleted it! Note the yellow ball in the centre, more or less, of
your desktop. That's what MS calls an Active Component, namely an
ActiveX control with some HTML added to it. In the yellow ball are two
clickable URL's which will take you to the IE 4.0 area on MS's
webserver. At the time of writing, the pages were there, but without
content because MS hadn't yet officially released IE 4.0. Notice that
you can move the ball around, enlarge it or make it smaller, just like
any other window. On the right of your desktop, you'll see what MS
thinks of its latest tour de force.

You may want to get rid of these two items as quickly as possible. In
fact, that was my first reaction. In addition, you may wonder what has
happened to your background bitmap. To understand this a bit better,
let's look at the desktop properties. Just right-click anywhere on the
desktop and you'll get a standard menu with a new addition called Active
Desktop. Note the check mark next to it, meaning this function is on.
Just click the option and watch the screen change back to my old desktop
with the Pamela Anderson background bitmap! Moreover, the MS commercial
has gone too! Very nice!

One thing should be clear already: The new desktop is actually just a
layer on top of the original and you can opt to switch back and forth
between the two by clicking a button.

You may ask yourself what the difference between the two really is.
Well, it's fairly simple actually:

- Your normal desktop (Active Desktop deselected) behaves just as
  before. Nothing more, nothing less!

- Your Active Desktop enables you to put live content into it, like
  stock quotes that get updated every 15 minutes, breaking news, etc.
  Unfortunately, this requires powerful hardware (resources) as the
  system tends to become very slow indeed, even on my 128MB machine! My
  guess is that this is most likely due to the fact that there are still
  big chunks of slow debugging code in it.

   Editor's Note: Still another unsupported hypothesis is the belief
   that any code put out so quickly is just badly designed! When in
   beta, badly designed with bugs! lbl

Apart from the desktop, start menu and taskbar, something else has been
changed: Windows Explorer. There is now only one browser to be used for
both browsing local content and the Internet. As you can see from the
following screenshot[**], the look and feel has been changed to look
more like an Office 97 application.

Notice the new features: the toolbar, the background on the right, the
favourites menu item and the addition of The Internet as a browsable
commodity. When you click The Internet, DUN will pop up asking if you
want to go online. If you decide to do so, you can browse the Internet
in the right pane. The left pane will show you the structure of the site
you're currently browsing. Click an option in the file menu for full
screen view to browse like in the old days.

   [Editor's note: In the standard installation of the IE 4.0
   platform preview, there is also an updated version of Internet
   Explorer itself.]


The Browser Itself

Now that I've described the obvious new things, let's examine the
browser itself in a little bit more detail.


  Smart Favourites

  Each time you go online, you have the option to update your favourites.
  This can also be done automatically at night. The smart part is that
  when a site has been updated, IE will put a small red dot in the upper
  left corner of your favourite. If you position your mouse over the
  favourite, IE will tell you when the site was last updated and when
  you last visited it. This works only from the time that you visited
  the site AFTER updating your favourites for the first time. When you
  have many favourite places to go on the Internet, this can be a great
  time saver. The only caveat is that updating your favourites takes
  time too, especially the first time. According to Microsoft, this will
  be faster after the debug code has been removed.


  Subscriptions

  You have probably heard of programs like Webcrawler 2.0 or MS Cache
  Explorer. The function of these programs is to go onto the Internet
  and download your favourite web pages for offline viewing, as well as,
  to be able to view the cache contents.

  As useful as these programs are, with the arrival of IE 4.0, they have
  become obsolete in their current versions. Microsoft has included
  functionality for fetching all kinds of web content to your hard drive
  to view off-line, and include an off-line viewer to browse the
  contents of your cache folder.

  This functionality is called a subscription in IE 4.0. To implement
  it, Microsoft extended the properties of the Internet shortcuts. Let's
  take a look at an example to make it crystal clear. Suppose I want to
  be kept up to date about what is going on at the WindoWatch site
  (http://www.windowatch.com/). To implement a subscription for this
  site, I must implement the following steps:

  - Call up the properties of the WindoWatch Internet shortcut

  - Go to the subscriptions tab

  - Enter my options

  - Click on OK to implement them


  Next time I log on, automatically or not, and update my subscriptions,
  I'll be able to view the WindoWatch site off-line. Ready? Let's do it!

  To begin with, I call up the properties of the shortcut. You can do
  this via favourites, organize favourites, right click on the shortcut
  and select properties. This will produce the following dialog box[**]:

  Next I click on the subscription tab. At the bottom is a button called
  subscribe! Press the subscribe button.

  It is here that you can set your desired update interval. Since WW is
  a monthly publication and there is no option for this, I will press
  the custom button.

  That screen provides the necessary choices and I can now choose
  monthly. It must be noted that some of the options change in response
  to the update interval you choose. Very nicely done indeed!

  After I've set my desired interval, I then go to the delivery tab.
  You will see there are enough options to suit your taste and keep
  you busy. One word of advice: do not check the last option (follow
  hyperlinks) unless you're somewhere in the US where an Internet
  connection doesn't cost anything and you have plenty of storage space.
  So I'll select this page and one pages deep for now. As this site
  doesn't have sound and/or video yet, I won't bother with this at
  this time.

  Also notice that Microsoft has the unfortunate Internet users in mind,
  especially in Europe, who must pay telephony charges so high they
  would knock your socks off. I am referring to the option that allows
  you to limit your download to a specified amount of KB and the number
  of minutes IE may spend downloading from this site. This last option
  is not ready yet but will be for beta 2.

  If you press OK, you will have subscribed successfully to this site!

  Let's now let's assume you have subscribed to sites you no longer
  want. How do you delete a subscription? There is no option for this.
  Or is there? Simply go to the tiny representation of a homepage in
  your tray called subscriptions, and double-click it on.

  Now hover over a site to get it selected and press the delete key. IE
  will prompt for confirmation.


  Off-line Browsing

  If you go to the file menu of Explorer, you'll see a menu item called
  off-line browsing. Select it and go through your favourites. What a
  nice surprise! I can read what I've just downloaded!

  To enable on-line browsing again, just re-select off-line browsing to
  toggle it off.


  Channels

  Suppose you have a live connection to the Internet like more and more
  corporations are installing. Wouldn't it be great to be notified,
  right on your desktop, of the latest news, stock quotes, and other
  events? IE 4.0 has provided an answer to this one, - and it works too!
  At the time of this writing, you could only tune in to MSNBC, Cnet,
  and Sportszone, but I believe that others will follow suit. Microsoft
  made a deal with Pointcast, Marimba, Backweb and a few others to
  provide content for its channels in the near future. A separate
  channel will be reserved for IE 4.0 updates and news.


  Other Nifty Things

  Depending on the Explorer you're in, you have different options in the
  view/options menu. In normal Explorer mode, you have the same options
  as in the old version. You can however, also specify whether you want
  to double-click (behaviour before IE 4.0) or leave it in its default
  state (single click) This takes a bit of getting used to according to
  some people I know.

  Internet Explorer options are very much like those in IE 3.x, apart
  from the added Microsoft Wallet choices. Microsoft Wallet is a very
  handy utility to keep your address and credit card information. The
  idea is that, in the near future, when a commercial site asks you for
  this data, you will simply click a button to transfer it instead of
  filling it in for the umpteenth time. However, you must specifically
  download the full IE 4.0 install or download it afterwards, otherwise,
  these items will be greyed out.

  Microsoft simply loves everything beginning with auto! After having
  swamped Office 97 with all kinds of auto-tricks, now it's IE 4.0's
  turn. If you keep your history for a while, autocomplete will come in
  very handy for the sites you visit most often.


Bugs

Every program in beta has bugs, and even release work has bugs. So IE
4.0, in platform preview (i.e. beta 1), is no exception to this rule.

Let me begin by saying that on my set-up (see last issue for full
details), IE 4.0 is surprisingly stable and relatively fast. Yes, the
accompanying readme file is full of warnings and "that this doesn't
work", but luckily, all those things are either for Windows 95 or
components I don't use.

However, I have noticed the following idiosyncrasies:

  - When Active Desktop mode is set to on and you empty the recycle bin
    or implement a change in the start menu, the whole desktop
    refreshes, causing a crash at times. Moreover, with each refresh,
    your Startup folder is read again, which is, indeed, quite a
    nuisance. For this reason, I've disabled Active Desktop since the
    channel feature doesn't appeal to me right now (I'm a poor devil
    with a dial-up connection instead of a live feed).

  - IE 4.0 is not compatible with Norton's recycle bin (from NU version
    2.0) according to the documentation. However, the NT version seems
    to be working fine.

  - Some have reported crashes with the Matrox Millennium and the Active
    Desktop activated. Again, not so here!

  - Some ActiveX controls no longer work, notably Microsoft's own menu
    control. To see this in action, go to
    http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstation/ and see if you can navigate
    through the menu's on the left. If you can, please e-mail me.

The list goes on and on, of course. But lately, I have noticed that,
with the same software installed, NT 4.0 doesn't experience the problems
one has in Windows 95. This leads me to believe that Microsoft developed
the whole thing in NT 4.0. Perhaps it needs more testing using Windows
95 if the claims have any validity. From where I sit more testing on
both platforms would do no harm at all !

To conclude: should you download at least 10MB and install it? I'd be
inclined to shout, YES, even in its present form. It seems to me, the
advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The new interface will be
standard issue in all future Microsoft's Operating Systems, be it
Windows 9x or NT. You may as well get used to it now instead of having
to wait another year for Windows 98 or NT 5.0.


As always, should you have any questions, feel free to e-mail me at
Stefan.Assmann@club.innet.be.


*******************

  [Editorial Note: Before downloading and installing the IE 4.0 platform
  preview, it is imperative that you recognise this is a beta product
  and that Microsoft provides no direct support for this beta product.
  Microsoft has the following warning when you first enter the IE 4.0
  web site (http:/www.microsoft/ie/ie40/):

    This preview release is intended to give software developers and IT
    professionals a head start in building offerings that take advantage
    of the many new features that Internet Explorer 4.0 will deliver
    with its final release later this year. It is not intended to be run
    on people's primary work computers. Be sure that you read the
    warning at the bottom of this page before you decide whether to
    download this preview release.

      Warning: The Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 4.0 is a
      developers' release. That means it is intended to provide an
      advance look at the product for software developers and other
      computer industry professionals, but not to serve as people's
      primary work browser. Some features are incomplete and the product
      as a whole is still in the testing phase, so some existing Web
      sites will not display properly using this preview, and many
      characteristics of scripting, HTML coding, appearance, and
      operation are subject to change. This platform preview is
      incompatible with MSN 2.0.

      As with all preview and beta releases, Microsoft does not provide
      phone support for the Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 4.0.
      For online support options, visit the Internet Explorer Support
      Center (http://www.microsoft.com/iesupport/ie40/). Microsoft
      assumes no responsibility for any damages that may occur either
      directly or indirectly from use of this software product. Peer
      discussions are available via newsgroups: Microsoft has created
      public newsgroups
      <http://www.microsoft.com/iesupport/ie40/default-news.htm> for
      peer-to-peer support and discussion regarding the Platform Preview
      of Internet Explorer 4.0. No account name or password is required.

      In addition to acknowledging all the warnings and caveats
      described above, it is very important that a good backup be
      performed before installing the IE 4.0 platform preview.



   ww page 6
  The Browser Wars
  

     The Browser Wars, an original cartoon by Jack Passarella, can be
     viewed and downloaded in the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch,
     available at the WindoWatch home page http://www.windowatch.com/.


   ww page 7
  Whither Goeth This Multi-Headed Dragon
  


         Is the Internet Staggering Toward the Same Old Stuff?
                    Copyright 1997 by Lois Laulicht


I plead guilty to having odd and unrelated thoughts about the future of
the Internet. Not so long ago, this subject would provoke ho-hum
responses like "Who cares?", or "I'm really not interested in
computers!" or "You don't have many friends, do you?"

It's hard to understand why the digital elite, the computer nerds and
their pals, or the adventurous souls among us, should be getting so much
bad press! It can't just be knee jerk reactions to the occasional flame
thrower, the graphic depiction of the single finger at attention, or
even the technological groupiness that creates such a din!

Some have been critical of the flash fires caused by the online rumor
mill where a single unverified assertion may spread as fact from chat
room to newsgroup and often beyond. These critics fear that democracy
could be threatened by such herd mentality. Their assumption is that
extreme social elements, hot heads favoring political boilermakers
over hot cocoa will dominate social thought, and more importantly,
social action. This outrage of a put down comes from members of the
working press and carries with it the assumption that emotional buttons
were invented and first pushed on the Internet.


What's Hot and What's Not!

The medium of choice before and during the second world war was radio.
It was an exciting source of drama, comedy, news, public affairs, music,
politics, opinion and creativity. It offered the Goldbergs, Jack Benny,
Fred Allen, fireside chats, Times Square celebrations on New Years eve,
Edward R. Morrow, The Lux Theater, the birthplace of the soaps, Saturday
afternoon performances of the Metropolitan Opera, the infamous
anti-Semite Father Coughlin, the Hit Parade, college football with Bill
Stern, and my favorite, Jack Armstrong the All-American boy.

However, it quickly became a wasteland as television began its climb to
prominence. Our collective love affair with radio was short lived, as
the early television days became exciting times of drama, comedy, news,
public affairs, music, politics, opinion and creativity.

You can imagine my surprise when in the midst of writing this essay, I
accidentally fell over and then watched a ninety minute documentary
celebrating fifty years of television. What is damning about the piece
is that nowhere in the film was there any mention of news, public
affairs or technological coverage. Other glaring omissions were
Star-Trek and MASH! During these fifty years the conventional faith in
polls was refuted by the Truman upset, McCarthy's witch hunt demeaned
our democracy with his guilt by association tactics, man walked on the
moon, Nixon resigned in disgrace, there was major confrontation on the
streets of Chicago during a national political convention, Desert Storm
was fought and won in every American living room, the Berlin Wall and
Cold War collapsed, and, last but not least, there was Mr. Rogers and
Sesame Street! None of the events on my missing in action list, save
MASH, StarTrek, and Sesame Street, made the networks a dime but all
represent part of the meaning of communications and information. This
testimonial film was nothing more than a glorification of the commercial
successes of the past with a single exception. Tonto, at last, found his
way into a solo act when he publicly bitched at picking up the Lone
Ranger's slop for many long years of playing second fiddle with saddle
sores!

Another turn of the wheel, and TV was replaced by cable. It was to be
better TV with more choices and richer programming options!
Unfortunately, the sheer number of channels offered by cable made no
difference in the quality of TV programming but rather another
opportunity to do the same thing, many times over again.


From Radio to the Superhighway

Seven decades later, the Internet came into public consciousness. It is
truly an exciting place of drama, comedy, news, public affairs, music,
politics, opinion and creativity.

It's neither rocket science nor elitism to recognize the beginning of a
repetitive cycle as we see the Internet turf being overrun by all sorts
of folks who want to reshape it into another mass marketplace! They have
their own notions and agendas of what they think the Internet can and
should become and what will also make scads of money! However, these are
the very same folks who have taken the fine news model of CNN, crammed
it with advertising for about 30% of on-the-air time, populated their
anchor desks with readers not news people, and blitzed their viewers
with large doses of cure-alls for hemorrhoids and gas. Their own polls
tell them that viewers have been in the process of abandoning television
for the Internet and for very good reason. It's not a huge leap to
suggest that much of cable programming is boring and verges on the trite
and common, as was true of legacy TV before it, and radio even before
that! A frightening thought! Are we in the predictable process of
watching the Internet become trashed, too? Is common and boring the best
that can be offered? It is really quite astounding, the intense
replication of hackneyed information on hundreds of channels across the
land! Boredom is finally setting in and this affront to the
sensibilities is not maintaining its viewership! There is hope it
seems.

That many of us resent the filtered news and opinion presented by cable
and TV as fact, is reflected in the turnoff of many on issues of
national importance. More to the point is the unlimited access to news
and opinion that Internetters have and prefer. When compared to
television news the Internet makes the alternatives look tepid and
factually unfocused! TV, cable and the hard copy press have missed the
point entirely by overdosing the public with sensationalism, partisan
political reporting, and mindless preoccupation with sex and soft porn.

In contrast, on the Internet each of us can be our own publishing house,
acting alone or in collaboration with others and addressing a
potentially huge international and domestic audience. Further, the
growing stream of people coming onto the Net and becoming aware of the
diversity of the newer information options must be worrisome to the
press. No surprise, it seems to me, they have much to worry about! Be it
the pithy and terse one-liner to a newsgroup or the more conventional
magazine articles that we do here, the fact remains that this uncensored
opinion, although at times ungrammatical and profane, is more often
honest and interesting. The working press can no longer claim privileged
access to information sources, smart opinion, or exclusivity! We too
have access to the Arkansas Democrat, The Jerusalem Post along with the
daily fare of The New York Times and more!

The publishers and program producers control media output with an iron
fist and, as in most things, the decision makers are following the
money. Whether nickels and dimes or megabucks, their work is pitched to
the advertisers paying the freight and audiences with consumer cash for
all sorts of services and products. And guess what, that market -- at
least part of it -- is heading for the Internet. Notwithstanding, or
perhaps because of the independent thinkers, the naughty language, the
open pornography, the sometimes extreme political views, the broad range
of values and belief systems, it's the Internet that's exciting and
interesting and stimulating!

This is not a dumb-dumb audience so we will ask what the difference is
twixt this media and the others. For openers, the only big investor to
date has been our favorite Uncle and he has a notorious reputation for
over-indulgence, particularly in the area of seed money for new
technology. Notwithstanding its original purposes, this media would not
exist if the federal government had not spent the money to make it
happen! The unplanned result is that individuals from around the world
have come together to exchange information, using exciting examples of
drama, comedy, news, public affairs, music, politics, opinion and
creativity. Bottom line? The Internet is us! A few of us own big pieces
while many own small plots. No license from the FCC is required. Any
man, woman or child with the price of admission can set up shop. In this
milieu it doesn't matter a bit if you have a lease on 5 MG or 25 Meg.
What does matter is that you're in the enviable position of being both a
part owner in the enterprise and have the power to unilaterally select
information sources from anywhere in the world. You can refuse to allow
your activities and/or information to be canned and pickled to please an
advertiser, a group of investors, or a special interest group. That's
very powerful stuff!

Unfortunately this openness could change irrevocably and in a very short
time. Can you imagine content providers embedding into their pages audio
clips touting Preparation H, PepcidAD or worse? What if content
providers had to be licensed by the FCC and were charged unaffordable
rates? The feared email server breakdowns have already occurred. What if
selected ISPs were regularly targeted with spams in the name of
controlling who gets access and for how much money? For the short term
at least, whoever owns the land lines has an edge and it's about time we
call it what it is. Whoever controls T1 and fiber optics installations
has an edge and this could include starving your local ISP and
controlling the price they charge you! Indeed, there have been rumblings
that the independent ISPs are being denied more telephone lines in favor
of the baby Bell affiliates.

I can hear you. This woman is loony tunes! Perhaps, but then again,
perhaps not!

We used to be a nation of political diversity. Now some Democrats worry
if the GOP is going to survive the onslaught from the right. A democracy
requires more than a single party. We used to be a nation of many
independent newspapers. Now the press is controlled by a few, largely
conservative chains. In most markets the morning and afternoon dailies,
if the community will financially support more than one, are owned by
the same company. Talk radio of the eighties and early nineties became a
bastion of the extreme right with no attempt at political balance. We
also used to be a nation of people who engaged in the political process
and voted in larger numbers. Is what we have become any reflection of
the quality of information received these past fifty years from the mass
media? The gate keepers have become a homogenized bunch, rarely
questioning or taking intellectual risks. Their strong suit is sleaze,
half-truths and celebrity!

In spite of all of the above there are a few with talent and courage who
regularly do their best to be honest and objective. Unfortunately,
Bernard Shaw, Christiane Amanpour, Al Hunt, Russell Baker and Mark
Russell are the few pearls among swine whose voices are strong but
numbers have grown too weak.

The uniqueness of the present Internet is no guarantee of what the
Internet might become? This has been called the Information Age.
Indeed, we have many more information tools but to no avail. The
diversity of the media options is meaningless if each is delivering
the same message -- except for information coming from the Internet.

It seems to me that we have a unique opportunity to take and embrace the
very thing which our form of government guarantees. An open risk taking
media provides the ammunition to protect a democracy. This is not Fourth
of July flag waving but simply a fear that if the wheel turns again in
the old predictable way, we, and the Internet itself, are a going to
lose too much!


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Lois Laulicht is the Editor Publisher of WindoWatch.



   ww page 8
  Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks!                 An HTML Tutorial Part VII
  

                           I Was Framed! III
                     Copyright 1997 by Gregg Hommel


Developing the Pages for our Frames

When we finished last month, we had a page ready to display as the
default for our second frame even though it wasn't much. If you recall,
the source code we had written was:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>WW Main1 Page</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif">
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>
  Welcome to the WindoWatch HTML Tutorial Web Site!
  </BODY>
  </HTML>

This time, we are going to expand this page, making it more interesting,
we hope, and will create a few more pages for the second frame that the
user can switch to.

Let's start with the main page. It's hardly more than an introduction to
our site, but a bit more than the gem above! So, let's go with this for
now.

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>WW Main1 Page</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif">
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>

  Welcome to the WindoWatch HTML Tutorial Web Site!

  <P>These pages are intended to assist us when working with our
  discussion of frames on a Web site, and how to use them to their
  best advantage. The content you will find on these pages is perhaps
  of little enough use, because it is not the content that is important
  in this context, but the appearance of the pages and the code used to
  accomplish this.

  <P>This page was developed as part of the seventh column in the series,
  wherein we are discussing, among other things, the use of tables on a
  framed site to create a "navigation bar" effect, allowing the user to
  change content easily and quickly.

  <P><HR SIZE=4>
  </BODY>
  </HTML>

As you can see, there is very little changed in the new page, other than
some text, and one new item <HR SIZE=4> which is actually quite simple.
It is the code that adds a horizontal rule, four pixels in height, to
the bottom of the page. The only reason for this is personal. I like to
indicate to a visitor that there is no more content on the page, and use
this <HR SIZE=4> to do so.

To create an additional page for our tutorial site, I cheated, as you
will see from the code for it...

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>WW Main2 Page</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif">
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>

  This is the second page of our test framed site. Again, we remind you
  that the content of these pages is not the important issue. Rather, it
  is the method of navigating, and the display of what ever that content
  is that is important here. As a result, all you will see a portion of
  the content of one of the pages on my personal site, all about me .

  <P>By profession, I have been an accountant for the past twenty-five
  years (yes, I am ancient, at least, according to my daughters, I am,
  and on a Monday morning, I agree with them <GG>), for the past ten
  years, in the construction industry.

  <P>When I am away from those offices, however, I am a part-time computer
  consultant, a beta tester for various companies, and a shareware author
  in the Windows Aspect language for Procomm Plus for Windows, from
  Datastorm Technologies Inc.. I have written two script applications for
  that programme, GHOST BBS and PCB Freedom.

  <P>To keep me out of mischief, and to make sure that I have no free
  time left to get into any, I also write a monthly column for WindoWatch
  Magazine, Lois Laulicht's useful and superb electronic publication
  covering Windows in all forms from a real world perspective. If you
  haven't already been there, be sure to visit the WindoWatch Home Page
  to download a copy of the latest or past issues, view some of the
  articles from the magazine on-line, or explore some of their links
  to other services.

  <P><HR SIZE=4>
  </BODY>
  </HTML>

This kind of cheating, or at least, a part of what I did, is something
you should get used to, if you are going to develop a framed site. What
I did was take my wwmain1.html file, delete the content of it, and save
it as wwmain2.html. I then added the new content. What this does is help
maintain consistency on the site, so that the basic design elements of
the page remain the unified from one to the other. Think about this as
using a style sheet, if it helps, because in effect, that is what you
are doing.

We now have two whole pages of content for our tutorial site. But how do
we get from one to the other, or back again? I suppose one could create
a link from the first page to the second with another from the second
back to the first. That would work but could quickly become complicated
trying to track items with various links as you develop more pages for
the site. In my view, it would be partially defeating the purpose of
using a framed site!

My personal preference to solve this problem is to use a table as a
navigation bar of sorts using one of the frames on the site that will
remain consistently displayed. In our case, this would be the title
frame at the top remaining the same no matter what is displayed below
it.

If you recall, the code we have to date developed for wwtitle.html is:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>Title</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif" TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>
  <CENTER><H1><FONT COLOR="#FF0080">The WindoWatch HTML Tutorial
    Practice Page</FONT></H1>

  <TABLE WIDTH=70% CELLPADDING=4 BORDER=4 BGCOLOR="#C0C0C0">
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle>
  <MARQUEE ALIGN=MIDDLE BEHAVIOR=SCROLL DIRECTION=LEFT LOOP=INFINITE
    SCROLLDELAY=1>
  Welcome to our practice page. This is an example of a framed page,
    from columns 5 and 6.</MARQUEE>
  </TD></TABLE><P>

  <TABLE WIDTH=80% CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=2 BORDER=4>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle>Starting Page</TD>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle>Second Page</TD>
  </TABLE></CENTER>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

We now have everything we need, except the actual links to each page of
content. We already know how to do links, but of course, you didn't
expect these tutorials to be that simple, did you? The reason they are
not routine is that we do not want to just load another page into our
browser. Our objective is to load another page, and have it appear in a
specified spot on the page, rather than replacing the current display in
toto. Fortunately, the HTML specs allow for this through the use of a
TARGET parameter for the HREF tag. Other than this item, specifying a
URL link for a frame is no different than specifying one at any other
time.

This results in the following code for our title page.

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>Title</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif" TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>
  <CENTER><H1><FONT COLOR="#FF0080">The WindoWatch HTML Tutorial
    Practice Page</FONT></H1>

  <TABLE WIDTH=70% CELLPADDING=4 BORDER=4 BGCOLOR="#C0C0C0">
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle>
  <MARQUEE ALIGN=MIDDLE BEHAVIOR=SCROLL DIRECTION=LEFT LOOP=INFINITE
    SCROLLDELAY=1>
  Welcome to our practice page. This is an example of a framed page,
    from columns 5 and 6.</MARQUEE>
  </TD></TABLE><P>

  <TABLE WIDTH=80% CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=2 BORDER=4>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain1.html" TARGET="FBody">
    Starting Page</A></TD>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain2.html" TARGET="FBody">
    Second Page</A></TD>
  </TABLE></CENTER>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

There is nothing really too complicated in this code, or at least,
nothing beyond the ken of any of you reading this. All of these elements
have been discussed within another context. The only change of approach
to note is that we put our links or anchors for the various pages within
the cells of a table. Which this is a new placement, it should not be
confusing because a link in the cell of a table is the same as a link
anywhere else.

This usage is an important one to remember, as many Web site developers
frequently use tables to ensure the correct placement of text or other
elements of their pages. As a result, it is something we will be
expanding upon shortly as we further develop our navigation bar for this
tutorial site.

Our tutorial site now consists of four files in a framed arrangement,
which, when displayed in a browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer
3.0, should look something like the following and with that, we have
completed what we set out to do back in the very first column, which
namely is to design and code a framed site using the HTML language,
completing this tutorial series.


*****************

What are you doing, looking past the end of the column?

Obviously, any of you who know me, or those were was brave enough to
look past the last paragraph above, are right. We are not finished.
Far from it!

What we have done so far in this column is cover the basics, merely the
very basics. We haven't touched on proper page design, especially when
framed sites are used, or a multitude of other tags and code variations
provided for in the HTML language specification. We haven't looked at
scripting, multimedia, making your site more interactive, or many other
possibilities. As far as I am concerned, this column will continue as
long as you keep reading it, and Lois keeps publishing it, and I have
something useful to say. Okay, so it doesn't have to be particularly
useful... make that as long as I have something to say!

But fair warning! The easy stuff is pretty well done. From here on, we
start getting into some things that require thinking, and are not as
simple or easy to understand. And quite likely, I'll stop pointing out
every little change in the code I post, allowing you to determine what
some of the changes I've made for yourself. So, that said, let's
continue from here...

Obviously, the site we have built is far from complete, nor is it even
that good looking. One thing about it that bothers me greatly is the
positioning of the navigation bar. With it in the TITLE space of our
site, the page looks top-heavy. There are several more graphical
elements at the top, and nothing more than text and links below that. To
me, this is top-heavy, as well as, cumbersome in appearance.

The solution to this is rather simple in concept, and execution. We must
move the table, which is our navigation bar, down from the title area,
to the bottom of the page. Since we don't want to continually repeat the
navigation bar for each page we load into the bottom frame, we will add
one more frame to the page.

In our original format, we set aside 27% of the vertical height of the
display area for the title. If we move the navigation bar from that
area, we can reduce that by approximately one third as there are three
graphical elements in that space, each roughly the same height. However,
since we still need that space for our navigation bar, we need to add a
third "row" frame to the bottom of the page, using that same 9% of the
vertical height.

This results in the following new wwindex.html file:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD>
       <TITLE>WindoWatch HTML Tutorial Page</TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <!-- This sets the frames for browsers that can use them -->

  <FRAMESET ROWS="18%,*,9%">
       <FRAME NAME="FTitle" SRC="wwtitle.html" SCROLLING="AUTO">
       <FRAME NAME="FBody" SRC="wwmain1.html" SCROLLING="AUTO">
       <FRAME NAME="FTable" SRC="wwtable.html" SCROLLING="AUTO">
  </FRAMESET>
  <!-- This sets a page for browsers that don't allow frames -->
  <NOFRAMES>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif">

  If you are seeing this text, then your browser does not support the use
  of frames, which is what this tutorial page is all about.

  <P>If so, please obtain and install a browser which is frames capable,
  such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, and try loading this page again

  </BODY>
  </NOFRAMES>
  </HTML>

As you can see, we are now creating a <FRAMESET> which has one column,
the default, since COLS= is not specified, and three rows. The top one
uses 18% of the vertical space on the page, the bottom one uses 9% of
the vertical space, and the middle one uses whatever is left over when
they are done (the "18%,*,9%" in the ROWS= parameter). To do this,
however, we have to modify the title page so that it no longer includes
our navigation bar. This is easy.. we just mark the code for the table
in our HTML editor, and cut it out, as follows:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>Title</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif" TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>

  <CENTER><H1><FONT COLOR="#FF0080">The WindoWatch HTML Tutorial Practice
    Page</FONT></H1>

  <TABLE WIDTH=70% CELLPADDING=4 BORDER=4 BGCOLOR="#C0C0C0">
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle>
  <MARQUEE ALIGN=MIDDLE BEHAVIOR=SCROLL DIRECTION=LEFT LOOP=INFINITE
    SCROLLDELAY=1>
  Welcome to our practice page. This is an example of a framed page, from
  columns 5, 6 and 7.</MARQUEE>
  </TD></TABLE></CENTER>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

We then move that navigation bar into it's own "page" which is the
wwtable.html that we have specified as the default display in the FTable
frame. Again, I simply used wwtitle.html, this time cutting out the
actual title and the middle table, which contains the marquee, in order
to maintain as simply as possible the "style" of our page, as in this
code for wwtable.html:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>Table</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif" TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>

  <CENTER><TABLE WIDTH=80% CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=2 BORDER=4>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain1.html" TARGET="FBody">
    Starting Page</A></TD>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain2.html" TARGET="FBody">
    Second Page</A></TD>
  </TABLE></CENTER>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

The nice thing about working with framed pages is that there is little
more to do than this. The central two pages need have no changes
whatsoever made to them, provided we accept the banal content presented
for the purpose of this exercise. They will do nothing more in this
scheme than change position in the overall page construct.

That is one thing that I really like about working with a framed site.
I can change the whole look of the site, without having to edit the
content of the text in pages. All I really have to do is modify the
number of frames, their position on the page, or the content of the
pages which remain consistent in the display. And as a result, the whole
look of the page can be changed quite easily, as you will see in a line
or two.

The end result of our relatively minimal changes in the basic code is a
page which looks like this, again, using Microsoft Explorer 3.0, and
looks quite different than our first view of the page notwithstanding
minor changes. To my eye, it looks many times better than the first one
with a more balanced feel to it, established by the bottom frame
containing our navigation bar.

But, of course, as any of you who know me are aware, I am never happy,
and even the above isn't quite to my liking. The table on the bottom is
fine now, but as we add more pages to our site, it will begin getting
awkward to use, as the size of the cells available for each link gets
smaller and smaller. We are striving to prepare for that and to create
what I consider to be a nicer looking navigation bar.


Not big changes here, but the elimination of the border around the cells
in the table, and the inclusion of the image called redball.gif before
each link in the table, gives the whole thing a cleaner, finished look,
while maintaining the balance the cell borders created earlier. As you
can see, the addition of the third link in the navigation bar doesn't
adversely modify the "clean" look (I'll post the code for the Links Page
referred to in the navigation bar next month, when we look at links
within frames, and how to control where a new page appears).

Once again, making a modest change to the look of the page was rather
simple. It entailed nothing more than adding two <IMG> tags to the code
we already have for wwtable.html, like this:

  <HTML>
  <HEAD><TITLE>Table</TITLE></HEAD>
  <BODY BACKGROUND="images/wall.gif" TOPMARGIN=0 LEFTMARGIN=0>
  <BASEFONT FACE="Times New Roman" SIZE=3>

  <CENTER><TABLE WIDTH=80% CELLPADDING=4 CELLSPACING=2 BORDER=0>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain1.html" TARGET="FBody">
  <IMG SRC="images/redball.gif" WIDTH=25 HEIGHT=13 BORDER=0>Starting
    Page</A></TD>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwmain2.html" TARGET="FBody">
  <IMG SRC="images/redball.gif" WIDTH=25 HEIGHT=13 BORDER=0>Second
    Page</A></TD>
  <TD ALIGN=center VALIGN=middle><A HREF="wwlinks.html" TARGET="FBody">
  <IMG SRC="images/redball.gif" WIDTH=25 HEIGHT=13 BORDER=0>Links
    Page</A></TD>
  </TABLE></CENTER>

  </BODY>
  </HTML>

We obviously can continue to do all sorts of things to these pages and
we will. next month. We'll look at adding pages, controlling links, and
perhaps even end up with a page designed to match the rough drawing we
used in the very first column. We may even make our very first foray
into the world of JavaScript, to control how our page displays depending
upon which browser is being used to view it.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
   As some of you have already noticed, we are beginning to post the
   earlier tutorial sections to the WindoWatch home page. Gregg's well-
   known scripting skill is turning that part of the homepage into a
   very busy place. We invite you to stop by too. Gregg Hommel is a
   member of the WindoWatch Editorial board and the HTML editor. He
   has contributed many articles to the magazine.



   ww page 9
  FrontPage 97                                      Learning New Skills !
  


               Reported by a First Time Web Page Creator
                  Copyright 1997 By Linda L. Rosenbaum


Although many of my fellow WindoWatch writers have established Web home
pages, I had not yet created any sort of page of my own. My ISP already
includes in his fee, 5 MB of space for a web page. Even so, my main
hesitation has been around the notion that I had little to say or do
that would be of interest to anyone other than my family and a few of my
online friends. I was also concerned that it would consume time that I
sorely lacked. However, the continued growth of the Internet has made me
rethink my position. The clincher has been the increasing attention from
developers who are releasing new versions of software that are Internet
ready. I decided that it was time for me to at least dabble and learn to
create and publish a web page myself. The next step was to select the
software I would use for this venture.

I have Office 97, and some of its many enhancements have features that
are HTML specific giving one the ability to create and convert to HTML.
Even though I like Office 97 quite a bit, I was not convinced it was the
best product for my new adventure. It is hard to explain why, other than
my notion that a dedicated product might be easier to learn and might
pull it all together better. I was also quite deficient in my
understanding of HTML and wanted something that would hide the code from
me as much as possible. At the same time, I was also convinced that
being able to edit directly to the HTML code was an important feature to
have for full document control.

I quickly learned that there are quite a few HTML editors available -
retail, shareware and freeware. I also had installed FrontPage 1.1 on my
system but as it turned out, without all of its components. This product
comes on the NT 4.0 Server CD. I had started it up at least once and was
totally lost. When I recently got interested in actually trying to do a
home page, an online friend explained that an HTML document is basically
a text document written in HTML language or with what she referred to as
HTML coding. She sent me an example of a basic one I could create/write
and how to do so easily in Notepad. Gosh darned, it worked! I then
decided to try to do exactly the same thing using FrontPage 1.1. This
time I found it a bit easier to figure out what to do. FrontPage 1.1
allows you to view in HTML code but not edit it. I also opened up my
very basic starter home page in Word 97 and was surprised to see that it
looked a bit different and that trying to modify parts of it were quite
different than in FrontPage 1.1. When working with an HTML file in Word
97 there is no way to edit the HTML code itself.

I was now leaning towards trying to use FrontPage, but was also aware
that a new version had come out a few months earlier (FrontPage 97). I
went to a bookstore to see what books on Web publishing were available
and what reference books existed for HTML editors. I found quite a few
dealing with FrontPage 1.1 and FrontPage 97. Browsing the FrontPage 97
books let to the discovery that there were missing components of version
1.1 from my original installation that were aimed at helping one get one
started using the software.

Next I did some basic research on the Internet, looking for reviews of
HTML editors as well as anything specific on FrontPage 97. I learned
enough to convince myself that buying FrontPage 97 would be a good
choice and that using this product should be more than sufficient for my
new project. A Microsoft program, FrontPage 97 information and updates
can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/.

I ordered FrontPage 97 with the bonus pack along with a book from
Microsoft Press called Introducing Microsoft FrontPage 97. I was
concerned that whatever manual came with FrontPage 97 would not be
detailed enough to give me the very basic steps on starting and working
on a web page. I found several books on FrontPage 97 that took this step
by step approach. The one I ultimately selected was a book called Teach
Yourself Microsoft FrontPage 97 in a Week. It is by Donald Doherty and
is published by Sams.net Publishing.

The installation of FrontPage 97 went very smoothly. I opted to first
uninstall FrontPage 1.1 from my system. The Setup dialogue box started
up automatically after I inserted the FrontPage 97 with bonus pack CD.
The installation instructions, contained in the jewel case for the CD,
indicated that FrontPage 97 should be installed before the bonus pack.
I selected the Custom installation and chose to install both the Client
software and the Microsoft FrontPage Personal Web Server. I also opted
to have the two components located on different partitions on my hard
drive, as recommended by Don Doherty. After all of this was installed,
I had restarted the system as prompted, and then went back to the CD to
install some of what comes with the bonus pack. I chose to install both
Microsoft Image Composer and the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard. I did
not select the Microsoft Internet Explorer since it was already
installed on my system. I also use Netscape Navigator as my web browser
most of the time. The installation program created a new program group
called Microsoft FrontPage with one shortcut also called Microsoft
FrontPage. This surprised me a bit because the program group I had for
FrontPage 1.1 had several shortcuts.

The very first time FrontPage 97 is started up, you are told that it
needs to get your hostname and TCP/IP address. After clicking on the OK
button, FrontPage searches the system for the appropriate information.
It then returns with the hostname that it finds on the system. On my
system it returned with information related to my ISP. I was now finally
ready to use FrontPage.

FrontPage 97 comes with a tutorial. I was too anxious to get started
with creating my own web page to bother with it. In hindsight, it
probably would have made as much sense to do the tutorial as it did to
buy what turned out to be two third party reference books for FrontPage
97. I have now read through the manual for the tutorial and it seems to
cover the basics quite well. The only part that baffled me (and still
does since I have not yet actually done the tutorial) was where you are
instructed to physically locate the tutorial web pages.

Clicking on the Microsoft FrontPage shortcut actually starts up what is
called FrontPage Explorer. This is the part of FrontPage that can be
used to start up a Web page as well as navigate through an existing one
or import one into FrontPage 97.

The first time I opened FrontPage, I opted to Create a New FrontPage Web
From a Wizard or Template. Actually I was using Don Doherty's book
following the step by step directions on how to get started with a web
page on a local hard drive. The next dialog box let me select the
template or wizard to use for my new web page. FrontPage comes with
several canned templates, including Normal Web, Corporate Presence
Wizard, Customer Support Web, Discussion Web Wizard, Empty Web, Learning
FrontPage, Personal Web, and Project Web. Doherty's book instructs you
to choose Personal Web at this stage. However, his book also includes a
nice appendix that describes each wizard or template. Personal Web did
not sound appropriate for personal home page, so I opted for Normal Web
instead. According to the information contained in Don Doherty's book,
the Personal Web is geared towards setting up a personal page within a
corporate site. I felt I would be doing more modifying and deleting of
its built in components than if I were to start from scratch with
essentially, a blank home page. That is what the Normal Web wizard
accomplishes - sets up a page with nothing in it. Next I had to identify
a location for the new web. Here is where I wanted to make sure it was
located somewhere on my hard drive. I followed Doherty's guidance and
placed it in a directory/folder called Webs giving it my last name.
FrontPage then created the new folder called Webs as well as the folder
called Rosenbaum containing my new web page. The name of the html file
that got created was called index.htm. I had learned from my friend that
the very first page to be viewed when entering a web site must be called
index.html. FrontPage uses htm for all the pages it creates, so I had to
rename index.htm to index.html in order for it to work properly on my
ISP. All of my other pages work just fine with the htm extension as
created by FrontPage 97. (See Editor's Note at the end of the article on
naming conventions!)

FrontPage Explorer gives you a visual view of how your Web is laid out
with all hyperlinks, both internal and external. You can also view your
web pages as a traditional folder view within FrontPage Explorer. This
makes FrontPage Explorer look almost identical to NT Explorer.

From within folder view, you can perform NT 4.0 style file management
using drag-and-drop to move files and folders. You can right click any
item and use the context menus to open, cut, copy, rename, and delete
pages in your FrontPage web. By doing so via FrontPage Explorer, you
enhance its ability to keep track of your web structure. It
automatically recalculates all affected links within the current
FrontPage web.

I leave FrontPage Explorer in hyperlink view because it is easier to
design or streamline the layout of the web site from within this view. I
also like seeing graphically all of the various links.

Since I had some notion of the basic layout of my web site, I first set
up a home page and several internally linked pages. At this point, I did
not actually edit any of them but rather had FrontPage add each new page
to the to do list because I wanted to work on the pages later. However I
did start by editing the home page, and from within it, created the
other pages. To actually work on the creation of a page, you use the
FrontPage Editor. I usually right click on the name of the individual
page from hyperlink view of FrontPage Explorer and then select Open to
work on a specific page in FrontPage Editor.

With a newly started normal home page, FrontPage Editor looks much like
a word processing program. FrontPage Editor allows you to do almost
anything you want with your page without actually writing HTML directly.
On the other hand, if you want to view or edit in HTML, you can do so by
selecting View, HTML. Unlike FrontPage 1.1, editing as well as viewing
can be done via this menu selection. Any editing done in HTML code is
seen instantly in FrontPage 97, if such editing effects how the page is
seen in a browser.

In looking at the toolbars, some of the icons are self-explanatory. The
icons from left to right are as follows:

  - Create a new normal page
  - Open an existing page
  - Save the active page
  - Print the active page
  - Show the page in the currently-selected web browser
  - Check the spelling in the active document
  - Cut the selection and put it in the clipboard
  - Copy the selection and put it in the clipboard
  - Insert clipboard contents (i.e. paste)
  - Reverse the last action
  - Redo the last action that was undone
  - Show the FrontPage Explorer
  - Show the To Do List
  - Insert WebBot component
  - Insert table
  - Insert image
  - Create or edit a hyperlink from the selected text
  - Return to the previous page in the hyperlink history list
  - Go to the next page in the hyperlink history list
  - Refresh the current page
  - Stop the network action currently in progress
  - Show or hide line breaks, form outlines, and other guides
  - Display help for clicked on buttons, menus, and windows

As in other Microsoft products, when you place the cursor on any of the
above icons/buttons, you get a display/balloon showing its name, as well
as a description in the bar at the bottom. While I can now easily
remember quite a few of the above, I find this incredibly helpful since
at first the icons meant nothing to me. Even with growing familiarity, I
can easily forget which is the correct one to be using for a specific
action.

The second row of icons is primarily used for formatting and setting the
display of what you have written on your page. In addition, you can also
right click on context menus that will take you directly to formatting
or setting up table properties and cell properties for a table, font
properties for most any text, and so forth. All of this is strikingly
similar to how a Windows word processing program works and quite a few
of the icons are identical to those used in Word 97. You select which
toolbars you would like to have open all the time in FrontPage 97 via
the View menu.

In order to set your page properties, you must go to File, Page
Properties. The first tab, general, is where you can change the
name-description of the page that is displayed in the browser. You would
normally see the name of the htm file, but in this case it is a new
blank normal page yet to be saved. In the background tab, you select
colors as well as a background image if so desired. FrontPage 97 comes
with a nice collection of backgrounds, logos, animated GIFs, icons,
buttons, and so forth. These are found by clicking your choice of
background image, or browse. Three selections are then available:
Current FrontPage Web, Other Location, and Clip Art. Selecting Clip Art
will take you to where you can view and select, if desired, any of the
clip art that comes with FrontPage. If you do select any of these, when
you finally save your web page you will be prompted to save the selected
image file where the other images for your web pages are located. This
is needed, or is at least preferable, because it makes its location
correct when later uploading all of this to your actual web site on your
ISP or wherever you plan to put your web pages.

In the choices above, I have found one oddity, to me, when using
FrontPage 97. When I first start it up, it seems to properly identify
whatever image files are located within that web page site. However, if
I add additional images while FrontPage 97 is open, it cannot or does
not see that these images are there. But if I use Other Location and
point it to same place, those images are available. Not a big deal, but
still kind of annoying to me.

Despite the appearance of being just like a word processing program, I
quickly discovered that HTML is not. I kept trying to do things that
work fine in Word 97 but do not in FrontPage 97, i.e. the placement of
text along with images. I went back to Don's book and learned that
tables are one of the most widely used ways to properly place text and
images where you want them to be. My very first web page contained a
table and I continue to use them extensively. It took some experimenting
to get the hang of doing this compared to the method used in a word
processing program, but the instant feedback from FrontPage 97 makes it
much easier.

I use the Create Hyperlink button/icon a lot. First I highlight the text
or image I want to create a link to and then click on the button. I get
a dialogue box, really a graphical menu replete with tabs

The tab selected is used to create or edit a link to the World Wide Web.
This includes mailto links as well as links to newsgroups, and of
course, includes URL's on the Web. To link to a page within your own
site, you can use Open Pages if you happen to have that page open in
FrontPage Editor, or you can use Current FrontPage Web and point to the
name of the htm file. New Page is used to create a new page within a
site along with the necessary links. This is how I started some of my
basic pages, and how I have later added ones to my existing site. In the
dialogue box for this you select the page title, which can be changed
later in Page Properties, the name of the URL (i.e. name of the file),
and whether you want to edit this new page now or later.

I use the show current page in browser button extensively. This gives me
instant feedback on how my creation will look in my browser of choice.
Of course, I again check all of my work once its been uploaded to my
ISP.

FrontPage Editor gives you a clue of how long a particular page will
take to load. Based upon a 28.8 connection to the Internet, we have all
learned that connection speeds can vary quite a bit at any specified
point in time. Even so, it is still very useful relative information
that can serve as a guide/warning when you have a page that starts
taking too long time to load, as indicated by a page on my site.


One of the more difficult aspects of maintaining a web site is keeping
hyperlinks up to date and accurate. FrontPage Explorer can help with
this task. Under Tools there is a selection called Verify Hyperlinks.
When first selected, all internal Hyperlinks are verified and problems
are noted. The following is the screen I see for my site after I select
Verify Hyperlinks. FrontPage Explorer found no internal link problems
with the question marks reflecting that none of the external links had
been checked yet.

To verify external links, first one must obviously be connected to the
Web, and then select the verify button in the upper right hand corner.
This can take some time to do. Since at any given point in time there
could be a problem connecting to an individual site, (even if FrontPage
Explorer thinks the link is broken) this could well be a temporary
condition rather than a permanent one. Despite these inherent
limitations, I find this tool incredibly useful for checking out all of
my links. If you do get feedback about a broken link, you can edit the
link and page directly from within this screen or add it to the To Do
List to be dealt with later on.

I have not tried to use Microsoft Image Composer included in the bonus
pack for FrontPage 97. I have been a long time user of Paint Shop Pro
and have the most recent version (version 4.12). This is a wonderful
program that started life several years ago, as a shareware program for
doing basic image conversions and viewing, and it has grown into a very
capable image-editing program too. You can download a shareware version
of it at http://www.jasc.com/.

I was now ready to actually upload my creations to my ISP. FrontPage 97
comes with the ability to automate or at least facilitate this process.
I didn't try to use these features as I had been given basic
instructions on how to get my stuff to my ISP, which involved using an
FTP program and uploading it to the proper place on my ISP. In addition,
my ISP had posted instructions which were along these same lines. I was
not clear if the FrontPage wizard for uploading my web site would work
with my internet site. My ISP said it did not even though someone else
had successfully done so. In any case, I played it safe and used the
freeware FTP program, WS_FTPLE, available at http:// www.ipswitch.com/ .
With this particular FTP program, you see your local system drive on the
left-hand side of your screen and the remote site directory on the
right. Uploading is as easy as selecting what you want to upload from
the left-hand side and clicking on the arrow which points to the remote
site (i.e. to the right-hand side). You can use WS_FTPLE to create
directories on your site for your files and you can easily delete those
that are no longer needed. It makes remote file management as easy as
working on your own computer. I have continued to use software to
upload to my ISP because it works.


In conclusion, I have found FrontPage 97 to be a joy to use and fairly
easy to understand. It took some work to figure out how to get started,
as well as how to accomplish many of the different tasks. But I believe
that is more due to the differences in how HTML works, as opposed to
FrontPage 97 itself. I believe I got going much faster with FrontPage 97
than I would have with just using Word 97 or any number of other HTML
editors, although hard to prove or disprove. I highly recommend that
anyone starting out with their first site to give FrontPage 97 serious
consideration. I would also guess that even advanced Web site creators
would find it useful if they gave FrontPage 97 some consideration. Next
month Stefan Assmann will be discussing some of the more advanced
features of FrontPage 97.


  Editor's Note: On Naming Conventions: The main page of a site may be
  named anything you wish, however, unless it is named using certain
  conventions, the URL for your site would have to include the full name
  of that page in order to have it load. Most ISP's use a naming
  convention to cause a default page to load when the URL for a site
  does not include the name of a page to load. This varies from ISP to
  ISP, and although for Linda's ISP, the default page name is
  index.html. For my ISP, that same auto-loading default page must be
  named default.html. To determine what the default file must be named
  for your site, contact your ISP and ask. - GH)


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Linda Rosenbaum lives and works in a suburb of New York City. She is an
assistant controller at the World Headquarters for a large global
manufacturing company. She has two young children and a husband whose
full time job is to take care of the kids. When not working, Linda can
be found on a variety of online services and the Internet reading and
writing about her experiences with NT, networking, and multimedia. She
maintains a home network of four computers using a combination of NT and
Windows 95. Linda is the NT Editor for WindoWatch and can be reached via
Email at either lindar@cyburban.com or 71154.2622@compuserve.com.


     When Microsoft was alerted that Linda had trouble viewing added
     images while FrontPage 97 is open, a member of the FrontPage team
     asserted that there are two possibilities behind her problem and
     that this "isn't a bug".

     "The first is she's launching the Front Page Editor without
     launching the Front Page Explorer. Or, she's not importing the
     images into the FrontPage web -- ,hence they don't show up as
     images "in" the web, but she can browse to them in the file system.

     If she's adding images by simply copying them to the \images folder
     via the file system (e.g. Windows Explorer) the files won't show up
     as part of the Web. If she imports them into FrontPage (File /
     Import in FP Explorer, or drag/drop into FP Explorer) then she'll
     see them as available in her Web when she chooses Insert / Image.
     Also, if she inserts her images from the file into her Web pages
     FrontPage always imports them into the Web upon saving the Web
     page, thereafter they appear as files in the Web."



   ww page 10
  The Notes Feature and a Few Tricks                      Outlook Part IV
  


                            The Task Manager
                    Copyright 1997 by Stefan Assmann


Task Manager

You probably expected an article about the Journal, as I promised in
last month's Outlook article. I decided to first cover the remaining
components of Outlook since the Journal can contain documents of all
other Outlook types. Going over the other parts first will improve your
understanding of the Journal.

The tasklist functions as a very simple project manager. With it, you
can input your tasks to a list, prioritize them, and then follow the
progress of assigned tasks. All of this can be done in a networked
environment, of course, so that other members who have access can add or
modify tasks, keeping track of your progress. A very handy for your
boss.

The task manager can be displayed individually as shown in the following
screenshot (figure1) to view all the necessary details, or in a
shortened view in calendar mode, where only the task will be visible.

Once again, I'll use a practical example to illustrate this feature. And
what better example than to add a task for writing an article for
WindoWatch? So, let's go!

Besides my articles about Internet Explorer 4 and Outlook, I'm going to
begin a new TIPs column this issue. So I'll type in "Tips column" and
press. As for the deadline, this was set by our editor to be May 1. You
can type in the date yourself, or you can choose from a mini calendar
when you click the drop down menu. Very neat. Now your screen should
look like the following image[**]:

   [**The graphic images described in this article can be viewed in
   the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch.]


The creation process is fairly simple, no?

When the deadline approaches, the tasks will change colour and will turn
red when the deadline has arrived and nothing has been done. You'll not
see it here because I always try to meet my deadlines.

One of the reasons the task list is visible in calendar view is obvious:
you can see your schedule and your task list, so you can plan ahead The
other reason, although less obvious, is certainly as practical as the
first. You can drag and drop your tasks onto your calendar and set
various options there, like reminders and other notes.

One of the nice things about the task list is that you can set the
percentage of completion. This is handy in a network situation where
several people are working on the same task. They can update this
concurrently and the boss has an overview of how much of the work has
been done at any given point in time. Of course, if you want all the
options of real project management, you should switch to a full-blown
project manager. There are many available choices.


Notes

The first thing you'll notice is that these objects look remarkably
similar to 3M's Post-It notes. 3M even initiated a law suit over it with
the outcome yet unknown.


If you use these handy sticky notes at work, you'll feel right at home
with this feature. Their functionality is the same as their live
counterparts. Instead of the stickiness, they remain on your monitor on
top of all the other windows. However, don't let this feature take you
in. They are certainly very handy, but don't over use them, or you will
find other important items covered over.


Tricks

I'll bet you didn't know this! You can use Outlook as your file manager
if you're not comfortable with Explorer. Here are the steps to follow:

- In the left bar, click "Other".
- Click on "My Computer".
- You now have access to your folders and drives, including all options
  available in explorer. In fact, it IS explorer you're working with,
  just cleverly hidden with a new look!


Next month we'll finish this series. I'll show you how to use the
Journal and then put it all together.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Questions can be e-mailed to me at Stefan.Assmann@club.innet.be. If you
want to know more about Outlook than described in this series, you can
also point your browser to http://www.stefan98.com/.



   ww page 11
  HEADLINER                                             A Product Review!
  


             The News You Want - Delivered When You Want It
                    Copyright 1997 by John Campbell


Headliner - An online news application

The Internet is a great source of information on every imaginable topic.
But, it takes time to search out the sites of interest, and then search
for the exact information one wants. A relatively new breed of
application exists that purports to make the job easier. These online
news clients, such as PointCast, My Yahoo! And Back Web, make it
possible to subscribe to a number of news sources, which the client then
delivers on demand. Headliner, from Lanacom, Inc., is the newest of
these. As a bonus, HeadLiner is freeware, and the content it delivers
is free of advertising.

The program delivers news in any of three ways. It can be configured to
display headlines in a news ticker display - normally across the bottom
of the screen, or to display articles either as a screen saver or via a
Web page, or in a display called the NewsTitle viewer. This last is
unique to HeadLiner. It consists of a ticker that scrolls headlines in
the title bar of your applications.

The ticker automatically switches between applications as you work,
always appearing in the active application. Clicking a small icon
enables one to temporarily minimize the ticker, so the application title
bar becomes visible again. You can even view two news feeds at once --
one in the NewsTitle viewer; the other in the standard ticker display.
Either of the scrolling displays can be stopped by placing the mouse
pointer over a headline of interest as it passes by. This pops up a
dialog containing a capsule summary of the selected headline. To read
the full text of an article, double click on the headline. Your browser
loads, connects to the proper site, then displays the article.

Another way to find something of interest fast is to click on the icon
at the far right of the news ticker display. This icon represents the
news source currently featured in the ticker. Now, all of the sources
in the same category (news, entertainment, etc.) appear in list format.
Clicking on any of these causes the ticker to switch to that source.
Click a down arrow next to the icon, and a window opens to display all
headlines retrieved from the selected source. You then can double-click
a headline of interest to retrieve the entire article. This neat feature
means it isn't necessary to watch all of the headlines scroll by on the
ticker until one of interest appears. It is easy to instantly switch the
display to a different category. Just click on one of the tabs at the
top of the ticker. All of this also can be done by using the icons
located to the right of the NewsTitle viewer display. Another nice
touch -- the ticker can be slowed or speeded up by dragging the mouse
across it.

A news client such as HeadLiner is only as useful as the number of news
sources it permits the user to retrieve. At present, there are over 600
web-based sources available, with more being added all the time.
HeadLiner automatically updates it's listing when news sources are
added. The listings are divided into 23 categories, including
entertainment (Ebert's Movie Reviews, Mr. Showbiz, etc.) newspapers,
such as LA Times, Wall Street Journal and Chicago Sun Times; sports
(Sports Illustrated, ESPNet, etc.); stock quotes (DBC, MSN, SecAPL and
QUOTE.COM); lifestyles (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and others);
Science & Technology and Travel. There is a special interest group that
features the likes of Army Times, and several sites of interest to auto
enthusiasts. Internet Newsgroups are available, (article headers only)
and the always handy weather sites are there too. There is an email
feature that one supposedly can use to retrieve mail from a selected
server. I didn't test this. Sites are selected via the HeadLiner Manager
window, which shows available categories and sites in a Windows Explorer
type window. To subscribe to a site, just click the box next to that
site.

The Setup dialogs give the user considerable flexibility in how the
program operates. You can specify either a permanent or dialup Internet
connection, in which case HeadLiner checks for new articles at specified
intervals, or, you can tell the program to await a manual connection.
Each site can be customized as to how often it is to be updated. It is
possible, but not recommended, to retrieve the entire text of articles.
Doing this requires considerable online time. You can tell HeadLiner to
use any browser you happen to have on your computer. Settings in another
dialog control whether articles from prior days are kept, the number of
simultaneous connections the program is to make when retrieving new
information (can be one to ten), and how Rules and Filters are to
operate.

Rules can be established to cause an Alert (either a flashing bar around
the ticker display, a special icon, or both) when specified text is
found in headlines or summaries from selected sites. Any number of text
strings can be entered. Filters operates in a similar manner, except
that only headlines that match the chosen text strings are displayed.

On the whole, HeadLiner is an impressive effort, considering that this
is the initial version offered. I did find several nits. If you
subscribe to HeadLiner itself, the program retrieves a number of
headlines that offer help on various topics having to do with the
program's setup and use. But clicking on any of these only takes you to
the company's Web page. You are then on your own. The page does feature
a helpful guided tour of HeadLiner operation, but I never did find
information matching several of the headlines. And, I don't see much
value in retrieving Usenet headers, if I can't download the articles
too. (Perhaps this is possible - it's one of the topics I couldn't find
help on.) Nits aside, HeadLiner is top notch, especially considering
that it is freeware. I recommend it to anyone who needs a daily dose of
customized news.

More information about HeadLiner can be found at the company's web site,
www.headliner.com. There is also a professional version available. It
differs from the free version in several areas. The user can subscribe
to as many as 100 sites (vs. 40 for the free version), more
sophisticated filters and alerts can be created, and multiple scrolls
are possible. In addition, the professional version allows customization
of colors and fonts, and has several other refinements. It is priced at
$69.95. (Administrative packs and Server modules also are available at
prices of $495 and $995, respectively.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
John Campbell lost his desktop briefcase. Notwithstanding the turmoil of
looking for it, he managed to get to the office and perform his duties
as the Manager of the Elkins, WV Unemployment Office. He found his
desktop briefcase and now he's looking for folks with which to share his
discovery. Someone please write to him and ask just to put the poor man
out of his misery. campbellj@neumedia.net



   ww page 12
  WinFax Pro v.8.                                        A Product Review
  


                    The Ultimate Faxing Experience!
                    Copyright 1997 by Stefan Assmann



Last issue, I did a first looks review of this program and gave it a
thumbs up. However, the article was written with those of you who are
already using the product from previous versions. This article is for
those of you who have yet to use a faxing program.

Why do you need a faxing program? Wouldn't it be nice if you could fax
important documents directly from your PC to a fax anywhere in the world
with just a click of a button? I thought so!

There are other faxing programs on the market and some are even free and
included in your Windows 95 package or a free download from a web site
as in the case of NT 4.0. None of these offer the speed, flexibility and
ease of use of Symantec's WinFax Pro.

I've already mentioned the requirements in the April issue, so a brief
refresher here:

  - Windows 95 / NT 4.0
  - 8MB of RAM, 32MB recommended
  - 386DX / 33 minimum, 486DX2/66 or better recommended


Features

You may ask yourself what is so special about WinFax Pro that makes it
stand out among other competing packages. My view of the fax World for
Windows!

  - WinFax Pro supports two telephone lines, enabling one to receive and
    send faxes at the same time.

  - WinFax Pro integrates completely with Exchange / Outlook, so that
    one can turn this Symantec product into an universal e-mail client.

  - WinFax Pro compresses your faxes while sending decreasing sending
    time and phone costs.

  - WinFax Pro comes with macro's that enable one-button faxing from the
    following programs: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Corel WordPerfect
    and Lotus WordPro. In addition, you can fax from any program you want
    thanks to the included printer driver. that will print to the fax and
    you're done.

  - WinFax Pro enables you to spruce up your faxes with great cover
    pages. If you don't like the choices offered you can create new ones
    with the cover page wizard.

  - WinFax Pro provides detailed logs about your activities while you
    are actually sending / receiving.

  - WinFax Pro comes with a small resident program sitting in your tray
    bar called the WinFax controller. With this program, you can do most
    of your work while saving system resources instead of having the
    full-blown program loaded into memory.

  - WinFax Pro supports multiple address books like the one in Exchange/
    Outlook and Act 3.0. No need to type in everything again, but
    rather, immediately begin to use them!

  - WinFax Pro comes with TalkWorks, an integrated solution for those of
    you with voice-modems. There's a telephone application with call
    discriminating, an answering machine and the ability to set up a fax
    call centre.

  - WinFax Pro comes with a multimedia tutorial, the entire manual in
    PDF format, with the reader included, and various trial programs
    that Symantec also sells.


Installation

This procedure has been discussed at length in the previous issue.

Insert the CD into the drive and installation will begin automatically.
After choosing your directory and installation type, followed by a
reboot, your tray will have one more icon. The icon is called the WinFax
controller. As we mentioned earlier, you can do almost anything from
here as opposed to launching the full program. These are the options at
your disposal Note: If you didn't choose to install TalkWorks, your
choices will be more limited):


Faxing

The art of faxing is simplicity itself. Just right-click on the WinFax
controller and select Send a Fax.

First, you insert the recipient's fax number. You can do this by typing
it in or by selecting it from the phone book by double-clicking its
entry. To do this, you need to expand the dialog box a bit. Press the
phone book button and you'll see what I mean.

As in all things, practice makes the master, so let's practice the drill
with an example. Suppose I'm going to send a fax to my computer dealer
to order a new motherboard. His data is already somewhere in my phone
book, so I'll just double- click his entry. After that, I will fill in
the subject-line and your screen should now look like the following[**]:

   [**The graphic images described in this article can be viewed in
   the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch.]

My next step is to choose a nice cover page to make him grin a bit when
he reads my fax. To do this, press the cover button and the screen on
the next page will pop up[**]:

As you will see, the cover pages are nicely organised by category. If
you browse through the list, you'll see a thumbnail presentation on the
right. If you found the one you're looking for, just double-click it to
select it.

Next, press the fill in button to fill in the cover page. The following
screen will appear[**]:

You'll see the cover page in its true format. Beneath it is room for
typing your message. You'll probably also see strange codes appearing in
the address and from fields. Don't worry, upon sending the fax, they'll
be replaced with the values you provided when installing WinFax Pro.

When you are through typing in your message, just press the send fax
button at the top of the screen. You'll then return to the main fax
screen at the beginning of the process.

Additionally, I can also send him an attachment along with this fax,
documenting the prices we agreed upon to make sure he doesn't bill my
credit card incorrectly. To do this, just press the attach button and a
selection box will pop up to enable you to select the file. When you
have found the file you're looking for, double-click it and you'll
return to the starting point.

Lastly, you can select some options for the fax you're ready to send,
like resolution and what to do after the fax has been sent.

You then press the send button and WinFax Pro will begin sending the
fax.


"Aha", I hear you thinking, "but I don't want to send it now, I want to
send it when the off-peak period begins. Can't I arrange that?" Sure you
can! Just press the delivery button and in the following screen, you can
select when to send it, from where, and even have the fax billed to your
credit card!

As you can see, there are many other options as well, but covering them
all one would take us beyond the scope of this article.

After having pressed the send button, WinFax Pro will present you with a
detailed progress screen. After the fax has been sent, a log entry will
be created, which you can view when you start the main program from the
controller.

This covers the basics of sending a fax. Of course, you don't have to
send a fax this way, but may opt to send a fax from whatever program you
choose. Just print to the WinFax printer driver and the main fax screen
will come up. The rest you now know.

I realise that I've only scratched the surface of this powerful program
and its endless possibilities regarding faxes. But as said earlier, if
we were to discuss every nut and bolt in detail, WindoWatch would
certainly qualify for an entry in the Guinness book of Records under the
heading fattest Internet magazine ever. If you want to understand the
other options, read the manual thoroughly. It's very clearly written and
has plenty of screen shots so you can follow the narrative easily. If
there's enough demand for it, I may write a series of articles on this
program. But you'll have to convince me to do this. Drop me an e-mail at
Stefan.Assmann@club.innet.be if you have any questions. They'll be
answered in the next issue.

In my opinion, this application is as close as it can get to being the
perfect fax program! Trust me, I've tried them all.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Stefan Assmann is a highly proficient computer user. A beta tester who
enjoys the challenge he goes where few of us dare to tread! He is the
Chief Accountant at Burgmann BVBA, a Belgian subsidiary of a German
based multinational making all kinds of seals for the industry. Stefan
is a regular WindoWatch contributor.



  ww page 13ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


            Introducing a Place for Microsoft Word Beginners
                   copyrite 1997 by Jack Passarella



Welcome

WindoWatch exists primarily as a Web entity. You won't find WindoWatch
at your corner drug store, local supermarket or favorite bookstore.
unless, that is, one of them comes with a pay-as-you go Internet
appliance du jour. Some of the big book chains have a coffee bar/lounge
right next to an Internet ready computer - so you can drink java while
you play with JavaT I suppose. But, you won't find WindoWatch on the
shelves in any of those places. It's on The Web. And the latest copy may
be on your hard drive in PDF format. Or you may have settled for the
simple ASCII edition.

If you can make one observation about The Web, the first thing that
comes to mind is the incredible pace of change. You may have heard the
terms "web years" or "Netscape years" in the same context you are used
to hearing "dog years." I think a consequence of the rapid development
cycle is that we, as webizens, assume that everybody on The Web has
mastered, or is in the process of mastering, whatever make and model of
software and hardware they happen to be using. And that is a big fallacy
on our part. The Web has attracted so many people because it is easy to
use. Internet Service Providers (ISPs - note to our illustrious editor:
Maybe we should start an Acronym Soup section in WindoWatch!) make a
point of advertising one-click access to the Internet. "Just type SETUP
and `Bang!' you're on the Internet." And just why the term Internet is
used interchangeably everywhere for The Web is a topic for another
column in another part of this magazine. Well, it's not quite that easy,
but it's not very hard to get started. And the major Online Providers
make it even easier to get on the Internet and The Web. Sometimes the
lines blur between where Online Provider ends and The Web/Internet
begins. Because so much attention has been placed on `surfing The Web'
it has become a lot easier to wax your virtual board and catch a wave
than it is to get through the rest of your computing day. Which may
explain why some people get addicted to surfing. It's easier than just
about anything else you can do with a computer.

Because WindoWatch pops up in just about any relevant search engine
match, chances are you may find yourself checking out the Table of
Contents or even downloading the current issue without too much trouble.
Then you might hop over (somehow I've lost the wave metaphor here) and
grab a copy of the free Adobe Acrobat Reader so you can read the issue
in all its glory. What you may have then discovered is that, generally,
WindoWatch is geared towards the experienced computer user, the
so-called Power User. (Personal Peeve Department: Just what the heck is
a Power User anyway? Someone who can customize a toolbar? Perform a mail
merge? Hack into the Pentagon just by typing really fast?) Even Power
Users have a weak spot here or there in their application arsenal. The
same person who can make Microsoft Word jump through flaming hoops to
the amazement of friends and coworkers may not have a clue when it comes
to preparing a presentation with PowerPoint. So it's no blow to the ego
to admit we don't know everything about everything. Otherwise the IDG
Dummies. books wouldn't be selling so well. While WindoWatch has, for
the most part, targeted the experienced or (drum roll, please) Power
Users out there, all that is about to change.

Well, not quite. But what WindoWatch will attempt to do in the coming
months is to expand the coverage we offer by including Beginner
sections. These may come in various topical flavors: graphics, HTML,
individual software applications or even Windows 95 or Windows NT. These
sections will assume you are new to the topic but eager to learn more.
Maybe for those of you who just want to pick up a few tips or tricks
here and there to make your day more productive.

If you're a seasoned computer user, you worry that WindoWatch is
becoming a beginners-only publication. One of the luxuries of virtual
pages is that you can expand the size of the issue without increasing
production costs very much. Beginners' sections will be clearly marked.
Even if you consider yourself a pro or a semi-pro, however, you may want
to skim through them to see if you missed a trick or two along the way.

The foregoing has been a roundabout way of introducing a new area, a
beginners' area for Microsoft Word users, dubbed First Words. Welcome
aboard!


Assumptions

Here you'll find all the tips, tricks and information you need to become
a more experienced Word user. We've lowered the bar in terms of what we
expect you - our reader - to know. We haven't lowered the bar at all in
terms of content or quality.

We'll assume you own a copy of Microsoft Word, which you are either
using now or really want to learn how to use. We'll assume that you may
have heard about customizing the Word interface but haven't tried it
yourself. We'll assume you can, in a pinch, type something on the screen
and print it out, but that you haven't familiarized yourself with styles
or how to create a template. Maybe you don't even know why you would
want to do those things!

We will assume you aren't afraid to learn new things, especially about
Word. If you are who we think you are, you realize Word is a program
that long ago surpassed the label of mere `word processor' and has
become a powerful tool with many, many features. You may never need all
of them, but we're sure there are quite a few features you'll be glad
you discovered. right here, in First Words.

Let us know what you think!


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Jack Passarella, WindoWatch Word Editor



  ww page 14ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


                 Microsoft Word: A Definition of Terms
                   copywrite 1997 by Jack Passarella


Terms of Endearment

You can't get very far along in the Microsoft Word learning curve without
hearing some terms that are at best mystifying, at worst dishearteningly
confusing. It's best if you have at least a familiarity -- if not yet a
complete understanding -- of them at the beginning. It makes that
learning curve a lot less steep.


Keyboard Shortcuts:

These are keyboard combinations of two or three simultaneous keystrokes
used to execute a command, menu item or macro. Quick typists often
prefer these shortcuts to using the mouse to navigate several layers
through the Word menu system. Example: CTRL+A to select an entire
document.


Macros:

In their simplest form, macros are recorded keystrokes saved on the
system to be played back later. Another time-saving feature of many
programs. In Word, macros can become so complex that they seem to run
another mini-application within Word, complete with complex dialog
boxes.


Dialog Boxes:

These are windows that pop up within the Word screen, usually offering
you options to select or requesting information that Word needs to
continue the current task. With complex macros, you can create your own
dialog boxes within Word.


Styles:

These are predefined formats you can use or create yourself to apply one
or more effects to text or whole paragraphs. Examples: font face, font
size, paragraph alignment, bold, italic. Word has styles that can be
applied to individual characters, called Character Styles, as well as
styles that affect entire paragraphs called, naturally enough,


Paragraph Styles.

Templates:

One of the simplest templates you have experience with was probably a
letter stencil sheet. These plastic or heavy-paper cutouts let you
create even, uniform letters for book report covers, etc. Word's
templates can be as simple as a blank document with MEMO in big, bold
type at the top, to a template that changes the way text flows and Word
operates.

Templates are like document toolkits where you can store things like
AutoText (i.e., boilerplate text or graphics), style definitions and
macros.


DOCs vs DOTs

Word documents have the file extension DOC. Word templates have a DOT
extension. When you create a new document (DOC), you can base its
appearance on an existing template (DOT) file. By default, new Word
documents are based on a special template called NORMAL.DOT.

NORMAL.DOT

This is basically your global, default template. If you create or modify
styles without saving them in a specific, custom template, they go into
NORMAL.DOT. If you create macros and don't specify a different template,
they go into NORMAL.DOT.

NORMAL.DOT is special in that if you destroy it, the next time you start
Word, it rises like a Phoenix from the ashes. One caveat is that the
NORMAL.DOT that returns from the smoking ashes of your file deletion
spree is the default NORMAL.DOT.

Each time you make changes to styles or macros, those changes are saved
to NORMAL.DOT. Starting with a fresh NORMAL.DOT wipes out all your
customization. It's a good idea to have a current backup of this file in
case in gets deleted or corrupted.

It's also comforting to know that if you really butcher this global
template, you can just erase it and start over again. No one will be the
wiser.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Jack Passarella is a WindoWatch Word Editor. Aside from being an
extremely able person, he is also a word guru unbelievable, a
playwright, a clever cartoonist, and all round Jack (excuse the pun) of
all trades. Additionally, he is the author of many articles which have
appeared in WindoWatch.



  ww page 15ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


                    The Five Steps to Microsoft Word
                Copyright by 1997 by Michelle Lundquist


    (Word Editor's Note: I asked Michelle to write a piece from the
    vantage point of the brand-new Word user, even though she's been
    using Word since version 2.0 debuted. If it hasn't been very
    long since you pulled off the shrink-wrap, this article will
    give you some handy, common sense advice. This article is based
    on Michelle's experience with Microsoft Word 6.0.)


Getting Started

As with any new software, just getting started with Microsoft Word can
be somewhat traumatic. So many new program features, lots of buttons,
nothing makes sense, - yet ! It can feel like Welcome to Confusion 101!
But don't fret. If you take it a step at a time it doesn't have to be
confusing. Eventually you develop a comfort level that allows you to
explore and enjoy this powerful word-processing program.

One of the first steps towards a comfortable Word experience is to
familiarize yourself with the basics of the program. What often happens
is that someone - generally, this would be you - is thrust into a new
software environment and doesn't have the time to get to know all the
buttons, features and hidden goodies associated with that program. This
is like being tossed into a swimming pool so that you'll learn how to
swim. You keep your head just above water and begin to assume that the
doggie paddle is the most efficient form of underwater locomotion.

Here's a simple, five step program to learn - to teach yourself - all
those other strokes. In other words, to help you feel comfortable with
Microsoft Word.


1. Tooling Around with Toolbars

  I'll assume you are very new to this and give the basic explanation.

  At the very top of your Word screen, the first row contains only the
  information "Microsoft Word - Document1.doc". Directly below that is a
  row of names for what are called "drop-down menus." The row of buttons
  directly below the drop-down menus is one of your toolbars. Each
  subsequent row beneath that one represents another toolbar. Most
  likely you are looking at the two most popular by default: Standard
  and Formatting. These buttons give you the ability to change font
  face, font size, open a document, print a document, alter text
  justification and a whole lot more.

  You can quickly and easily add toolbars or take away toolbars by first
  clicking on the View drop down-menu and then selecting "Toolbars". You
  are then shown a dialogue box with a list of toolbars to choose from;
  those with an "x" in the box are currently being displayed. If you
  want to see and use any others, click in the empty box to the left of
  the name of the toolbar and it will now be displayed. Note: Once a new
  toolbar is selected, it may simply pop onto the middle of your screen,
  forcing you to drag it out of the way. That is, if you want to get any
  work done. To move the toolbar, place your cursor where the name is
  show in the toolbar box, click and hold and you'll see the border turn
  a lighter shade. Holding the mouse button down, drag it to where you
  would like it to reside. This can be at the top section of your screen
  with the other toolbars, at the bottom of your screen or even to the
  left and right of the screen. If you drag it close enough to another
  toolbar or the edges of your active window, it may dock into place.
  This is perfectly normal. Placement is solely up to you!

  Experiment with all of the toolbars to see what they contain. You can
  always go back under View "Toolbars" and deselect them later. And once
  they are selected, they will be saved when you exit and waiting for
  you when you return to Word.


2. Boldly Go... (or, Click on Everything)

  Go into a blank document. Start from the top toolbar, first button.
  Begin clicking. Experience now what all the buttons can do for you.
  Or if you aren't feeling that brave yet, just place your mouse cursor
  over the button, but don't click, just wait a second or two and you'll
  see the name of the button appear in a small yellow box called a
  ToolTip. So many times beginners spend precious time searching for a
  command in the drop-down menus, when their answer is a button-click
  away. Familiarizing yourself now with your toolbars and what they
  contain, could save you time in a deadline situation.


3. Power Up!

  Gone are the days of typewriters and basic DOS word-processing where
  every document began with a virtual blank sheet of paper. At your
  disposal are pre-formatted documents ready for you to use and
  customize as needed. Under the File menu, select "New" and you'll find
  a list of pre-created, ready-to-use templates for everything from
  letters, memos and fax cover sheets to purchase orders and invoices.
  Take a moment to click on a few and see what they offer. For the
  amount of time they can save you, they certainly are worth
  investigating.

4. Wizards are Your Friends.

  Wizards can seem as magical as their names imply. They "wizard" - or
  walk - you through, the toughest document setups, prompting you for
  the necessary information as they are created. This customization
  process makes the fax sheet, letter or memo into a format of your very
  own design. Play around with the different choices to see what the end
  results will look like.

5. Help... is only a click away!

  At the far right of the drop-down menus is the menu item for Help.
  This often-ignored feature offers a quick way to get information on
  something you are trying to do, or even just want to read up on before
  you take the plunge.

  If it's a general overview that you want, click on Help and start with
  the top selection "Contents". This is the broad index of what is
  contained in Word's help facility area. However, if you do have a
  specific topic you want to know about, for instance Bolding Text, you
  could go to the "Search for help on..." topic under Help. Then type
  your query, "Bolding Text", and see what selections come up. As you
  begin typing, Word immediately starts to display related topics. This
  is usually enough to get you going in the right direction.

  One of the best Help features found in Word is the button at the end
  of your Standard toolbar. The button looks like an arrow pointing up
  with a question mark next to it. After clicking on this, you can then
  click anywhere inside the current Word screen. Click in the text area
  or on a toolbar button and you're instantly brought to the area in the
  Help system that pertains to that topic. This is a very quick and easy
  way to get the information you need.

  Finally, check out the "Quick Preview" selection in the Help system.
  This will give you an on-screen demo of Word's most popular features.
  It only takes a few minutes and can answer most of the basic questions
  users have when first getting started.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Michelle Lundquist is a Marketing Communications Manager for a
commercial printing establishment. Her job gives her ample opportunity
to work with the various components of Microsoft Office, particularly
Word for Windows. This is her first appearance in WindoWatch. We hope
the beginning of a long and happy relationship.



  ww page 16ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


                      Introducing Word for Windows
                     Copyright by 1997 by Tony Lima


       (Word Editor's Note: When I put out the call for First Words
       writers in the ILink MS-Word conference that I host, Tony was
       quick to reply. His article discusses the benefits of Word's
       outlining feature for Word beginners. His experience here is
       based upon Microsoft Word 6.0.)


What Do I Do First?

You've figured out how to start Word. What should you do next? I'll try
to give you some hints about starting to write and work with Word. I'm
writing with Word for Windows 6.0c; however, this article should be
useful to anyone using versions 2.0 all the way through Word97.
Throughout this article, I'll assume you have a writing assignment, be
it a long memo, a term paper, or a lengthy analytical white paper. My
objective is to help you use Word to make your job easier.

Here are some tips I've found useful in the past that I'll discuss in
this article:

 -  Use Word's Outline view before you start to actually write text.
 -  Get words into the document before worrying about formatting.
 -  Save frequently and use different file names.
 -  Reorganize by shuffling blocks of text.
 -  Don't be too quick to throw material away.

Writing with Word, or any word processor, for that matter, is not the
same as writing with a pen, pencil or even a typewriter. Making slight
changes in your work style can improve your efficiency considerably.


Use Outline View

Remember how your high school teachers used to nag you to write an
outline before you started to write text? That advice is even more
worthwhile when using Word because the outline becomes part of your text
automatically; it is literally a framework on which you hang the text.
To switch to outline view, either select View/Outline from the Word menu
or click the third button from the left in the lower left corner of the
Word screen.

When you select Outline view, Word will apparently not change very much.
However, you now have access to three levels of headings plus a normal
text style. Figure 2[**] shows the default heading styles. I've typed their
names to show you how they look.

   [**The graphic images described in this article can be viewed in
   the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch.]


These headings will look exactly like this in your document. If you
don't like the way they look, change them using Format/Style. If you do
a lot of writing, you should save the change in NORMAL.DOT or whatever
template you are using to format your document.

Using Outline view will help you keep your writing organized. You can
easily promote or demote a heading by using the Outline toolbar shown in
Figure 3[**]

For outline purposes, and most others, you're working with the line on
which the cursor is currently resting. The left arrow increases the
heading by 1. Clicking it once will promote a Heading 3 into a Heading
2. The right arrow does the opposite, demoting a heading. The double
right arrow turns a heading into normal text.

You can also use the toolbar to move headings around. The upward
pointing arrow moves a heading up one line; the downward pointing arrow
moves it down one line.

Finally, you can use the Outline toolbar to change the level of the
headings you are seeing. The - button collapses the view by one heading
level. The + button expands the view by one heading level. However, you
can only collapse the view to the level of the currently selected
heading. For example, if Heading 2 is selected, clicking the - button
once will cause the displayed text to look like Figure 4[**].

Clicking the minus button a second time will collapse the view to
Heading 2. However, as long as Heading 2 remains selected, clicking the
plus button will not collapse the view any further. Clicking the plus
button will expand the display to its original state.

Once you have an idea what you want to write, creating an outline is an
excellent way to stay organized. As your ideas evolve, you can easily
move material around while not losing any material. Speaking of which,
what's the next step?


Write, Write, Write

Working with a word processor means you never have to retype an entire
paragraph. That's the biggest productivity booster. It also means you
can work better by slightly changing how you approach the writing
process.

After you're happy with your outline, your main objective should be to
type your text as fast as possible. That doesn't mean trying to increase
your typing speed. It means your focus should be on entering the words,
sentences, and paragraphs that make up the bulk of your document without
worrying about formatting or even organization. Since you can easily
move, delete, or change text, you should put off decisions about what
material to keep, where it should go, and what it should look like.

Once you have all your ideas in a file, you can reorganize, delete, or
add to them easily.


Save Frequently and Use Different File Names

There is one activity that should periodically interrupt your typing:
save your work. You should save your file using File/Save As. If the
document is part of a larger project, it should have its own folder or
directory to Windows 3.1 users. However, always use .DOC for the file
extension (the three characters following the period after the file
name) - Windows uses DOC to identify the file as a Word file. After
you've saved the file the first time, you should periodically save it
while you're working on it. Remember that files saved to disk are
reasonably safe from things like power failures and system failures.
Changes you've made since the last time you saved the file to disk are
only present in the computer's random access memory (RAM), occasionally
called volatile memory. It's called volatile because anything that's in
RAM will be gone if your computer suffers some sort of failure.
Fortunately, Word gives you an easy way to regularly save your work.
Click the button shown in Figure 5 to save[**].

If you're working on a longer document, you may find yourself editing
while you write. You may not be sure whether you'll need a block of text
later in the writing process. Once you've made a major change to a
document, save it under a new name using File/Save As. That way, you can
always retrieve your old material if you decide you need it later. I
usually name my longer documents by date. If you type the date as
YYMMDD, the dates will sort in the correct order when they are listed.
Thus, April 28, 1997 becomes 970428. You can add an A B, or some other
letter if you're saving different versions on the same day. Windows 95
users can use long file names to keep track of what's in these different
files. However, even long file names aren't all that long. Use Word's
Summary Info dialog box to enter a more complete description of what's
in the file and what you've deleted!

Word's file search capability (File/File Search) lets you quickly search
for keywords entered in this dialog box.


Reorganize by Shuffling

Word makes it easy to move text around. You can either cut and paste or
drag and drop. Either way, you must first mark the block of text. To
mark an entire paragraph, position the cursor in the left margin so that
it becomes a pointer pointing at the first line of the paragraph. Hold
down the left mouse button and drag the cursor down the left margin. As
you pass each line, it will be highlighted. Once the lines you want to
move are highlighted, release the mouse button.

You can use the same actions to mark words and characters within a
paragraph. The sole difference is the cursor, which will look like the
text insertion point cursor instead of an arrow.

When the block of text is marked, you can drag it to the new insertion
point and drop it. Click on the marked block and a light frame will
appear next to the pointer. There will also be a light insertion bar.
Hold down the left mouse button and move the bar to the new text
location. When you release the mouse button, the block will be moved.
Sometimes you want to move a block of text to a distant location in your
document. Use the cut and paste buttons to do this.

Click the scissors to cut the marked block actually moving it to the
Windows Clipboard. Position the cursor at the place you want the text
moved to and click the left mouse button once. Then click the Paste
button (the third button shown above). (You can, of course, select
Edit/Cut and Edit/Paste from the menu to do this.)


Don't Throw Material Away

Become a pack rat. Don't throw anything away. Save it in a file instead.
It's been my experience that the stuff I need is usually what I threw
away. That means I spend some time every month archiving material from
my hard disk to floppy disks. It also means I have a pretty good
organizational system for storing floppy disks. If it's worth your while
to use a word processor, it's worth the time it takes to develop an
organizational system.


Conclusion

This article has given you some tips for using Word to improve your
writing. Many of these techniques can be used equally well with just
about any word processing program. Many of them involve organizing your
writing. Use outlines, focus on getting words in your document, and move
the words and paragraphs around once they're entered. Use these tips and
you'll find your writing better and faster.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Tony Lima has been working with personal computers since 1978. He has
written half a dozen books and over 100 articles about various aspects
of the small computer industry. In his other life, Tony is professor of
economics at California State University, Hayward. E-mail him at
tony.lima@toadhall.com.



   ww page 17
  Oldies for New Users                            Humor from the Internet
  

                     A Fast Forward from Jon Helis
             Computer Stories from a Field Service Engineer


When I worked for a company that had a contract with 3M, 3M then asked
me to write them a memo describing why we were having problems with
diskette failures. I said in the memo that the disks were failing due to
head crashes. "If the customers would just clean their heads
periodically, we wouldn't have these problems," I said in the memo. One
customer responded with "What kind of shampoo do you recommend?"


                        :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


An end-user hotline received a call about a bad software disk. They
asked the customer to make a copy of the disk and mail it in to the
hotline. A few days later, they received a letter with a mimeographed
copy of the disk. Since it was a double-sided disk, both sides of the
disk had been Xeroxed.


                        :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


A Computer Operator says as she is lifting an RP06 disk pack from the
drive: "Gee, how much does one of these weigh?"

Me: "It depends on how much data is on the disk....

The operator believed it.


                        :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


I had a similar experience while working as a student operator at
Michigan Tech. One particularly trying afternoon, the computer was
merrily crashing for a number of reasons. After about four such
spectacles, we broadcast that the computer would be down for the
remainder of the afternoon. There was a resigned groan from the users
and they began to file out of the Center, except for one comely young
woman with wide blue eyes who wandered up to the counter and queried:

  "What's wrong with the computer?"

  Too tired and irritated to give her a straight answer, I looked her
  straight in the eye and replied: "Broken muffler belt."

  A look of deep concern wafted into her expression as she asked: "Oh,
  that's bad. Can you call Midas?"


                        :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


I work for University Computing Services answering questions about any
and all aspects of computing here, and as a result I run into some truly
astonishing mental densities. A few excerpts from the Helpdesk:

  Caller: "What's the name for when you're entering data into the
    computer?"

  HD: "Data Entry."

  Caller: "Thank you!"


                        :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


Overheard in a student computer lab:

  Client (raising hand and waving frantically): "The computer says
    'Enter your name and press RETURN.' What do I do??"

  Lab Assistant: "Enter your name and press RETURN."

  Client (as if a revelation has struck): "Oh!"


                          :-D  ;-)   : )   :-)


Another friend of mine in a similar situation reports having a student
in the lab one day, who had to abort out of the SET PASSWORD sequence
because he couldn't think of a six-letter word.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
From the RHF archives as selected by Brad Templeton, Maddi Hausmann and
Jim Griffith. This newsgroup posts former jokes from the newsgroup
rec.humor.funny

kb5iav@intersurf.com
Jonathan Helis, KB5IAV
http://www.intersurf.com/~kb5iav
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA



   ww page 18
  Computers in Schools                                      A BOOK REVIEW
  


            The Continuing Debate: Computers in the Schools
                    Copyright 1997 by Frank McGowan


I thought I'd done the last of these when still a sprout in the 7th
grade! As I recall, my concluding sentence was something akin to "I
would recommend this book to any girl who likes horses. Turns out I was
wrong: I received a copy of Net Lessons: Web-Based Projects For Your
Classroom, published by Songline Studios and O'Reilly and Associates,
copyright 1997. The author is Laura Parker Roerden.

Paraphrasing my earlier appraisal, I would recommend this book to any
person who's interested in using the Web in their classroom. What faults
I found were minor, and more a measure of my own growing crotchetiness
than any real deficiencies in the text itself. While the title may not
get your pulse racing, the content will gladden the spirits of even the
most hardened pedagogical technophobe. Ms. Roerden's approach is
refreshingly free of technobabble, indicating that she's either a
relative newcomer herself, or remarkably endowed with empathy for
novices. At no time does she indulge in the off-putting jargon so
common to publications dealing with computer topics, especially those
that address, no pun intended, the Internet. Instead, she maintains a
friendly but professional tone, aimed at intelligent adults whose
knowledge of things computeristic is minimal if not altogether nil.

She divides the book into two section, labeled Theory and From Theory to
Practice. Part 1 sets up the framework for what is to come, defining
terms for beginners and providing ideas about curriculum design and
implementation. It is reassuring to novices, while not so basic that
more experienced users will be bored.

The Introduction, you know, the part no one ever reads, also contains a
great deal of material that should be read, especially by those who
remain skeptical about the merits of having the Internet available to
their students, a topic of much heated discussion on campuses around the
country.

There seems to be a sharp divide between the restrictionists and the
anarchists. Can anyone figure out which of these camps I favor?

Those in the restrictionist side express fear bordering on paranoia:
letting the little so-and-so's have unfettered access can only lead to
debauchery, disaster and litigation, or so they say. If we give 'em a
byte, the next thing you know they'll be gawking at the Hooboy channel,
or worse, and/or sending raunchy mail to the world, with the school's
implied stamp of approval on it. Better to keep things simulated, so as
to exercise restraint.

On the other side are those who advocate unlimited access, on the
grounds that it's the school's job to teach individual responsibility
and accountability; and that we shouldn't be hung up by the possibility
that one or two rotten apples (or applets) will spoil the barrel. We
shouldn't unnecessarily limit all the others who won't go looking for
porn or send obscenity-laced Email to everyone in the universe. As
usual, I see merit in both sides, but am more inclined to side with the
anarchists. You can't very well assign research projects unless you're
going to make the research tools available.

Ms. Roerden implicitly leans towards anarchy. Okay, unlimited access, if
anarchy's too loaded a word for you. The projects are not the kind that
lend themselves to simulation. You have to be able to get out there and
poke around, using search engines and following links from place to
place. A simulation just won't cut it. As she points out, you can
control, at least, the incoming data by using one of the security
systems that filter out objectionable material. And you can also
establish passwords to prevent unauthorized email on the outgoing side.

Still in Part 1, Theory, my first quibble comes with the opening
statement under "Why Use The Web In The Classroom," a quote, no less,
from Tom Snyder Productions: "Technology is cool. Teachers are cooler."
Even allowing for the abuse of the word "cool," which should have been
retired when the last beatnik hung up his beret and goatee, technology
is neither cool nor uncool: it just is. Assuming the second part of the
quote is meant as a compliment, well, speaking for teachers everywhere,
thanks a bunch, but a fatter paycheck would be more appreciated.

Ms. Roerden continues the hip musical metaphor in the second paragraph,
comparing teaching to leading a jazz orchestra. I found this especially
intriguing, since not long ago I was a member of such an ensemble, and
confess that I agree with the idea: the leader of a big band has many of
the same challenges as a teacher - keeping the stars interested while
pulling the less gifted up; deciding which subjects/arrangements to
study/rehearse; maintaining some semblance of order in a group of
disparate, unruly individuals; and if you're going to improvise, you
damned well better know the changes!

It turns out that all these allusions to the world of jazz are
well-founded: Mr. Roerden, it seems, is on the staff at the Berklee
School of Music in Boston, which has provided the world with an endless
supply of "Beserklee" graduates starting with its first incarnation as
Schillinger House (I hope I spelled that correctly).

Part 2 takes things from there, with suggestions for projects in the
areas of art and music, language arts, math, science and, praise be,
social studies. The projects are geared to grammar school, middle school
and senior high school students. One of the projects that caught my eye,
under the social studies category, was "Was the A-bomb a Necessary
Evil?" If nothing else, this shows that she's not afraid of
controversial topics. By the way, does anyone know the answer?

Ms. Roerden also includes appendixes comprising an index of lesson
plans, worksheets and, best of all, a list of Web sites by subject area.
This alone would be worth the price of the book. The book's index also
deserves to be complimented. For one thing, there are no entries for
"About" or "Using," which are not only useless, but infuriating. While
the book has nothing to do with horses, I feel safe in recommending it.
But then, how could it not be high quality? One of those mentioned in
the acknowledgments, Frank Willison, is a former colleague and graduate
of the technical writing course I taught about 15 years ago, - taught
that boy everything he knows!


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Frank McGowan is a teacher, science writer and computer consultant. He
has written articles for WindoWatch since its earliest days continuing
to amuse us with his dry with and gently educating us with puckish
wisdom.



   ww page 19
  ConfigSafe for NT                                      A Product Review
  


        Configuration Tracking and Recovery Tool for Windows NT
                  Copyright 1997 by Linda L. Rosenbaum


One of the greatest mysteries to me, and probably for most NT users, is
the registry. Despite the fact that I have been using NT for over two
years, I am very wary of the registry, and confess to still being in awe
of it. I have at times made direct changes to the registry, but only
with very explicit directions on how to make a specific change. Before
doing so, I also make sure I have a good backup of the registry! Mucking
around in the registry can result in NT not being accessible! Knowing
this makes me wary of the many changes made to the registry by program
installations. Another unpleasant consequence is that of uninstalling
programs that too often leave stray information in the registry. This is
true even for programs that can be removed via Control Panel in NT 4.0
or come with their own uninstall program.

As a result, I was intrigued when I heard about a program for NT that
can monitor/track registry changes. The name of this program is
ConfigSafe NT with separate versions for both Windows 95 and Windows
3.x. Imagine LAN, Inc., the ConfigSafe NT developer, offers a trial
version for download from http://www.imagine-lan.com/. The trial
version, a fourteen day trial version; supports Windows NT 3.51 and
Windows NT 4.0; and provides uninstall ONLY in the Windows NT 4.0
environment. Contact information for imagine LAN, Inc. is as follows:

               76 Northeastern Blvd. Suite 34B
               Nashua, NH 03062
               mailto: sales@imagelan.com
               Sales:800-372-9776//603-889-3883
               FAX:603-889-8822

ConfigSafe NT is $99.95 if purchased directly from imagine LAN, Inc.
However, I believe the street price is closer to $90.00 when purchased
from a reseller. In addition, OEM versions of ConfigSafe are available to system and software vendors.

imagine LAN, Inc. describes ConfigSafe as follows:

     "ConfigSafe TM is a comprehensive configuration tracking and
     recovery tool for Windows PCs. ConfigSafe tracks changes, users and
     applications make to the system Registry, configuration files, file
     versions (including DLLs, EXEs, and drivers), system hardware, and
     network connections. More importantly, ConfigSafe restores Windows
     settings to their previously working settings in just seconds."

ConfigSafe tracks changes to system settings by taking a snapshot of the
system. This snapshot is much like a backup of the system and contains
the information described above. ConfigSafe uses the snapshot to
identify changes made to the configuration by comparing two different
snapshots and then restoring the system to a prior configuration (i.e.
to the state the system was in at the time a specific snapshot was
captured).

The system requirements to run ConfigSafe NT are as follows:

  - 80486 or Higher CPU (Pentium recommended)
  - Microsoft Windows NT Operating System NT 3.51 or 4.0
  - VGA Color Monitor
  - 4 MB System Memory
  - 5 MB Disk Space

It is important to note that additional hard drive space is needed for
the snapshots. In addition, the uninstall feature of ConfigSafe NT is
only available in NT 4.0. Further, ConfigSafe NT also requires a certain
level of privileges to work properly. These required privileges differ
depending upon the types of activity to be performed by the user. The
user profile of the currently active user must include the following
privileges to perform indicated functions:

   For automatic snapshots:

     - "Back up files and directories privileges"

   To Install and/or Run:

     - "Back up files and directories privileges"
     - "Managing and auditing security log"
     - "Restore files and directories"

Typically, by default, members of the Administrators group will have
the Rights necessary to perform all ConfigSafe functions. By default,
members of the Backup Operators Group will have the access rights
necessary to perform the automatic snapshots.

My version of ConfigSafe NT came with one 3.5" floppy diskette and a
very brief four-page pamphlet. The package this was enclosed in had a
note in the corner as follows:

A self-extracting file, "manual.exe", containing ConfigSafe User Manual
in Microsoft Word for Windows format is available on the distribution
diskette for your reference.

I guess if you do not have Word for Windows you are out of luck.
Actually, this Word document is in Word 6.0/95 format and can be read by
WordPad that comes in NT 4.0. I am also able to view (and print) this
doc file in Quick View Plus.

Installing ConfigSafe NT was a breeze. Inserting the floppy diskette in
the floppy drive and executing INSTALL.EXE from the floppy diskette
started the installation. The steps that were performed on my
installation were as follows:

1. Asked for location for installation of program files.

2. Copied files.

3. Asked for verification of the location of several files, some of
   which do not exist in NT (but it did acknowledge those it did not
   find, such as protocol.ini).

4. Launched the program and told me to wait a minute. Then closed it
   back up.

5. Asked if I wanted a shortcut to the desktop and/or start up menu to
   be created (I said yes).

After the installation was finished, I started up ConfigSafe NT and took
a look around. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like when first
started[**]:

   [**The graphic images described in this article can be viewed in
   the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch.]


The first icon at the top, from left to right, is used to display the
changes that have been made to the configuration files. The second icon
is used to display changes to the system information. The third icon is
used to display changes to the drive information. The fourth icon is
used to display changes to the directory information. The fifth icon is
used to display changes to the registry information.

The boxes for Changes Starting and Changes Ending are used to identify
which two snapshots are to be compared. The blue plus and red minus sign
near the listing of configuration files in my screen shot above are used
to identify exactly what you want captured for that part of ConfigSafe
for a snapshot. The options available vary and depend upon the section
of the snapshot you are trying to modify. I have checked off that
ConfigSafe is to only show changed lines.

When I select the directory icon for the two snapshots identified in the
first screen shot, I see the following[**]:


At this point, I need to highlight the directory I have taken snapshots
of to see comparison information. After selecting one, ConfigSafe
launches and says it is doing a system analysis and is identifying and
analyzing directory information. When this is complete, my screen looks
as follows[**]:

Items in green identify ones that are changed. Items in blue are those
that have been deleted. And items in red are the ones that have been
added. The double arrows near the bottom of the program are used to
easily go back and forth between the next deleted, added or changed
line/item.

Selecting the icon for registry changes is similar. You will get a
listing of registry keys that can be analyzed for changes and then
displayed, and which keys have been captured are determined by you. I
have the four main keys being captured, but the program when first
installed defaults to only two keys being captured.

The buttons to the right side are for performing other tasks that can be
done by ConfigSafe and for managing the program. Exit is pretty obvious.
Snapshot is where you actually perform a snapshot. After clicking on
this particular button you are asked to identify the name you want to
give the snapshot. It fills in the last name used requiring that you
change it manually. Hitting the OK button then performs the actual
snapshot. The time it takes to do a snapshot depends upon the amount of
information to be captured. After switching from the default of two
registry keys to four, the time increased significantly, as did the size
of the snapshot capture. My configuration for snapshots now takes over
16MB of hard drive space for each snapshot.

Individual snapshots can be renamed or deleted. You can also identify
how often, if at all, you want ConfigSafe to schedule for a snapshot. I
had first set this for windows startup but quickly stopped due to the
size of each snapshot. I have settled for once a month as I seem to add
programs regularly. I take snapshots both before and after a new
software installation in order to analyze what a particular program
installation has done to my system. The maximum amount of screen shots
to save is also indicated here. The default is 8.

The Report button is used to either view a report of the changes made
between two snapshots or to print it out. Further, you can select the
information to be included in this report. Selecting view report opens
Notepad after ConfigSafe first does the analysis needed to generate the
report. This report is not visually easy to follow because the changes,
additions and deletions are not color-coded. Symbols are used for the
coding instead, with arrows indicating changed items; the plus sign an
added item and the minus sign a deleted item.

The Restore button is used to save the current configuration and replace
it with a configuration that is stored in a snapshot. The Undo button is
used to return to the system configuration before your last restore. It
does not become available until a Restore has been performed. ConfigSafe
can only do one level of UNDO. I have not yet had the opportunity (or
misfortune) to do a ConfigSafe Restore so I cannot make any comments on
how well it works. And likewise I have not performed an Undo.

I have run into a number of problems with ConfigSafe NT in my use of it.
First, and this is a very minor complaint, it identifies my CPU as a
Pentium (I have a Pentium Pro processor). Second, and this is probably
my main gripe about the performance of the program on my system, I get
frequent Dr. Watson visits when ConfigSafe NT itself has a problem and
shuts down. This has happened when trying to compare keys of the
registry, when trying to view reports, and a few other instances I no
longer remember. Normally if I restart ConfigSafe and try to do whatever
triggered the shut down of the program, it will work fine. Third,
although I have it set to only save eight snapshots, I discovered a few
weeks ago that there were actually thirteen saved snapshots. I had to
manually delete the snapshots I no longer wanted. I have not gone beyond
eight since that time so I don't know if this was a fluke, or if the
setting I have selected for the number of saved snapshots does not work
properly. And fourth, while this is not truly an area where ConfigSafe
is not performing as it should be on my system, I do consider it an
issue in terms of how the program works overall. ConfigSafe, including
saved snapshots, takes up a huge amount of hard drive space.

In conclusion, despite the problems noted, I consider ConfigSafe NT a
good utility program to have. It is important to note that it must be
run (i.e. snapshots taken) before installing a new program for it to be
able to do its thing. While I have not had to use it to restore to a
prior configuration (yet), I do feel more comfortable knowing this
option is now available to me. In truth, I like poking around in its
comparisons of two different snapshots. It helps me understand much
better what is being done to my system when changes are made to it.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Linda Rosenbaum lives and works in a suburb of New York City. She is an
assistant controller at the World Headquarters for a large global
manufacturing company. She has two young children and a husband whose
full time job is to take care of the kids. When not working, Linda can
be found on a variety of online services and the Internet reading and
writing about her experiences with NT, networking, and multimedia. She
maintains a home network of four systems using a combination of NT and
Windows 95. Linda is the NT Editor for WindoWatch and can be reached via
Email at either lindar@cyburban.com or 71154.2622@compuserve.com.



   ww page 20
  A 7th Level Quest                          A Game Review and Evaluation
  


        A Review: Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
                     Copyright 1997 by Lynn Alford


Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
Developer: 7th Level
$24.99 plus s & h
1-800-884-8863
http://www.7thlevel.com


Brief Description:

So you loved Monty Python and the Holy Grail, did you? You've always
wanted to live the thrills and excitement of going through the plague
village, help burn a witch, defeat the Black Knight and all those other
fun moments from the movie? Well now, here is your chance.

Eric Idle has joined forces with 7th Level to produce this game. There
are ten locations, each based on one of the major locations from the
film. There are also several additional games within the game which add
to the fun. A number of the best known and loved video clips from the
movie are also included in this game.

Rule one, read the manual. It's short, has good game information and is
one of the more entertaining manuals that come with a game.


Game Play:

You travel from location to location in the game. In each location,
there are a large number of clickable spots and objects though finding
them may well be difficult. Many, many of them will do different things
at different times.

In fact, the key to playing this game is patience. You may have to do
something a number of times before you get the desired result. This is
fun however, because many of the hidden places give you different
results almost each time you click on them.

In each location, you have to find the swallow and shoot it, find the
special item (found by clicking your way through the dialogues and
finding all the clickable areas of the scene), and eventually place a
special item on the scene. I say eventually because you'll pretty much
have to gather the objects from their hiding places before it's
worth-while trying to learn where to put them.

I admire how the game uses actual scenes from the film.


The video sequences have been nicely done frequently using the footage
from the original film to fill in what is happening. As you place the
special items, video sequences will be shown. You may then enjoy them
again by looking at the Book of the Game.

A special treat in the game is when it is showing the sequence of 'how
can you tell she's a witch.' There is a board in the background which
shows the logical argument as it progresses, and is great fun to watch.


The Games Within the Game

  Drop Dead. As the bodies fall, you need to pack the grave as best you
  can. Bodies will keep falling faster, and the occasional one isn't
  quite dead yet, which makes moving it around more challenging.

  Knights in Kombat. As King Arthur, you must defeat the Black Knight.
  As the Black Knight, you have to kill the King. It's your choice which
  opponent to be, though you will have to win as King Arthur to move on
  in the game.

  Burn the Witch. You need to watch the sequence in which the witches
  burn and repeat the sequence yourself. Or fail and have one witch die
  when you do.

  Catch the Cow. Those naughty Frenchmen are throwing cows at your
  party. You need to prevent your men from getting squished by clicking
  on them to turn them to the right.

  Spank the Virgin. If you are good enough at this game, you get a
  special nude bonus round. The title of the game is pretty
  self-explanatory.


Conclusion

Adults only, please. Nudity and rude language naturally enough abound.
Spank the Virgin is one example of how this game may offend some.

As far as game play goes, it can be frustrating. You have to find the
set of ten special objects and where to place them. Some things are
fairly obvious, others aren't at all. There are a large number of places
to click and there seems to be no rhyme or reason behind why you
eventually get the special object.

I wouldn't put this game in any normal category. It's not really quite
what people think of as interactive movie, nor adventure game, nor
arcade game, but it does have all those elements within it. The game
doesn't really have puzzles with clues, as an adventure game would

However if you enjoy Monty Python madness, this game should fill the
bill nicely. It has the video clips of the best parts of the movie, and
lots of unexpected things happen as you explore each screen. Some new
dialogue has been added, and the last video in the game is an animation
that wasn't used in the original film.


Last update 4 May 1997


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Lynn Alford is the WindoWatch games editor! A skilled HTML programmer,
she is the WebMaster for the Centre for Interactive Multimedia at the
John Cook University in Australia. Lynn can be emailed to
lynn.alford@jcu.edu.au Additionally, Lynn maintains Game Review pages at
http://www.jcu.edu.au/~imla/games2.html



   ww page 21
  Cleaning Out the Dead Indians*
  


                      Reflections of a ModemJunkie
                   Copyright 1997 by Leonard Grossman



"How else do you get rid of the dead Indians from the bottom of the TV?"

The foregoing was the punch line of a popular joke in the late 40's and
early 50's. In those day's the Western was the most popular television
format. So much so that tri-color plastic sheets were sold which snapped
over the tv screen. The top third was blue and the bottom was green. For
two days I have been asking people what color the middle was and no one
has been sure. But in any event, with the top third of the screen
representing sky and the bottom grass, it would be years before anyone
needed a real color tv . Talk about redundancy and low band width.

In that pre PC era, so many T.V. Indians were killed each day that
the questions was asked, "Do you have an Indian removal service?"

Well, maybe we didn't need a removal service back then but we sure
do now.

The other day I was reading an article in local newsgroup using
NewsXpress. At the bottom of the article I noticed the following line:
"Attachment converted: c:\download\vcard.vcf" The only time I had seen
such a line before was when reading some articles in the Clarinet news
groups. When news photos were included with an article, the file and a
text description were automatically saved to a \download directory on my
hard drive. But Clarinet warns the reader in the article header that a
graphic is attached.

The poster in the news group had not provided warning. I looked in
C:\download\ and found a file which contained some incomprehensible
information. I posted a rather intemperate message in the newsgroup and
received a response telling me that I should turn off the ability to
accept attachments in NewsXpress, along with the following explanation:

   The VCARD is a Netscape convention that is really handy if you are
   a Netscape user. Along with every message is my VCARD. A Netscape
   4.0 user can drag the vcard picture that they see at the bottom of
   my message directly into their address book, and it brings my name,
   address, and a whole slew of other info into the address book. This
   also then becomes available to applications like MSOffice. It is
   really quite handy. It is like having a business card with your
   email. Like what you put at the bottom of your messages [sig file]
   but in a format that is readily accessible.


How wonderful? How absurd! First of all I am not a Netscape user and
haven't been, except for specialized purposes, since it approached 10
meg. These attachments are totally useless to me. Be that as it may,
instead of a simple signature file, which any reader could cut and
paste, he attaches a proprietary piece of gobbledygook to every message
he posts. Not only does it require additional band width, it goes
unbidden somewhere on every reader's hard drive creating an ugly
signature as well. But the story doesn't not end here. The file I found
on my hard drive did not contain merely sig information but much more
that the sender apparently didn't know he was attaching. His
explanation:

     "Also, I discovered where my attachments were coming from. The
     newest Beta of Netscape also allows encryption and digital
     certificate use. The crap at the bottom of my message was
     additional VCARD info that I didn't mean to be sending. It is my
     public key for encrypted messages. That should no longer be
     present. I don't know how it got turned on. Sorry for any
     inconvenience."

     [name withheld to protect the guilty]

     Attachment Converted: "C:\DOWNLOAD\vcard.vcf"

So! If I hadn't posted my intemperate objection, the sender wouldn't
have even known he was attaching all of that junk. Please note: his
standard attachment is still distributed with his e-mail, as well. So to
add to the ridiculous things Netscape has foisted on the public, it has
added the ability to unintentionally send large meaningless files over
both the mail routes and the Usenet, swallowing up bandwidth and
delaying transactions.

If this were the only example, I probably wouldn't be writing this
column. But in recent weeks I have received a number of unwanted files
from a number of sources. My hard drive is becoming cluttered with
unidentifiable files.

First there, supposedly well meaning e-mail from someone in Israel (at
least the address ended in .il). It congratulated me on one of my pages
but contained a huge attachment in an unrecognizable font, most likely
Hebrew. I didn't ask for this nor can I interpret it. A reply from me
went unanswered so I still don't know what it was.

Spam is bad enough, but now some spam comes with attachments that
frequently after examination, turn out to be files in HTML advertising
this or that. Since I am not using a browser to read them, they are
totally wasted on me! At least with spam, all I have to do is click on
the trash can, but now I have to go to a file manager and clean out the
download directory as well.

This reminds me, that many spam messages come with instructions as to
various ways to remove yourself from the list. A local tvshow suggested
replying with "Remove" as the only text in your message. WRONG!! The
best thing to do with spam, unless you want to go to a lot of work, is
to simply delete and ignore it. Any form of reply verifies your address
and makes its inclusion on lists more valuable.

Of course there are many other ways in which our drives become cluttered
with unwanted and even unidentifiable files. Installation programs leave
behind debris. Uninstall programs leave behind .dlls and .ini and
registry entries which are no longer needed. Manual removal leaves
behind even more.

When I had a 40 meg hard drive, I knew what just about every file on my
machine was for. Still I sometimes deleted things I shouldn't have. But
with the huge hard drives which are now so readily available, there is
no way to know what all that stuff is. Some of it can't be avoided but
we don't need to be the recipients of gratuitous files we never asked
for.

When Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer, many of us were fiercely
loyal to Netscape. During the past year, NS has tried our patience with
unnecessary proprietary extensions and other folderol in addition to its
bloated size. But this unbidden cluttering of our hard drives is simply
too much. It confirms my decision to stick with Opera.

In the meantime, does anyone know where I can get a removal service.


   [* I recognize that the title of this month's column is not PC, but
   then it comes from an era long before the term PC was invented, in
   either of its current uses.]


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Leonard Grossman is a lawyer who works for the government. He has many
interests which include computers and the Internet. Leonard has been
doing his column for WindoWatch from almost the beginning and developed
many friends and fans along the way. His many pages are linked to
<http://www.mcs.net/~grossman> Notes from a ModemJunkie. Leonard can be
reached at grossman@mcs.net



   ww page 22
  A New WindoWatch Feature
  


                            Tips and Tricks
                    Copyright 1997 by Stefan Assmann

      This new column is intended to bring you the best tips and
      tricks we can uncover for your favorite computer programs.
      This column is not just for you, but is also intended to be
      supported by you. So, if you have a few neat tips and tricks
      to share, feel free to forward them to me, and I'll be sure
      to mention them in a future issue. Those that we use will
      also carry the name of the person who submitted them. A note
      to Stefan.Assmann@club.innet.be to submit your best tips.
      This first edition will contain tips from me.


Access 2.0 / 95

If you're working in a mixed environment (i.e. Access 2.0 and Access 95
or higher), you might want to have all your shared tables in Access 2.0
format. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an export to command on
the file menu for this. Don't give up, however! If you choose save as
from the file menu and then overwrite an existing 2.0 database, the
database you're saving will be converted to 2.0 format. Note that this
will only work with databases that don't contain specific programming
code. If you're using a particular database often, you can even automate
the process by writing a macro for it. Just take the following steps:

- Select the macro tab, click New and choose the TransferDatabase
  action.

- Set TranferType to Export, Database Type to Microsoft Access and
  Database Name to the to the full name of the Access 2.0 database you
  want to export the table to.

- Set ObjectType to Table, Source to the name of the table you wish to
  export; Destination to the name for the table in the destination
  database, and leave Structure Only as No

- Choose File / Save As and give the macro a meaningful name like
  TableTransfer or something


Office 97 / 95

- Check out http://www.microsoft.com/officefreestuff/ every week.
  Microsoft usually refreshes this site on Mondays. Things you'll find
  here include free converters, program updates, loads of new add-ins
  and templates, and the entire Office 97 Resource Kit. Sadly, it's only
  the on-line version and not a downloadable help file. The first time
  you're using this site to download something, an on-line registration
  wizard will start. Keep your PIN number handy. You can find this
  number in the About box of every Office 97 application.


Defragmentation

- You're using NT with the NTFS file system and wondering why your
  machine is getting slower? You might be experiencing fragmentation of
  your hard drive. If you thought that this couldn't occur because
  Microsoft said so some time ago, think again! There are currently two
  solutions for this, except if you're still using NT 3.5 or earlier.
  Then you're out of luck. For NT 3.51, Executive Software
  (http://www.execsoft.com/) has a solution in the form of Diskeeper
  1.09. Version 2.0 (2.0.112) is intended for NT 4.0 and will defragment
  your drive(s) on the fly and in the background (it runs as a service).
  The full featured Diskeeper costs money but you have the option to
  download Diskeeper Lite from their web site. This free version will
  only run manually and misses many other options available in the full
  registered version . Under NT 4.0, you can also opt for Speedisk, a
  defragmentation utility from Symantec. You'll find it bundled in its
  Norton Utilities for NT 4.0 suite. (Note: Diskeeper version 2.0 was
  reviewed in the March issue of WindoWatch and Norton Utilities 2.0 for
  NT was reviewed in the April issue.)


Powertoys

- If you want a powerful, yet easy way to control some aspects of either
  Windows 95 or NT 4.0 that are otherwise only changeable through
  registry editing, go out on the web
  (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/common/aa2729.ht m) and download
  TweakUI from Microsoft. This control panel applet is part of the
  PowerToys, a collection of handy GUI extensions written by the people
  responsible for the Windows 95 interface.


Windows 95 - DUN

- If you have installed Dial-Up working in Windows 95, but the option
  save password is grayed out, install the client for MS Networks via
  control panel / networks and reboot. Your password will now be saved.

- Even if you don't have an ISDN-line, you should download and install
  the ISDN 1.1 connectivity kit
  (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/common/aa2725.ht m). The kit not
  only contains the necessary ISDN drivers, but also updated components
  for dial-up networking eliminating most of the bugs in the original
  version. (Note: this tip is for Windows 95 users only.)


Windows 95 / NT 4.0

- Installing the new Internet Explorer 4.0 will not only give you
  another way of viewing the Internet, it will also update a large
  number of shared DLL's, eliminating bugs and adding convenient, be it
  tiny, updates.


That was our very first tips and tricks column. Hope you enjoyed it as
much as I did when I wrote it.


   ww page 22-
  The Last Word
  


The Last Word                                    A WindoWatch Feature!


No More Spam.  I'm Full!
Copyright 1997 by Ben M. Schorr

With all due apologies to the Hormel Corporation, the increasing
onslaught of spam or unsolicited E-mail, seems to be worsening
exponentially.

Yesterday, a Monday, I started my day with twenty-four e-mail
messages; a normal amount for me.  Of those twenty-four, fourteen of
them were unsolicited ads.  Those fourteen are the ones that managed
to slip by my spam filter, while still another dozen were automatically
dealt with, only after I had invested time, money, and bandwidth to
download them in the first place.

Today, my morning mail count was thirteen  messages.  Eight of these
were spam.   What's just as distressing as the quantity of spam, is its
poor quality.  The vast majority seem to fall into one of the following
categories: ads for shaky investment schemes, (It seems Christopher
Erickson failed math in school), MLM long distance service, or
pornographic web sites.  Even worse is that spammers are ruthless
and unrepentant; usually spoofing their return addresses so that you
can't politely request that they stop.

The really irritating habit that the spammers have acquired is the
"Sorry to spam you, but..." technique.  You know the one:
"Hi, I'm really, really sorry to spam you and I realize that I'm
beneath bacteria on the food chain and I don't deserve the bandwidth
I've taken, and I'll never, ever, ever spam you again.  I assure you
that you aren't on any list at all. I just physically picked your name,
along with the other 200,000 people I spammed this to, from a Magic
Crystal Ball, so there's no need for you to reply with a "Remove"
because there's no list and I've already forgotten your e-mail address
and I'm really, really sorry to bug you, but as long as I'm here...let me
tell you about this amazing weight loss product!"

We know they understand that what they're doing is annoying, but
they're going to continue to persist.

It's like spray painting graffiti on the side of my house and expecting
me to not to get mad by promising, ahead of time, that they'll never
do it again.  Of course, we all know that they'll do it again.  They'll
just spoof a different fake e-mail address and send you still another
"Sorry to spam you, but..." message.

As an IS professional I can shrug off these annoying intrusions and go
on with my day.  What worries me is the effect on my users. How long
before they decide that it simply isn't worth the effort to download
and sift through a dozen spams in order to get to the two or three
really important messages in their box?  I already know of users who
check their e-mail less frequently because they simply can't muster the
enthusiasm to wade through all of the junk that has accumulated in
their mailboxes.  I don't think it will be long before some of them
abandon their e-mail entirely.  When that happens, all of us will have
partially lost a valuable business tool.  It is one that clients use to
contact us; that colleagues use to share ideas; and that we use to
distribute information.  It seems to me, that is the real consequence of
spam.  It becomes a denial of service attack on our IS resources.  It
doesn't cost each of us that much to download the occasional copy of
the stupid My name is Christopher Erickson scam.  But, when it
reaches relatively large numbers, it costs us a lot particularly when a
client's important e-mail message goes unopened because the attorney,
as in this case,  was simply overwhelmed with dozens of spam
messages.

What can we do about it?

I make a brave effort. I diligently send each spammer a polite "Please
remove me from your mailing list" message.  Ten minutes later, about
75% come bouncing back to me as undeliverable.  With a bit of
sleuthing, I can often find the real addresses for these spammers.
Either they've posted an address in their message for people to write
to for more information  or perhaps they've posted a URL for us to
explore.  A visit to that URL will often yield a valid e-mail  address.
Certainly, if you have their URL, you have at least a domain name
that they are connected to.  Forwarding  their spam along with a
complaint to their postmaster, is often effective.  I cc: the spammer's
junk to the ABUSE@"domain.name" account without the quotations,
of course.

Editorial Note: See Daniel Christle's Sandwich Meat and Unwanted Email:
WindoWatch: Vol.2 No.9;Nov.1996

If you want to find out who is really responsible for a domain,  visit
http://domain-registration.com/reserve/ and you can look up the billing,
technical, and administrative persons of record.  One persistent
spammer stopped mailbombing me after I started forwarding all of his
spam back to the address listed on his domain registration. Guess he
didn't like getting all of that unsolicited e-mail, huh?

I've downloaded a copy of Spam Hater, which offers to track the
origins of a spam message by going through the headers of the
message.  I've found it to be  of marginal use perhaps because I'm not
skilled enough with its techniques.
Even so,  I've rarely found Spam Hater to give me any e-mail
addresses that I  couldn't have gotten easily myself just by browsing
the header information.

Sanford Wallace and his crew blithely suggest employing a filter.
Using a filter to stop spam is like using a colander for a rain hat.  The
spammers will employ any and every tactic they can think of to
subvert your filters. They'll change domains; they'll use subject lines
like "Hi, how are you?" or "Thanks!"; or they'll spoof other
addresses.  I'm sure they'd even spoof your mother's e-mail address to
get a message through, if they had some way of finding it out.  They
have no ethics whatsoever, so it doesn't bother them.

As has been astutely pointed out before, a filter is not a satisfactory
solution because no filter can both eliminate all of the spam and allow
all of the messages that you want, to come through.  Some people have
suggested setting up a filter that only accepts mail from a list of
approved persons.  Great!  Except I often receive mail from colleagues
or clients whom I've never received mail from before.  Perhaps I
haven't even met them before. There's no way that I could know to
add them to a list of approved persons.

So the battle goes on.  Every time I get a  My name is Christopher
Erickson post, I print it out and mail it to the U.S. Postal Inspector's
Office.  They've contacted me twice to assure me that they are
following up with those individuals.  Every time I get a spam message
I return it to the spammer, along with a polite request to remove me
from their spam list.  I often forward their junk to their postmaster
and ISP.  The spam I receive originating from CyberPromotions is
automatically forwarded to abuse@cyberpromo.com.  I also have a
filter that automatically deletes the AutoResponder that
CyberPromotions spits back.


Still the spam comes!  What will stop it?  A law?  I don't think that's
viable because our country's Constitution rightly allows freedom of
speech. There is, however, one ironclad way to stop spam, that is not
complicated, but is not fast either!  DON'T BUY THE PRODUCTS
that spammers are trying to sell.  Ignore, and resolve not to purchase
or buy into any promotion that is being pitched.  Don't visit their
websites and don't call their 1-900 numbers.

The only reason spam is sent, is to get a response.  They want you to
go to their web site; buy their products; send a buck to each of five
people on a list; or whatever.  Trash it.  Ignore it.  Refuse to do
business with companies  that advertise via spam.  If the user
community steps up and says, "Please don't spam us! If you do, we
will not do business with you!". You will then, slowly begin to see a
reduction in spam.  Make no mistake.  It will take a massive effort.

If just a few dozen people do it, that wont be enough.  If the spammers
are getting ANY significant response, they'll keep believing that their
efforts are successful.  We have to give them the cold shoulder AS A
GROUP!

Sanford Wallace isn't spewing spam at you because he enjoys it.  He's
doing it because people are paying him to do it.  They're paying him
to do so because they believe that you will read this junk and buy
their products.

         DON'T DO IT!  IGNORE!  IGNORE!  IGNORE!

Let's send the collective message that one helping of spam is more
than enough.

Ben M. Schorr is the Director of Information Services at Damon Key Bocken Leong
Kupchak.  He reluctantly receives e-mail at bms@hawaiilawyer.com. He has been
writing his LASTWORD column since the early days of the magazine .



   ww page 23
  The WindoWatch Art Gallery
  


Waiting for Godot  by  Herb Chong


      Herb's original digital art work, Waiting for Godot, is
      available to be viewed in the WindoWatch Art Gallery, and
      downloaded in the Adobe Acrobat edition of WindoWatch,
      available at the WindoWatch home page
      http://www.windowatch.com/.



   ww 

EDITORIAL

Editor:                        Lois B. Laulicht
Contributing Editor:           Herb Chong
HTML Editor:                   Gregg Hommel


Ascii Edition Editor:          Lin Sprague
NT 4 Editor:                   Linda Rosenbaum
Games Editor:                  Lynn Alford
Word Editor:                   Jack Passarella
WebMaster:                     Daniel Christle

Contributing Writers:          Stefan Assmann, Vlad Balak, John M.
                               Campbell, Leonard Grossman, Jon Helis,
                               David Kindle, Jerry Laulicht, Tony Lima,
                               Michelle Lundquist, Frank McGowan, Peter
                               Neuendorffer, Jack Passarella, Jim Plumb,
                               Ben Schorr, and Paul Williamson


EDITORIAL BOARD                Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois
                               Laulicht, Paul Williamson.


SUBMISSIONS and REQUESTS

Email:                         editor@windowatch.com
                               lois.laulicht@channel1.com

                               Editor: WindoWatch
                               Valley Head, WV 26294


Submissions remain the intellectual property of the author. Manuscripts
will NOT be returned if not used.

Electronic File Access:        All back issues are available from the
                                 WindoWatch homepage. See Back Issues or
                                 anonymous ftp site at:
                               FTP://WindoWatch.com
                               www.shareware.com - Search under the
                                 "All Windows" category
                               FTP>Simtel.Net/pub/simtel.net/win95/winwatch

Comments, letters, and requests can be sent to editor@windowatch.com

WindoWatch (c) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 all rights reserved, is the
property of Lois B. Laulicht and CCC of WV Valley Head, WV 26294


  
  Vol.3 No.5 ww End

