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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            
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
                                                                        
   ͵
    July 1997                                             Vol. 3  No. 7 
   


  page 2
                            WHAT'S    INSIDE
   Vol.3  No.7                                                July  1997
  

                                     Editor's Soapbox
    
                              The Supreme Court Rules   Lois Laulicht

                                  The Authoring Tools
    
    Understanding the Tools for Publishing on the WEB   Herb Chong

                                                 HTML
    
                    Mastering Corel's WebMaster Suite   Gregg Hommel
              Another Look at Corel's WebMaster Suite   Dan Christle
                  Weighing Corel's WebMaster Features   Dan Christle
    Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: An HTML Tutorial IX   Gregg Hommel
                         The Kudzu Plug-In: A Cartoon   Jack Passarella

                                   DeskTop Publishing
    
                                  CorelDraw 7: Draw 7   Jack Passarella
                      Desktop Publishing with Word 97   Jack Passarella

                                Soft and Hard Reviews
    
       Worthwhile Improvements on the Venerable Mouse   Linda Rosenbaum
   Shockwave Studio: Designing Multimedia for the Web   David Kindle

                                          FIRST WORDS
    
                                Let Word Work for You   Tony Lima
                                           Mail Merge   Michelle Lunquist

                                                 WORD
    
                            WordBasic Macros: Part II   Christopher Greaves

                                             FEATURES
    
                                       Games Reviewed   Lynn Alford
                                      The Art Gallery   Herb Chong
                        Compumania: One Woman's Story   Peter Neuendorffer
                         Combating Corrupt File Chaos   Christopher Greaves
                                      The ModemJunkie   Leonard Grossman
                   Understanding the Basics of Access   Tony Lima



  page 3
  WindoWatch              The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
   Volume 3 No.7                                               July 1997
  


                          The Editor's Soapbox


The High Court Rules !

The overturning of the Communications Decency Act was but one of several
rulings where the Supreme Court stated clearly that it was the
Constitution it was defending rather than a particular piece of the
social landscape. They underscored with clarity, that there were already
laws in place that preserved safe guards against prurient material. Some
have referred to this Supreme Court decision as the Magna Carta of the
Internet while others have used other language just as lofty and perhaps
just as overblown.

Notwithstanding the rhetorical attempts to spin the Internet as isolated
from the main stream society, the Court rulings underscore again, that
we of the Internet are not an island and that laws are already in place
defining the differences between protection against obscenity and
infringement upon free speech.

Problems of inconsistent laws and their enforcement are not new to our
society. What is new is the multi-national nature of the Internet. Be
that as it may, the graffiti on our virtual walls emphasize the need for
collective accountability to clean up our act. In the same breath it
must be said that in some cultures this discussion is not only foolish
and idealistic but will be completely ignored. It must also be noted
that these same societies look the other way when children and women are
trafficked, as simply another commodity for pleasure and profit.
Pornography on the Internet is one of the few commercial enterprises
that makes money!

Even so, we cannot run away and hide from forces we cannot completely
control or influence. We could, I guess, finesse away any responsibility
and move to gated communities with security guards at each entrance. Or
perhaps establish national and exclusive networks where the like talk
only to their own kind!

The more difficult option is to get on with the job of applying peer
pressure to those who not merely offend our sensibilities but reinforce
exploitive behavior which victimizes children and women.

The Court assumes that adults, under the law, must be allowed to do as
they will. Nonetheless, those who break local laws should be prosecuted
by local law enforcement at all levels of government. Parents must
actively protect their children and warn advertisers and their clients
that certain behaviors are not acceptable. We do have the power to turn
the economic screws upon those who turn a blind eye to prurient sexual
material or exploitation of children for profit. Boycotts are not
pleasant but are often necessary and can be quite productive.

The strength of the Internet as a great force for education and
dissemination of information cannot be minimized or under valued.
Whatever the practical out come of the over turning of CDA, there are
sharp differences, for instance, between information about breast cancer
and the need for regular breast self-examination and the baring and
manipulation of the breasts and other body parts, to entice children
into an erotic and possibly dangerous encounters in the electronic red
light district.

The Founding Fathers clearly understood the level of balance required to
insure that the Constitution was going to last as the corner stone of
the democracy even though they couldn't imagine the reach of their
words. I, for one, am pleased that the court reiterated Constitutional
values. Their recent decisions successfully fend off radically diverse
efforts to dilute the document for momentary political advantage or for
what appears to be the favorite national past time, the frenzy of the
witch hunt.

The Constitution does not favor one political philosophy over another or
it appears, does this Court. The long terms winners, whether on or off
the Internet are the American people and those societies who opt to
embrace all or parts of this credo.


 Ŀ
                                                                         
    The Front Cover:                                                     
                                                                         
    Mike Savad is the creator/owner of this month's featured stained     
    glass window, THE JAPANESE GARDEN. He has generously allowed us      
    to use his work. You might want to pay him a visit and look at his   
    other fine art, and say hello at:                                    
               http://www.geocities.com/Paris/1141                       
    Tell him you're from WindoWatch!                                     
                                                                         
 


   ww page 4
  Understanding the Tools for Publishing on the WEB
  


                   HTML and PDF Publishing on the Web
                      Copyright 1997 by Herb Chong


Although the web is primarily an HTML-based system, Adobe has been
making some inroads in specialized areas with its PDF format for web
publishing. Each is designed for a different purpose and so the two
formats have different strengths and weaknesses. In this article, I will
explain some of the underlying workings of HTML and PDF and why you
might chose one over the other for distributing documents on the
Internet.


HTML and SGML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a special variant of
something called Standard Generalized Markup Language or SGML for short.
SGML is an ISO and ANSI standard for document markup. What does this
mean? To publishing and document management professionals, marking up a
document means putting instructions into text that describe the text.
The <P> and </P> tags in HTML are also valid SGML tags. They tell both
the reader and some automated document processing system that whatever
is between the tags is to be treated as a paragraph.

In the case of HTML, a web browser knows what the <P> tag means and what
do with it. With SGML, it's more complicated. In SGML, the <P> and </P>
tags only say that the enclosed text forms a paragraph. It has nothing
to say about what to do with a paragraph tag. For SGML, documents have
associated with them Document Tag Definitions (DTDs) that describe what
each tag is and what it means. Thus, the tags are a structural markup of
a document.

Both HTML and SGML describe the contents of a document by using tags to
identify parts of a document and how they relate to one another. A
<H1>-</H1> tag pair identifies a level 1 heading. It is up to the
document processor to decide how such a heading looks and how it is
positioned. This means that if, in HTML, you change browsers, or in
SGML, you change the DTD, the document may look different. However, a
heading will remain identifiably a heading.


Postscript and PDF

Adobe developed Acrobat and the Portable Document Format (PDF) as a way
of moving documents between different types of computer systems with
differing capabilities. It is a specialized and standardized version of
Adobe's own Postscript Page Description Language (PDL). Postscript is a
full-blown programming language that has built-in primitives for
drawing, font, and image manipulation. Although Postscript is today
found mostly in high end printers, most Unix systems have available an
optional Display Postscript driver that can use Postscript for managing
how the screen appears, much like the Windows GDI manages how a Windows
screen appears. The NeXT system was a Unix system that provided only
Display Postscript as its means of output. PDF describes the contents of
a document by taking its graphical elements such as letterforms and
images and places them onto the output page in certain locations and
with certain scaling and orientation. Whereas SGML and HTML describe the
structure of a document and leaves the formatting and presentation to
another program, PDF and Postscript know a document only as a stream of
graphics objects that have to be placed according to instructions in the
input file.

Computer scientists distinguish these two ways of document description
by calling SGML and HTML declarative languages and Postscript and PDF
imperative languages. SGML and HTML identify parts of a document and let
something else decide how they look. Postscript and PDF require that
something produce a detailed list of instructions on how to place each
graphics object in the output. Letters are just special types of
graphics objects. There is no such thing as a sentence, paragraph, or
even a word in Postscript.


Pros and Cons

Both HTML and PDF have their specific uses in web publishing. Because
HTML describes a document and leaves the formatting to the browser, HTML
pages look different depending on the browser, the screen settings, and
the user's preferences. If you resize a browser window, the HTML page
changes as best as it can to adapt to the new size. In particular, lines
of text break at different positions in order to fit the page better. It
is hard to make a HTML page be formatted the same for everyone without
lots of tricky work with tables or changing the entire page into a giant
graphic. PDF files are designed to look the same as much as possible, no
matter what you use to view the file. The only limitation is the
graphics capabilities of your computer.

With these design goals in mind, it's easy to see that HTML is best used
for general web pages that appear most often on the Internet. HTML not
only provides document description so that a browser can display a
document, it also provides interaction by means of forms and links.
These allow a two-way interaction between a web browser and a web
server. Adobe Acrobat is meant for document publication where there is
a specific look and feel in mind. It may be technical documents with
footnotes, headers, and other stylistic forms dictated by corporate
requirements, or it may be deliberate control of object placement for
artistic effects. Acrobat's only real link back to the web server is a
hypertext link. Otherwise, there is no other type of interaction. What
one is good at, the other is poor at. However, there is often a need for
both on the Web.

Other differences between HTML and PDF are less important. HTML files
are always sent as text. PDF files are binary. In principle, you can use
a text editor like Notepad to read a HTML file and understand what it is
about. You must use the Acrobat Reader or something similar to read PDF
files. For a given amount of text, HTML files tend to be larger than PDF
files because PDF specifies compression. PDF also includes document
control. Authors can lock documents and prevent certain actions such as
copying or printing. When valuable information is being published, often
it is important that a document always retain origin identification. PDF
allows a publisher to lock a document so that it must be used in its
entirety or not at all. HTML text is free to all that view the page.

The remaining difference may be the one that decides you one way or the
other. Currently, the easiest to obtain package for creating PDF files
is buying a copy of Adobe Acrobat 3.0. Although not expensive, it still
requires a purchase. HTML is free and can be created by a wide variety
of tools. If you search on the Internet for Ghostscript and its
utilities, you will find ways of converting Postscript files to PDF
format without having to pay anything, but the tradeoff is a set of
tools designed to be used from a command line. This may or may not be an
impediment.


WindoWatch Publishing

WindoWatch publishes preferentially in PDF format to protect the
copyrights of its authors and editorial staff. At publication, we try to
preserve a certain look and feel so that people only have to learn to
navigate a document only once. Because PDF is a page description
language, screenshots and other images will stay where they are placed.
However, the web site uses HTML because its contents must be viewable by
a wide number of people using many different browsers. Using HTML gives
us freedom to easily make changes. There is also no special information
to protect about the web site itself. At some future point, if we decide
to use Javascript and Java to enhance the site, it is easily done.

Which tool is best for you depends on what types of documents you intend
to publish. If you don't need a document to look and feel exactly a
certain way or you don't need document security, you don't need Acrobat.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, just that you don't need it.
Otherwise, HTML is just easier to work with.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Herb Chong is a Windows programmer, a researcher, and the Contributing
Editor of WindoWatch. His work has been published by Windows Sources,
The Cobb Group, and WindoWatch. A prolific digital artist, his work can
be found in the WindoWatch Art Gallery.



   ww page 5
  Mastering the WebMaster Suite
  

                         Corel WebMaster Suite
                     Copyright 1997 by Gregg Hommel


Overview

Corel WebMaster Suite according to the Corel advertisements, is
virtually everything one might need to design, publish, and maintain a
Web site. I suppose, this is partially true, but there are
qualifications that should be made to those advertisements.

Overall, should you want to design a fairly simple site, and do so from
scratch, WebMaster Suite may indeed be perfect for you. For a more
complex site, or to maintain a pre-existing site of complexity, it falls
somewhat short of being ideal.


Installation

According to the manuals for Corel WebMaster Suite (some of us do
read them, if not thoroughly), to install the application in Win95, you
select Start|Run and type "X:\setup", X being the drive designation for
the CD. In reality, this is not necessarily the case, as the CD does
support AutoRun, and will start the installation screen when the CD is
inserted into the drive.

Installing WebMaster Suite went fairly smoothly, albeit not quickly. The
box states that the system requirements are a 486 with 16 megs of RAM
for a Win95 install.

I installed on a 486DX2/66 with 20 Megs of RAM, and a 4X CD-ROM. Total
install time was an hour and twenty minutes. The biggest reason? This
thing is big. I used a Custom install, and left out the Barrista
component as Java is more than a little beyond me at the moment; the
Web.Data component for publishing database information on a Web site;
and the Web.World component for creating virtual 3D worlds, using VRML.
I also decided, for now, to not install any of the literally hundreds of
fonts that ship with the Suite.

Even leaving those items out, the resulting install required 138 Megs.
of space on my hard drive! A typical install requires 146 Megs., while a
full, Custom install could use as much as 176 Megs., all without any of
the over 8,000 graphics files included on a second CD-ROM, and accessed
using the Web.Gallery component.

In spite of the time required (a fast Pentium machine, with a 12X CD-ROM
couldn't hurt that), and the space, the install went smoothly, at least,
until it came time to register the product via TCP/IP, as suggested by
the install. I filled out the information requested, and told it to go
ahead. A connection was established to my ISP, and the dialog box on the
screen said that the registration information was being transferred.

This went on for five minutes. I couldn't check to see if there was
still activity, as the Corel install utility is full screen, even
covering the Win95 task bar. I couldn't find a way to make the screen
any smaller, or to minimize the install to check the modem status lights
on the system tray. So, after seven minutes, I cancelled the
registration. I have no idea if anything really did happen, or not, but
will assume that it did not, and mail in the proper registrations.

After canceling the registration, a few more minutes brought me out of
the install, with a dialog telling me the installation had completed
successfully. It was then I found out that my connection to my ISP was
still open. Canceling the registration dialog obviously did not
disconnect from the ISP.

Upon exiting the install, I had, as happens frequently, several windows
on the desktop, each containing some of the icons installed into my
Start menu for the various WebMaster components. As usual, I closed
these down, and then, as is usual for me after any application
installation, restarted Win95.

Nothing in the install had told me to do this. I have just found it to
be a good habit to get into. And in this case, it turned out to be so.
When I restarted Win95, I got the standard "Setup is configuring your
system" on the screen, as configuration changes made by the WebMaster
install were completed, and loaded.

Additionally, when the system restarted, those windows for the Corel
Start Menu items were once more opened on my desktop. Once again, I
closed them down, this time to some effect. Just out of curiosity, I
restarted Win95 again, and this time, the windows did not re-appear.

I would suggest, however, that, after installing Corel WebMaster Suite,
you restart your system, even though the install does not mention any
need to do so.


Web.Designer - A WYSIWYG HTML Authoring Tool?

The current buzzword when it comes to HTML authoring applications is
WYSIWYG. It seems that every new authoring tool to come out these days
claims to be WYSIWYG. Web.Designer, the HTML authoring portion of
WebMaster Suite, is no different. However, it is actually more like
WYSIAWYGANRTC (what you see is approximately what you get, although not
really that close).

I will be the first to admit that I did not try out Web.Designer on a
simple, one page, non-framed design. I am not interested in that, so I
didn't bother. Instead, I tried to use it to duplicate my current site
design, which is twofold in nature. Since the more important side of my
site as it relates today's browsers is the framed side, that is what I
tried to duplicate.

Unlike FrontPage97, Web.Designer is capable of displaying frames. The
editor portion of FrontPage 97 allows you to create a framed site, but
does not display it for you. You have to edit each page to go into the
frames as if they were standalone. Web.Designer handles framed pages
much better, displaying the frames, and allowing you to edit the files
in those frames in place.

BUT, and this is a big one, this is where we come up with WYSIAWYGANRTC.
First, let's look at my site, as it is currently coded (using HomeSite
1.2 and displayed using Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01).[**]


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


This is how I intended it to be seen. I wanted no frame borders, making
it appear to be a seamless, single page, even though it is not. As often
as possible, I want the entire content of all frames visible without the
need to scroll to see them. The entire navigation bar on the left should
be fully visible so that navigation of the site is as simple as
possible.

As of this writing, I have not yet had the time to attempt to completely
duplicate this in Web.Designer. I have created a portion of the
navigation bar, the title frame with only the marquee, and the home page
displayed when you first log on, but nothing for the two icons in the
bottom frame. This is how it appears in Web.Designer. You will note
several things:

1. The background graphic appears to be rather pinkish compared to that
   displayed in Internet Explorer (and Netscape 3.01, too).

2. Everything displayed appears to be larger than it should be. The text
   is large, both in paragraphs, and in tables. The frames do not
   display the full content of each one. The table in the left frame
   continues below the edge of the WYSIWYG display. The title at the top
   right is a graphic only, with the marquee missing.

3. The frames all have borders on them. This, in spite of setting
   borders off in the properties for the frames. What that does in code
   is to set BORDER="0", while it should set FRAMEBORDERS=NO. When
   previewed in a browser, the Web.Designer setting still displays
   borders on the frames, albeit small ones. In order to eliminate the
   borders in the frames, I had to use the manual HTML direct editor,
   and add a FRAMEBORDER="NO" parameter to the <FRAMESET> source code.

Even so, the frames themselves are being displayed, which is an
improvement over the FrontPage 97 editor. The default content of each
frame can be edited in place even if you can't change a frame's contents
to edit other files to be displayed there. This makes it far easier to
design a framed site which looks the way you want it to when viewed on
the Internet, than it is to do the same thing in FrontPage 97.

However, close is generally only good enough in horseshoe tossing, and
hand grenades. In this particular case, Web.Designer displays an
approximation of the page, but not as close as one might like (thus,
WYSIAWYGANRTC). This is how the above looks when previewed in Microsoft
Internet Explorer 3.01.[**]


As you can see, the margins have changed, in some cases, like the
navigation bar, drastically. The navigation bar appears to take up far
less room in display here than it does in Web.Designer, with all kinds
of room left over below it, rather than having the table itself scroll
off the screen. There is much more of each frame visible than there was
in Web.Designer because of much smaller font display. Simply more is
displayed, in reality, in any given frame than is displayed in
Web.Designer.


The Word Processor approach to HTML Authoring

The above being said, for a WYSIAWYGANRTC HTML authoring tool,
Web.Designer is certainly of far more use when it comes to frames than
FrontPage 97 is. Even approximately is better than no display of a
framed page at all. And the tools for semi-WYSIWYG design of a page in
Web.Designer are pretty much the same as those found in FrontPage 97.

WebMaster Suite comes with a much more extensive collection of templates
to be used when designing a page. I counted around 225 of them, ranging
from generic, to very specific in style. If your interests rest in the
ecology and environment, WebMaster Suite has templates that express this
well. Whatever your interests, or the basic concept of your site, there
is likely something within the more than 225 templates to suit you.

But you are not limited to those templates. Should none of them suit
you, there is nothing to stop you from designing from scratch, and
Web.Designer handles that quite well, and in the familiar fashion of a
word processor.

Text can be typed in place, and formatted using either the menus or a
Word Processor-like formatting toolbar. The standard text formatting
tools are available from Bold, through Italic, through centered
paragraphs, and so on. Even the colour of text can be changed on a
selective basis with the use of a somewhat inscrutable icon on the
formatting toolbar.

Inserting graphics into a file is a relatively simple procedure, again,
either by icon, or a menu item. Just place your cursor where you want
the graphic, and click the tool bar icon or menu item. Web.Designer will
bring up a dialog box asking for the name of the graphic file, and all
parameters for it. If you don't know the name of the file, there is a
browse button to locate it.

When you locate the graphic, if not in your current site directories,
Web.Designer will make a copy of it there. This is done so that the URL
for the graphic can be handled on a relative basis, and so that, when
you upload your site to the Internet, the graphics files used on it are
easy to find, and upload along with the HTML files themselves.

Tables and forms are just as simple to insert, either using icons on the
toolbar, or items on a menu. Modifying the elements of a table or form
is equally simple. Want to add a new cell to a table? Just select that
item from the Table menu and modify the text content of a text form
element? Just as easy.

One place Web.Designer excels (sorry -- considering this suite is from
Corel, maybe that should read "quattros") is in working with frames.
Like tables and forms, everything is on one menu. Want to add another
frame to your site? Just do it from the menu. Split an existing frame
into two? Same thing! Use the menu because there is an entry there to do
just that. Delete a frame element? Once again, it is there. When it
comes to dealing with frames, Web.Designer appears to have all the bases
covered, even a few that weren't on the playing field before.

Inserting an anchor, however, is not quite as simple as in some other
HTML authoring tools. When I wanted to do so, both the icon on the
toolbar, and the menu item for it were grayed out. This one had me
stumped for a while, enough so that I actually fell back on the Help
files to find an answer. It turned out to be rather simple just not the
way I am used to working. Most HTML authoring tools these days will
allow you to place a link in the file, and in the dialog setting this
up, will ask for everything applicable to the anchor or link, including
the text to be used as the link. Web.Designer takes a slightly different
approach. In Web.Designer, you first type the text into the page that
will become the link, then highlight it. When you highlight text, or an
image, in Web.Designer, the icon for inserting an HTML link and the menu
item for it will become active. You can then, in the resulting dialog
box, specify the details of the link.

In spite of these relatively minor drawbacks, designing a site in
Web.Designer, which looked rather close to my existing site, was quite
simple to do, and required only about an hour. Of course, I began
knowing what I was aiming for, having already designed the site, but
still, it was fairly quick and painless. Even I have to admit, it was
much easier than when I tried designing the site again in a non-WYSIWG
HTML authoring tool.


ActiveX Controls and Scripting

Web.Designer makes it fairly easy, and painless to insert an ActiveX
control into your page. Go to the Insert menu, select the ActiveX item,
and then pick the control you want from the list of them installed on
your system.

Set the various elements of the control, then select the Properties
button to edit the properties and parameters of the control, if, of
course, Web.Designer is able to determine that they exist. However,
Web.Designer is somewhat inconsistent here. Several controls I tested
showed no Properties to edit, even though the same controls had editable
properties in FrontPage 97.

Where Web.Designer, and the WebMaster Suite really fell down in this
area is in what to do with the controls once they are placed on your
page. I could find no way to add scripting code to control the ActiveX
controls, or to act upon them, either in JavaScript, or VBScript. And
indeed, from my experience importing my files into Web.Designer (see
below), it would appear that Web.Designer simply does not recognize
scripting, in any form. Of course, this makes it rather difficult to act
upon, or use many ActiveX controls, and is something that should be
addressed by Corel as soon as possible.


Importing an Existing Site

It is here that I had real problems with WebMaster Suite. However, I
must also say that I had real problems doing this using FrontPage 97 as
those of you who read my editorial last month already know.

Importing my current site into Web.Designer resulted in errors reported
in five, out of six, basic files imported. To begin with, Web.Designer
had problems with my default.html file. This file uses a trick to direct
a visitor to the appropriate site, framed or non-framed. This trick
involves the use of REFRESH meta tags, one in a page loaded into a
single frame on that default page (to determine whether the browser is
frames capable). The other, however, (and this is the "trick"), uses a
REFRESH meta tag in the <NOFRAMES> section of the default.html file.
This redirects the browser to the non-framed site, if it sees the
<NOFRAMES> section. In order for this to work (and it does), the tag
MUST be in that section of the default page.

Like FrontPage 97, Web.Designer insisted on moving this tag from
<NOFRAMES> to the <HEAD> section of the page, a move which totally
defeats the purpose, and causes the default.html file to fail miserably
in it's purpose. And, also like FrontPage 97, Web.Designer refused to
allow me to move the tag back to where it belonged, even using the HTML
source code editor. As soon as I made the change, and went back to the
WYSIWYG editor, Web.Designer changed the code back to where it thought
it should go.

Once this failed, I decided to go to the framed site itself, and import
the main files, the <FRAMESET> page, and the four files it loads into
frames. Of these five files, Web.Designer reported errors in four of
them. In two cases, the errors reported were a result of elements of the
page being set in JavaScript code, which Web.Designer does not recognize
as being in existence, other than to import it intact.

The biggest error report was generated by my 3,690 byte table.html file,
which is the table of contents, navigation bar loaded into the frame on
the left hand side of my site. Here, Web.Designer reported 136 errors!
And in the process of discovering these errors, Web.Designer totally
blew away the table used to hold the bar, resulting in code which
displayed like this in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.01.[**]


The reason that the title bar looks as close to my original as it does
is because most of the code for it is contained in a JavaScript, which
Web.Designer basically ignored, and didn't change. As a result, when
later loaded into a browser, the title displayed closer to the original
than it might have otherwise.

I later found out why this happened (after a fair bit of experimenting
with code until I discovered the reason). It appears that Web.Designer
expects a <TR></TR> construct around every "row" of a table, even the
first (and perhaps, only) row. In reality, HTML does not require this,
although including a <TR> construct around the first row makes no
difference to the display of the table. But, Web.Designer requires this
on each and every row, no matter if there is one, or 100 of them. If it
does not find this construct on the very first row in a table, it
reports an error, and proceeds to close the table using </TABLE>,
resulting in a table without any rows.

This, of course, means that every other <TD> thereafter is also reported
as an error, whether or not it has a <TR> included (they are reported as
errors, also), and removed from the code. End result? What you see
displayed above, a table without any contents, and all of the contents
of the table cells displayed as if they were written to a single line on
the screen.

Admittedly, this one was easy to fix, and later attempts at importing my
files were far more successful. However, it was frustrating, to say the
least, until I figured this out, without anything in the error messages
from Web.Designer to give me a hint as to the problem. And it was also
frustrating to have to rewrite my code to suit Web.Designer's ideas of
proper code in order to be able to import the file without this
multitude of errors.


The Rest of WebMaster Suite

There is much more to WebMaster Suite than the WYSIWYG HTML editor. I
took a quick look at Web.Site, the site management utility, however, as
I did not yet have a workable site in WebMaster, either through design
or import, and was not able to test it out fully. It appeared at first
glance, to be rather similar to the same feature in FrontPage 97, albeit
a little less visually intense, and therefore, perhaps, more usable.

WebMaster Suite also comes with a wide range of graphics applications
designed specifically for the Web, as one would expect from something
out of the house of Corel. Indeed, these graphics applications take up a
large proportion of the space required by a full install of Corel
WebMaster Suite. They include Web.Draw for creating vector graphics for
use on the Web; Web.PhotoPaint, a rather large utility for the
manipulation of bitmap images and in particular, photos, etc.; and
Web.Move, a utility to create and/or edit, animation files.

I tried all of these, but never got very far with them. In all honesty,
they were well above my head to be able to test them out reasonably
well, or for that matter, at all. When it comes to graphics, my children
refer to me as challenged, and insist that I am simply unable to draw a
straight line, even on paper, using a ruler, without the assistance of a
third party. Given some time to go over the manuals for these in detail,
and to practice and play with them, I am certain that I could make use
of them, and that they would be up to the usual high standards of any
drawing application from Corel. But our editor insisted on having this
review before the new millenium, so I had to skip trying to do that.


Conclusion

Let's face it. I am simply not a WYSIWYG kind of person when it comes to
HTML authoring. I push the limits of HTML at times, tricking it into
doing what I want it to do, sometimes beyond the bounds of normal
programming. Lately, I have begun using JavaScript for control of the
page, to make the content somewhat dynamic, and to add interest to
things. To do this, I like to get down and dirty with the code itself,
and that is just too difficult to accomplish with a WYSIWYG authoring
tool.

Because I push the limits, the code I use is somewhat outside the bounds
of normal at times. An authoring tool which forces me to write my code
the way IT thinks is best, whether that works as intended or not, just
isn't my cup of tea. As a result of these quirks of mine, it simply may
be impossible for me to ever import my site into a WYSIWYG HTML
authoring tool. So far, having tried two of the latest applications, it
certainly appears so.

However, if you are just starting out with HTML programming, and don't
care to deal directly with the source code at all times, or have little
desire to push the limits of what can be done beyond the normal bounds,
just to see if you can do it, then Corel WebMaster Suite may be just the
ticket for you. It makes it remarkably easy to design and build a
complete site from scratch, whether it is framed, or not. Although not
quite accurate, its WYSIWYG display is reasonably close, making it
simpler to design a site as you want it to look. And the display of
content in a framed site during editing is certainly a boon to those
designing such a site, something FrontPage 97 could learn from

The Suite comes with an impressive array of graphics files, predesigned
for use, and royalty free. If you can't find what you want among the
8,000 or so files on the second CD in the Suite, then maybe it doesn't
exist. The graphics tools included with the Suite will allow you to
design the graphic yourself, be it vector-based, bitmap, or animation.
Web.Designer has an almost equally impressive array of templates to use
to begin designing a site, or to add a new page to the site.

But be forewarned. Corel WebMaster Suite can and will help you design
Web pages to be proud of, but it asks a price in return. Unless you are
graphics competent to begin with, the learning curve on the graphics
portions of the suite is steep, even if Web.Designer is not.
Additionally, it will require a very large amount of hard drive space to
install everything in the suite, and a powerful processor with gobs of
RAM. But, if you have that much space, and the power of at least a
486Dx266 with 16+ Megs of RAM, Corel WebMaster Suite can get the job
done for you, with a minimum of fuss, so long as you don't push the
limits of HTML, or need to do scripting.

Corel WebMaster Suite shows some definite and very strong potential.
With the addition of scripting capabilities, and the reduction of some
of the control that it insists upon exercising over the code that you
write, it could prove itself useful to a wide variety of Web designers.
In this 1.0 version, it's usefulness is somewhat limited by the lack of
these items, but the potential is definitely there.


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


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Gregg Hommel has been looking at HTML authoring tools. This is the
second review and evaluation in this vein. The next will be Adobe's
PageMill v.2.



   ww page 6
  The Corel WebMaster Suite                      An Evaluation and Review
  


                         Corel WebMaster Suite
                   Copyright 1997 By Daniel Christle


Corel advertises their recently released WebMaster Suite as the complete
web site solution for web masters. In this review we examine this claim
as we inspect the components that make up this suite.

I installed WebMaster Suite on a Pentium 120 with 32 Megs of RAM with an
8x CD-ROM. The installation went smoothly and took about a half an hour
to complete. At the end of the installation the setup routine asks to
register you via the Internet and starts up your default connectoid.
However after waiting 10 minutes for the registration to complete I
finally gave up and decided to mail the registration card in instead.

In my install I chose a custom installation that consisted of
Web.Designer (the Web editor), Web.Move (graphic animator),
Web.SiteManager, Web.Draw (a web enabled light version of CorelDraw),
and Web.PhotoPaint (photo and graphics editor). This resulted in about a
whopping 139 MB of disk space being consumed. I could have easily
consumed and additional 10+ MB of disk space had I installed Web.World a
3D VRML editor. Included with WebMaster Suite are Netscape 3.01,
O'Reilly's WebSite 1.1 web server software and 8,000 pieces of clip art.
I chose not to install O'Reilly's Website or Navigator as I already had
Netscape Navigator 3.01 and Communicator 4.0 installed on my system and
had no real need for server software.

The first pace I visited once the software was installed was
Web.Designer the heart of this suite. Web.Designer is a WYSIWYG HTML
editor, and like others of its genre, it only shows you a close
approximation of the page you are creating. This leaves you to still
check your work in a browser to see what it actually look like.

Creating a page from scratch is simple and when you first load up the
program you are presented with several options; to Start a New Web Page,
Start a New Page with Frames, Open and Existing Web Page or, Choose a
Template to Begin your Web Page. My first effort was to start from
scratch and found, for the most part, that the program was easy to use.
Backgrounds and other <BODY> tag options are found by right clicking
anywhere on the page and selecting properties.

Other areas of page creation were not so easy to figure out immediately,
such as image properties. Once you insert an image and you want to
modify its properties, you must either use the menu or double click on
it to modify its properties. You can not simply right click on the image
as you can in other programs. When you right click the image you get the
page properties and not the image properties, something that I found
confusing.

Creating image maps was simple enough and while the image map maker
included with Web.Designer is somewhat mediocre it does the job. You can
create both server side maps and client side maps with this
image-mapping tool. Hot spots can be created with a couple of different
shapes, a rectangle, circle or polygon, which will handle most users
needs. A quirk that Web.Designer has that can be somewhat annoying if
you design multiple sites is you must define a folder as your server
root. When you are saving to a directory other than the one predefined
you are warned that you could loose your relative links. As it turned
out Web.Designer simply copies all the graphics and page elements to the
new directory.

One thing I did like about Web.Designer is the ability to edit the
source code in the source view. I found this handy for tweaking some tag
elements; however, this is where you can start to run into problems with
Web.Designer. If you insert an element that Web.Designer doesn't like it
will remove it or change it citing it as an error. This seemed to happen
with the <CENTER> tag. To me it appeared to replace the <CENTER> tag at
random with <P ALIGN=CENTER>. Admittedly, this would seem to be caused
by the fact that Web.Designer adheres rather strictly to the HTML 3.2
specification where <CENTER> is allowed but not officially recognized as
yet. This, to my way of thinking, is rather amazing considering the wide
spread popularity of the <CENTER> tag.

On the plus side, while you can't see the results of JavaScript in the
editing window, it does leave it alone. Which means you can use
JavaScript to your heart's content with out fear of the program changing
the code on you. The only way to insert JavaScript into your documents
is in the source code editor, there are no options to insert from the
main editing screen. Something I found unusual considering how often
this is done with text editors.

Where Web.Designer really falls short is when you open an existing page.
I opened my homepage in Web.Designer and discovered to my dismay that it
had inserted extra rows and cells in the table that provides the layout
for that page. To see if this is consistent I opened several of the
WindoWatch pages with it and true to form it did the same thing. If you
want to use this program as a tool to manage an existing site, be
forewarned Web.Designer may not be useful for you. If you were to do so
you will have much work to do converting your site to something
Web.Designer will work with.

Something else I found irksome in Web.Designer was that the insertion of
Java applets or ActiveX controls is poorly implemented compared to other
programs I have used in the past. The documentation for either of these
functions is dismal and relies on the user to know and understand well
the use of Java or ActiveX. The manual contains a whopping 1/3 of a page
on inserting an ActiveX control and not a whole lot more on Java. This
is not exactly helpful to a novice of these technologies.

The next piece of the suite I looked into was Web.SiteManager, the site
management tool. You can manage a site locally on your hard disk or
directly on the Internet, well, sort of. I chose to try this last option
with a couple of sites I work on. I was able to have Web.SiteManager
check all my links and pages to make sure everything was accurate and in
place. In my trial it found no broken links on my personal site but did
so on another site I tried. At this point it is simply a matter of
correcting the link and you are back in business. You can also have the
software create a mirror of your site locally on your hard disk, a big
advantage if you want to keep your site accurate and up to date. Anyone
who has managed a large site can tell you it is no easy task maintaining
that site on a day to day basis. Uploading your changes or any new pages
is accomplished through the use of the included FTP program. To edit a
page on that resides on the Internet Web.SiteManager must download that
page to your hard disk first. Then you can use the editor of your choice
to edit that page. This is great feature, especially if you prefer a
text editor for quick changes to an editor like Web.Designer.

From here I moved on to the graphics tools that are included in
WebMaster Suite. I won't go into too much detail however I found them to
be adequate for my needs. These include Web.PhotoPaint and WebDraw,
scaled down versions of Corel Draw and Corel PhotoPaint 7that has been
web enabled. While I am not a graphics specialist, these programs are
all that you will need for web based graphics. In PhotoPaint and WebDraw
it is really easy to create transparent GIFs and convert just about any
image type available to images that are supported on the web. To get a
better idea of what Corel's graphic applications can do I would
recommend you check out Jack Passarellas' Corel Draw series.

Overall, I would say that Corel WebMaster Suite is a good set of tools,
especially for graphically oriented or novice users. It definitely has
some draw backs and will not appeal to anyone who is really comfortable
with the HTML markup language or is heavy into JAVA or ActiveX. For
someone who is creating a site from scratch and has little time to work
on it, Corel WebMaster Suite may just be the perfect tool. The real
bonuses in this suite are the graphics tools and site management tools
that are included in the package. They alone are worth the purchase
price.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Dan Christle has been the WindoWatch WebMaster since the first of the
year. He also examines a variety of software for the magazine. His
Norton Utilities ver. 2 continues to be a very popular file as are his
WW offerings on Cookies and Spam.



     ww page 7
  A Corel WebMaster Epilogue
  


                  Weighing Corel's WebMaster Features
                     Copyright 1997 by Dan Christle


Corel's WebMaster Suite is probably one of the few Web authoring suites
available in today's market competing with the likes of Microsoft's
FrontPage. Products, such as these, offer a variety of tools covering
the major cornerstones of site development; web design, graphics and
site management. Unlike the majority of web authoring tools available,
WebMaster Suite provides you with a graphical environment to work in.
Tools such as these are really aimed at the corporate user who lacks the
time to develop and manage a large site or towards the more graphically
inclined who really don't care to see HTML coding.

But are suites like these useful? Let's take a look at Corel's WebMaster
Suite and see what we came up with. To begin, we had to ask the question
does WebMaster Suite deliver on its promise as a total solution for web
developers. Frankly the answer is yes! However it does fall short in
some areas and will likely not appeal to the professional Web Master as
a primary editing tool.

You can develop a uniform site quickly and easily from scratch or from a
myriad of templates. In fact, you can design a framed site with
delightful ease because Web.Designer (the authoring component of
WebMaster Suite) does something FrontPage can't. You can work within the
frames themselves so you get an approximation of what your site will
look like with frames. This has always been something that developers
have had to work around by loading up a browser locally while working on
their code. The caveat here is the you only get a close approximation of
the appearance of your page as you develop or edit it. To see how it
looks, you still have to load a browser to preview the page, something
that Web.Designer allows you to do with a click of a button.
Unfortunately, you can only assign one browser for previewing. In
practical terms, this a let down for most web authors who are notorious
for having several browsers on their systems so they can see how their
pages look under a variety of conditions.

Gregg Hommel (the WindoWatch resident HTML editor) really discovered an
area where Web.Designer truly lacks; the importing of existing pages. In
his exploration of the suite he imported his framed pages into
Web.Designer and watched in horror as it preempted his code, which
displayed well in both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and then
proceeded to call them full of errors. As a result, Web.Designer changed
the code to what it believed it should have been. This resulted in
dramatic changes to the overall appearance of his pages. Worse yet, on a
page that used tables extensively, Web.Designer reported 136 errors and
rendered the page pretty much useless.

In my tests Web.Designer also decided my tables were full of errors and
added more elements to them changing the layout of my graphics. While
you can go into the source editor to hand code your page or in this case
repair the page, Web.Designer will not allow you to change code it
believes to be in error. To get around this you have to resort to a text
editor (HomeSite is my favorite at the moment) to implement the changes
we wanted. Bottom line, if you want to be on the cutting edge of HTML,
you will need to do most of your work in a text editor, particularly if
you work with scripting. Web.Designer seems to intensely dislike
VBScript while completely ignoring JavaScript. This is a good thing for
those of us that use JavaScript but not so good for the VBScript user
who gets to watch his or her script get eaten and turned into useless
text. Web.Designer will let you insert Java or a basic ActiveX control
with no problem at all. In his tests Gregg just couldn't find an
acceptable way to manipulate the controls for ActiveX, something that,
as Hommel will tell you, FrontPage does quite well.

Another thing that WebMaster Suite promises is the ability to edit pages
online. I tried this and it works -- well sort of! Actually it downloads
the file to your hard disk while keeping you connected to the site. Once
you are finished editing the file it just copies it back to the site. I
am not sure you would want to make major site changes this way but the
option is there. Also it does support both Netscape 3.0 and Internet
Explorer 3.0 specific tags rather well, making this suite a good
universal development tool. The same cannot be said of FrontPage which
really gravitates towards optimizing pages for Internet Explorer.

Needless to say the rest of the suite is quite good, in fact the rest of
the suite may appeal to the power and professional users. The graphics
tools are above average as they are scaled down versions of CorelDraw
and Corel PhotoPaint that have been web enabled. You can easily convert
or edit graphics and make web ready images such as transparent GIFs and
JPG files. If you use Adobe Photoshop or Jasc's Paint Shop Pro you are
unlikely to switch to WebMaster suite just because of the graphics. But
you may be tempted by the site management tool. The site management
tool, Web.SiteManager, is an excellent value in and of itself and easy
to work with. It gives you a graphical or detailed view of your site and
searches out your links to external sites and reports back any links
that are broken.

What is really nice about Web.SiteManager is it doesn't require a web
server to be installed on your system in order for you to use it. To me
this is a real boon as I am not connected to the Internet full time and
don't quite appreciate the extra drain on resources a web server would
make on my PC.

In the end WebMaster Suite lives up to its promises as a general purpose
tool but its not for everyone. Its main appeal will be for novice
authors who don't want to deal with code or need to manage a site and
have little time to do so. If you are a professional Web Master or even
a hand coding veteran who likes to tweak all the elements that make up a
page, you won't like this package. The price it extracts in terms of
providing a graphical editing environment can hamper you as it takes
control of the HTML, shielding it from the user almost completely. In my
opinion it is easier to use than FrontPage and is a worthy contender in
the WYSIWYG authoring category. For my part I plan to use the site
management and graphic tools that are included with the suite while
continuing to use my text editor.



   ww page 8
  Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks          The HTML Tutorial Series: Part IX
  


                  How to Grow Gray Hair - or Lose it!
                  Copyright 1996, 1997 by Gregg Hommel



All Men are Created Equal - but all browsers are not!

I was planning on breaking new ground with this column by leaving the
topic of frames behind us, - more or less! I want to advance to the fun
stuff of JAVAScript and scripting in general. I do intend to keep with
this plan, but must first explore another area, else all of our efforts
with JAVAScript in future will be for naught.

Several months ago, I began working on a new site for myself on the Web.
The original was getting old, and due for a change, but more
importantly, I wanted to use this new site as a learning experience for
these columns. It would afford me a venue to try out some JAVAScript
code that was intended for use here, while updating my site at the same
time. Little did I know when I began how quickly doing so would cause
the hair I have left to turn gray, and the hair that was already gray,
begin to fall out.

I will be the first to admit that I was partially at fault , mostly
because I forgot a cardinal rule in programming: never assume anything
will work without testing it!

I designed the new site, and got the preliminary version up and running
perfectly on my local machine. It looked great, so I uploaded it to the
Web, and asked some friends to take a look and tell me what they
thought. And that's when it hit the fan!

Those friends, using Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0x said it looked
great. Then the problems began, notably with friends who use Netscape
3.0x as their browser.

The rule I had forgotten? Don't ever assume that any two different
browsers will see a given page or site exactly the same way. I had
checked the new site with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but, because I
had not used it in a long while, and no longer had a copy installed, did
not test with Netscape. And boy, was that a mistake!

The first problem for my friends with Netscape was simply that they
could not get to the site. They would enter the URL, or use their
bookmark entry, and nothing would happen. Absotively, and posolutely
nothing!


Gray Hair is Caused by Browsers

Let me try to explain. http://www.ionline.net/~gregghom/ would cause
your browser to go to my site, and open the file default.html. No
problem with that, except that I actually had two sites to visit; one
that used frames for browsers that were frames capable and another that
did not, for everyone else. But how to direct everyone who came to my
site to the correct place?

I knew, of course, about meta tags, the special tags one uses in the
<HEAD> area to indicate various things about the pages, such as author,
keywords, and of course, REFRESH. You aren't familiar with that?
Actually you probably are, but don't know it.

Have you ever gone to a page that has changed locations, been told they
have, and after waiting a few seconds, will be sent to their new site?
That is done via a REFRESH meta tag in the <HEAD> section of the page.
And this is exactly what I needed, except for one small detail; I wanted
to direct people to two different spots, depending upon the browser they
were using. And a REFRESH meta tag doesn't offer that option. Or does
it?

The answer is that, in a way, it does. You see, in reality, for most
browsers, it doesn't matter if the REFRESH meta tag is in the <HEAD>
area or not. They will act on it, even if it is found in the <BODY>
section of a page. I found this out by accidentally placing my tag in
the body when I was testing the REFRESH tags, to see if I could use
them. And the browser was redirected, even though the REFRESH tag was
not in the <HEAD> section.

This gave me an idea. What if I used a <FRAMESET> to load a single page,
i.e. one frame only. If the browser loaded that page, then it was frames
capable. If not, it would load the contents of <NOFRAMES>. Now, what if
I put a REFRESH meta tag into the <HEAD> of the single page loaded by
that <FRAMESET>, like this:

  <META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL=framed/main.html">

and, in the <NOFRAMES> section of the <FRAMESET> page, put this:

  <META HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL=noframe/main.html">

Would that do what I wanted and load the framed site for a browser that
was frames capable, as well as, the non-framed site for others? To my
surprise, it did, when tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer, at
least.

But, from what others told me, it did not when tried with Netscape. As a
matter of fact, it wouldn't even show the small start up page, either
framed or <NOFRAMES> that simply said "One moment, please." while the
REFRESH tag worked. That should have been my hint, but it wasn't. I
assumed (that nasty word again) that the problem was with the REFRESH
tags, and tried playing with various parts and positions for those to
see if I could fix things. No matter what I did, nothing could get
Netscape to properly open the site.

While all this was going on, Lois, our fearless editor, was off
exploring newsgroups, to see if she could find anything that might help.
Meantime, I had decided on using a JAVAScript solution to my site
loading problem, by using a small script that did nothing more than
change the URL of the current page to a new one. Since the only browsers
currently released that are frames capable, also all support JAVAScript,
I figured this would at least work until I found the proper answer. And
it did, but I wasn't happy with a workaround, rather than the real
answer to the problem.

Some of the items Lois had read in those newsgroups referred to problems
with Netscape and frames, which caused me to begin looking for my answer
there, rather than in the REFRESH meta tags. I tried almost everything.
Originally, since it was only loading one frame, my tag was simply
<FRAMESET>, which worked just fine. However, with the bug in my ear, I
decided that perhaps Netscape had a problem with <FRAMESET> without a
ROWS= or COLS=, so I modified the page to read <FRAMESET ROWS="100%">,
which again worked just fine with Microsoft Internet Explorer. But still
no luck with any Netscape version.

Well, I tried every possible permutation and combination of parameters
for the <FRAMESET> tag that I could think of, and nothing worked. I had
about given up hope, when I ran across a page of HTML samples on the
Web, and noticed one that did just what I wanted to do, i.e. load a
single page into a single frame, as if it were not framed at all. BUT,
the code they used was just ever so slightly different from that I had
tried. It was a simple <FRAMESET ROWS="100%,*">. A very small difference
but a very critical one. Netscape will ignore a <FRAMESET> tag unless it
includes a ROWS= with at least two settings in it! To complicate matters
further, if it ignores the <FRAMESET>, it still does not see, or act
upon, the <NOFRAMES>. And that is what was happening on my site.
Netscape users would visit, and since the <FRAMESET> did not at any time
include at least two settings for ROWS=, Netscape would ignore the
<FRAMESET> and also ignore the <NOFRAMES>. As a result, Netscape users
would go to my site, and see absolutely nothing.

Within minutes, I changed my code to read <FRAMESET ROWS="100%,*">,
which bothered Microsoft Internet Explorer not at all, and voila!
Netscape users could now access my site as hoped for.


So? What is the Point?

Glad you asked that! The point is that I assumed that both Microsoft
Internet Explorer and Netscape would recognize the same tags, written
the same way, and would act upon them in exactly the same manner.
Regrettably, as the above proves, this is not always even close to being
the truth when we make the dreadful mistake in assuming anything else.

It is a general rule for Web site developers that you should always test
a site with as many browsers as you can, and at as many possible screen
resolutions as you can. Thankfully, the current crop of HTML authoring
tools often takes care of this by allowing you to view the code you have
written with multiple browser choices, and often, using multiple
resolution choices. Of course, this assumes, that word again, that you
have multiple browsers installed to choose from, and many people simply
do not.

However, if you are going to be at all serious about this, you should at
the least, have Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape installed to
test with. Because you see, now that Netscape users could access my
site, my problems were not only not over, but were just beginning!

If you recall, in earlier columns, to set up our frames we used
something like <FRAMESET ROWS="85,*55" FRAMEBORDER=0 FRAMESPACING=0
BORDER=0>. Well, I am sorry to say that I told you wrong.

Using similar code to that, this is what I saw in Microsoft Internet
Explorer <INSERT PICTURE MYMSIE.GIF HERE> which, in all honesty, was, at
the time, precisely what I wanted to have a user see. Now, I know that
Netscape doesn't accept the Microsoft Internet Explorer marquee tag, and
would just display static text replacing it in the table portion of the
title header. But I sort of expected (silly me!) that this would be the
only real difference if the site was viewed using Netscape. As you can
see <INSERT PICTURE MYNETS3.GIF HERE>, it wasn't!

The left hand, top and bottom frames are badly sized, requiring scroll
bars, and there is a gap between each of the frames, even if there are
no borders. The latter turned out to be the easiest to fix. Again,
reading various Web sites on HTML coding provided a clue. On one of
these, I read something about Netscape not using the Microsoft Internet
Explorer FRAMEBORDER=0, but instead, requiring FRAMEBORDER=NO. It also
mentioned that, if trying to design for both browsers, you should
include both parameters, as Microsoft Internet Explorer does not
recognize FRAMEBORDER=NO.

In the end, this turned out to be a touch inaccurate. The addition of
the FRAMEBORDER=NO did indeed result in the border gaps being eliminated
in Netscape, however, in one of my edits of the <FRAMESET> page, I
goofed, and forgot to put in the FRAMEBORDER=0 for Microsoft Internet
Explorer. To my surprise, this had no effect on Microsoft Internet
Explorer, and the display remained just as it was with FRAMEBORDER=0 in
the tag. It seems that Microsoft Internet Explorer will accept and use
FRAMEBORDER=NO, while Netscape ignores, and won't use, FRAMEBORDER=0.
So, to get a similar display in both Microsoft Internet Explorer and
Netscape, it is necessary to use, as a minimum, and unlike the code
mentioned in previous columns, <FRAMESET ROWS= "85,*55" FRAMEBORDER=NO
FRAMESPACING=0 BORDER=0>.


Where to from here, now that everything works?

OK, so overall, everything was now working, at least, in so far as the
basic display was concerned. Netscape still required scroll bars for
those frames, while Microsoft Internet Explorer did not, even though the
code was the same, but there were other problems.

Had I scrolled down in the title bar of that Netscape capture, you would
have seen that it had two problems with it. First, the text within the
form elements, the text boxes, was a fair bit larger than that displayed
in Microsoft Internet Explorer, and second, the right hand text box,
with the time in it, is out of alignment with the rest of the contents
of the line. For now, we will ignore the actual contents of the two text
boxes (left and right) visible in the Microsoft Internet Explorer
capture above (and below the scroll in the Netscape capture). They
result from a script that we will get into at some later time. The point
here is that clearly, all other things being equal (I adjusted the fonts
in Netscape to match that I was using in Microsoft Internet Explorer),
the two browsers do not display the same code, in the same way. And
obviously, as a Web site designer, we have to take this into account.

Another difference in how tags are handled has to do with margins. As
you may be aware, in Microsoft Internet Explorer, one can specify the
margins on all four sides of a page using the various MARGIN parameters
for the <BODY> tag, such as TOPMARGIN= and LEFTMARGIN=. The problem is
that these are Microsoft Internet Explorer specific parameters to the
<BODY> tag, and do not work in Netscape. Were you to rely on these to
place the text in your frames, as I did, originally, you would find the
display in Netscape to be completely different.

There is a solution, fortunately, although it only works for frames, and
is much more limited in scope than using the four Microsoft Internet
Explorer parameters. This solution rests with the MARGINHEIGHT= and
MARGINWIDTH= parameters for the <FRAME> tag, which set the margins on
the each side combination of (HEIGHT or WIDTH) for that frame. These are
limited in scope, since you can't set the left/right or top/bottom
margins individually. Even so, using them results in the same display of
your frame contents, as far as margins are concerned, in both Microsoft
Internet Explorer and Netscape.


Forms, Tables, and Alignments

When designing pages for both of the major browsers, you should also be
aware that even the standards that have been around for a while, do not
result in a standard display. Tables are a good example of this.
Normally, the contents of cells in a table are displayed aligned
according to the ALIGN= and VALIGN= parameters for that cell, or for the
table. It is for this reason that many HTML programmers rely on the
<TABLE> tag and it's cells to properly, and consistently, align elements
of the page where they want them. Although HTML has some formatting tags
available, they are limited in what they can and can't do. Often, to
ensure that the contents of a page are displayed as the page designer
wants them displayed, he/she will use a <TABLE> to hold the contents.
Overall, this works just fine.

Where it falls apart, is in the use of <FORM> elements within a <TABLE>
on the page. On my site, I use several text-box <FORM> elements for
various reasons. The biggest of these is because HTML pages are,
overall, static. Through the use of scripting, etc., you can make them
somewhat dynamic, but generally, this is at load time only. You can not
go back and change a portion of text on the page without redrawing the
entire page, at least, not easily. This may change in future, with the
introduction of Dynamic HTML in Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0,
however, that is not yet a standard, nor even finalized in Microsoft
Internet Explorer 4.0.

To compensate for this, and to display a running clock on my pages, it
is possible to use a <FORM> element. Text boxes, for example, are meant
to have the contents changed without redrawing the page to do so. You
can place your cursor in a <FORM> text box, and then type text into it,
to submit the form. Such <FORM> elements can also be manipulated through
scripts, which allows the page designer to modify the <FORM> elements
based upon your responses, a selection from a drop down list, etc. On my
site, I use text <FORM> elements to display the date (which changes once
a day, obviously) and the current time at the user's system (which
changes each second), simply because they are fairly simple to
manipulate, and update, from a script. In order to ensure proper
display, one on either side of the marquee use in my title area, I have
these <FORM> elements contained in cells of a <TABLE>. That is when I
noticed some anomalies in the display of these elements by both
Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape.

I started both browsers, by using VALIGN=bottom, in an attempt to get
the <FORM> elements, and the marquee ( In Netscape, is also a <FORM>
element to be discussed in another column) to align nicely across the
bottom of the cells presenting a pleasing look. The first thing I
noticed was that, in Microsoft Internet Explorer, these <FORM> elements
were not on the bottom of the cell, but in the exact opposite place, the
top. This clearly was not what I wanted, but...

To see what else, if anything, should be fixed, I tried Netscape 3.01.
Much to my surprise (although, by this point, it should not have been),
these elements displayed still differently. The problem here was that
they were displayed inconsistently. Even though all three elements were
set using VALIGN=bottom, the first row, the date and marquee, were on
the cell bottom, but the third was at the top of the cell. This made for
an even but less pleasing display than in Microsoft Internet Explorer,
and was not what I wanted either.

In the end, I tried all kinds of combinations of the parameters in both
the cell (<TD>) and table (<TABLE>) tags to fix this display anomaly,
but the only fix that worked for both Microsoft Internet Explorer and
Netscape was to change to VALIGN=top for all cells. Although not what I
had wanted in the beginning, it at least resulted in the display in both
browsers looking as close as possible to the same thing, without being
too displeasing to the eye.

But, there were still differences that I could do nothing about. The
biggest of these is the font used within the <FORM> element. In
Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the browser options set to the
smallest font on my 1024x768 display (using View. Fonts), the text
within the boxes displayed similarly to the rest of the text on the
page. In Netscape, however, that same text displayed differently from
the balance of the page (even after changing fonts in the Options
section of Netscape), not only larger in size, but with the bold
attribute on, neither of which I had asked for.

And apparently, there is no way to control the font type, size, or
attributes in a <FORM> text box, in either Microsoft Internet Explorer
or Netscape. No matter what I did, or how hard I tried, the text within
the boxes remained the same but different one browser to the other. In
the end, I could only leave it that way, and accept the fact that
nothing I could do would ever make the displays identical in the two
browsers. As you can see below, although not identical, the display in
Microsoft Internet Explorer <INSERT PICTURE MSIE301.GIF HERE> is
reasonably close to that which I was finally able to end up within
Netscape <INSERT PICTURE NS301.GIF HERE> Not quite perfect, but
reasonably close!


Losing Your Hair with JAVAScript (just a little, though!)

I now had a framed site that, in the basics at least, displayed mostly
the same in both major browsers. So I was happy, right? Not even close!
We now come to the use of JAVAScript (JScript in Microsoft Internet
Explorer, although the JAVAScript language name can and is used in
Microsoft Internet Explorer) on my site, and how both browsers can
interpret the same script commands differently. In the process, they can
definitely cause you to lose any hair you may have left on your head.
But we aren't going to do that this month.

Last column, I had promised that we would begin discussing scripts in
Web pages, and I don't want to entirely go back on my word on that. So,
before we begin discussing the differences between Microsoft Internet
Explorer and Netscape when it comes to scripting, as we will next month,
I am going to give you a small, simple (relatively) script to be used to
determine which browser, by name, is being used by a remote visitor.
What you are about to see may look like Greek to you at first (even if
compared to our very first forays into HTML), but it will make sense, I
promise. So here goes (this code should be placed in the <HEAD> section
of the page on which it is to be used).

  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">
  <!--  start hiding script code

  var INDEX = 0;
  /* Determine the browser in use when the page loads */
  if (navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer"){
  INDEX = navigator.appVersion.INDEXOf('MSIE') + 5;
  }
  var browserName = navigator.appName +" "+
        navigator.appVersion.substring(INDEX,INDEX+4);

  // end hiding script code-->
  </SCRIPT>

We start by using the <SCRIPT></SCRIPT> HTML tags. For a browser that
understands scripting, anything between these two tags is taken to be a
script. In the opening <SCRIPT> tag, we also use the
LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT" parameter to tell any browser that sees this,
which language to use to interpret the next lines. Since, by default,
both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape use JAVAScript, this isn't
strictly necessary in our case, but, as a good work habit, we will do so
anyway.

Once we have set up the construct to tell the browser that this is
script code, we have to consider browsers that don't understand scripts.
For those browsers, the <SCRIPT></SCRIPT> tags hold no meaning. As a
result, they don't understand that anything between them is not to be
displayed, but acted upon. And because they don't understand, they will
display what is there, as if it was any other text for the page. In
order to prevent this junk from appearing on the page for browsers not
capable of running scripts, we must hide everything between the <SCRIPT>
and the </SCRIPT> tags. To do this looks strange in the code, but is no
stranger than the standard HTML comment tags (<!-- ?), which tell a
browser that the text between the opening and closing tags is a comment,
and not to be displayed. A browser that understands scripts ignores
these comment tags, because scripts use different tags for comment
lines. But a browser that doesn't ignore scripting, sees the code there
as a comment, and doesn't display it.

Now, we really start. The first thing we do is declare an integer
variable called INDEX, and set it to a value of 0. In JAVAScript, we do
this by using the var variable declaration command. Unlike many
programming languages, JAVAScript does not need a variable declared as a
particular type. When the variable is set equal to something, its type
is determined. Since, in this case, we are setting INDEX equal to 0, it
is automatically an integer variable. The reasons for making this
variable declaration, and equivalency, will become obvious later.

Next, we want to determine the name of the browser being used. You see,
some information about the browser in use is readily available to a
script, provided you know how to access it. JAVAScript is an object
oriented language. This means that the things that it sees and uses,
generally are objects, or classes of objects, and that each object has
both properties (information you can ask about), and methods (things
that can be done to the object). In JAVAScript, you access these
properties and methods of an object by using a "dot" method of address.

I know that this may be confusing, and we will discuss it further in our
next columns, when we delve deeper into scripting. For now, let's look
at the concept quickly.

You are the proud owner of a brand-spanking new car. Let's call that our
object, i.e. car. Now, that car has many properties to it. It has a
colour property, perhaps a type property, maybe an engine size property.
You don't do anything to change these, because they can't be changed,
but they can be "read" from our object, and perhaps used from there. To
read these properties, we might address the colour of our car by a
statement such as currColour = car.colour. We haven't changed the
property, but have made a variable called currColour equal to whatever
that property is, i.e. the colour of our car, and this we may be able to
act upon.

Our car also has something else, which we'll call methods. Methods
instruct the object to do something. Again, we might have several
methods for our car, such as a start method, a stop method (a good idea
if we have a start one), and other methods used to make the object do
other things. But again we use the "dot" method to address these,
although slightly differently than we did for the properties of our car.
In JAVAScript, for example, to start the car up, we would use
car.start(). The brackets tell us that this is a method, and the dot
command tells the car to apply the start method, and thus, start the
car.

In JAVAScript, one of the objects available to us is navigator. This
object has a limited number of defined properties. It also has one
method which may or may not be available for use, depending upon the
implementation of JAVAScript in that browser. Right now, what that
method is, or how to use it needn't concern us. But we are interested in
two properties of the navigator object.. appName and appVersion.

There is a reason for the constant use of JAVAScript in this column,
rather than the Microsoft Internet Explorer VBScript language. VBScript
is currently limited to Microsoft Internet Explorer only, and is not
supported in Netscape. Although the support for JAVAScript in Microsoft
Internet Explorer can be spotty at times, both Microsoft Internet
Explorer and Netscape support it. Thus, for compatibility reasons, the
logical choice in a scripting language, for us, here, is JAVAScript.

The property appName is fairly straight forward. It returns the defined
name of the navigator application in use. And, strangely enough, the
appName for Netscape is "Netscape", while the appName for Microsoft
Internet Explorer is "Microsoft Internet Explorer".

Where we run into problems or how different browsers can respond
differently to the same commands in a script, is in the appVersion
property. Like the appName property, this returns a string. But, the
strings returned by Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape are just
barely similar. In Netscape 3.01, the string returned is "3.01 (Win95;
I)". Obviously, the first few characters in the string represent the
version number. However, in Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02, the string
returned is "2.0 (compatible; MSIE 3.02; Windows 95)". Equally as
obvious, the first few characters of this string do not reflect the
version number. That is buried deep in the string. Be prepared for this
type of thing regularly when working with scripts (Next month, we'll
look at some further examples of the differences when scripting between
Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape). If you aren't prepared for
it, and on the lookout, it can cause you to lose hair quickly. Just ask
my daughters about mine!

(If you are wondering, I suspect that the initial 2.0 in the Microsoft
Internet Explorer string refers to compatibility with Netscape 2.0.
Another of the properties of the navigator object is userAgent. Using
this, Netscape 3.01 returns Mozilla/3.01 as the opening portion of the
string, while Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 returns Mozilla/2.0. The
assumption made above, along with some things discovered when using
scripts, seems to reflect a much closer compatibility in scripting
between Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02 and Netscape 2.0.

In order to obtain the version number of the browser in use, we clearly
have to look in two places in the string returned for appVersion,
depending upon the browser in use. That is what our next lines of code
do. determine where in the returned string we have to look for the true
version number, so that we can use that information later. In Netscape,
this is simple. The version number can be found starting at the first
position in the string, i.e. at an INDEX of 0 which is what we have
already set that variable to be.

But for Microsoft Internet Explorer, this is different. The true version
number is buried appearing after the string "MSIE" in the appVersion
string. It should then be clear that in order to determine the version
number of Microsoft Internet Explorer, we will have to first locate that
string in the appVersion string. That is what we do in this code

   /* Determine the browser in use when the page loads */
   if (navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer"){
      INDEX = navigator.appVersion.INDEXOf('MSIE') + 5;
   }

What this code says to the browser is, if you are "Microsoft Internet
Explorer", set the value of INDEX equal to the starting point of the
string "MSIE" in your appVersion string, plus 5 (to move that INDEX
value to the starting point of the actual version number). What it
doesn't say, but what is implied, is that, if the browser is "Netscape",
then leave the value of INDEX as 0.

Once we have a value for INDEX to start from, we can use a dot command
for the STRING object to determine what the version number is. Since
appVersion is itself a STRING object, we can apply this dot command
directly to it, as so

   var browserName = navigator.appName +" "+
       navigator.appVersion.substring(INDEX,INDEX+4);

which defines a variable, browserName and concatenates the browser name
(navigator.appName), a space and the sub-string of appVersion which
represents the version number, based upon the value of the variable,
INDEX as a start point, and taking 4 characters (INDEX+4) as the version
number.


Now What?

So now we have our script, and we all understand it thoroughly and
completely (I also believe in Santa Claus). But how do we use it? As
noted, you place the script above in the <HEAD> section of your page.
When and where you want to use it is up to you. As an example, however,
we'll look at a portion of one of my pages which uses this script

  <BODY  BACKGROUND="../images/parchmtl.jpg">
  <BASEFONT FACE="Arial,Helvetica" SIZE=3>
  <CENTER><IMG SRC="../images/home.gif" WIDTH=139 HEIGHT=30 BORDER=0>
  </CENTER>

  <P>Don't ask why we are doing this... I'll bet many of the people with
  pages on the Web have no idea why they put them there. One reason, in
  our case, was to give Gregg a place on the Web for people to come and
  get either his software, or the columns he has written for WindoWatch
  magazine. The rest of us have no reason to be here, but here we are,
  anyway.

  <P>It should be relatively simple getting around this site. We already
  know that your browser can use frames, or you wouldn't be here.

  <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">
  <!--
  document.write('There are JAVAScripts for the date and time displayed in
  the title bar above, and to randomly change the contents of the marquee
  at intervals. There are others deciding what text to put here right now
  (this text, starting at &quot;There are JAVAScripts &quot;), and which
  browser you are using ( ' + browserName + ').');
  // -->
  </SCRIPT>
  <NOSCRIPT>
  Since you have disabled scripting in your browser, you can't see the
  date or time above, in the title bar. You aren't really missing much,
  but if you enabled scripting, you could at least see them there.
  &lt;GG&gt;
  </NOSCRIPT>

The explanation for this code isn't all that difficult. In JAVAScript,
the document loaded is an object also. One of the methods available for
that object is write(). What this does is writes content to the page in
memory on the client (i.e. remote) side. The scripting capability of the
browser used by a visitor sees this, and writes it to the page that they
see, as if it were hard-coded into the page content.

Since a browser that is not script capable, or one that has this
capability turned off, would thus see nothing there, we add a <NOSCRIPT>
</NOSCRIPT> section of content to appear in place of the contents of the
script. Anything between <NOSCRIPT> and </NOSCRIPT> is seen by a browser
without scripting capability or without it enabled, as the content of
the page. Within the brackets of the document.write dot command, you can
place virtually any HTML tags, or other <BODY> type content. Anything
which is HTML or similar (including text to be written to the page)
appears within quote marks. If you want to add a JAVAScript variable or
similar to that text, you close the quotes, use the JAVAScript +
operator to concatenate the data, and then put the JAVAScript variable
into the document.write statement. When you are finished whatever is to
be written to the page, you simply close the brackets of the
document.write statement. To a script enabled browser user (let's say
they are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02), the page contents
would appear as thus:

  It should be relatively simple getting around this site. We already
  know that your browser can use frames, or you wouldn't be here. There
  are JAVAScripts for the date and time displayed in the title bar
  above, and to randomly change the contents of the marquee at
  intervals. There are others deciding what text to put here right now
  (this text, starting at "There are JAVAScripts "), and which browser
  you are using ( Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02).

To someone with scripting disabled in his or her browser, or without a
script capable browser, the same section of the page would appear like
this:

  It should be relatively simple getting around this site. We already
  know that your browser can use frames, or you wouldn't be here. Since
  you have disabled scripting in your browser, you can't see the date or
  time above, in the title bar. You aren't really missing much, but if
  you enabled scripting, you could at least see them there. <GG>


As you can see, this does make the page contents dynamic, albeit only at
load time, and can make your site more interesting to a visitor. Because
of this, we will explore JAVAScript further in future columns.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Gregg Hommel is the WindoWatch HTML editor. An experienced script
programmer, he brings his considerable skills to this HTML tutorial
series.



   ww page 9
  The Browser Wars Continued!                        A WindoWatch Feature
  


     The Kudzu Plug-In, 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/.


The Kudzu Plug-In Copyright 1997 By Jack Passarella, All Rights Reserved



   ww page 10
  Desktop Publishing
  


                           CorelDRAW 7: Draw7
                   Copyright 1997 by Jack Passarella


Introduction

Last month I reported on my first impressions using CorelDRAW7. Another
month has gone by and I've had some more time to assimilate the strange
new world of the graphics suite. What I've actually done is spend more
time getting to know the basics of the DRAW7 component. DRAW7 is,
granted, the flagship product of this suite fleet and so has taken a
good bit of my learning-curve time. I won't pretend to have attained the
status of expert or even journeyman. But I have been able to pick up
some techniques and even generate some samples, which I'll review in a
bit. Other techniques are acquired skills, like node editing - a skill I
have not yet acquired.

So this time out, I'll share my further impressions of DRAW7, along with
the samples.


System Requirements

CorelDRAW 7 is a major application suite. One might even say mammoth.
Before buying it you may want to make sure your system has the right
stuff to run it. So I'll review the system requirements again.

According to the on-box requirements, the min-to-max requirements are as
follows. CPU: Pentium 60 (low end) to a recommended Pentium 120. For
RAM: 16MB to a recommended 32MB. (Both my systems have 32MB of RAM.) The
box states a minimum hard drive toll of 40MB. Don't believe it. To
install the suite you can plan on surrendering over 200 megabytes of
your hard drive. The maximum is even higher, at an unbelievable 400MB.
(Note to self: Buy a new hard drive.)


The Interface's The Thing

I remember when I first used WordPerfect DOS. The on-screen display of
the blank page was a refreshing change after the cluttered menu and
squashed look of WordStar. For the writer, the blank page is a welcome,
if sometimes intimidating metaphor.

The DRAW7 interface is the blank desktop. You see beyond the rectangular
page into what might be described as a virtual desktop. You can use the
desktop area to place all the tools DRAW7 equips you with, or at least
those you use most often. Only the area within the blank page is
printable. Images and tools can clutter up the blank desktop. The images
or parts of images that spill over the virtual page will not print.

Being most comfortable with the Microsoft Office productivity suite -
word processor, spreadsheet, database, etc. - the first thing I noticed
about this graphics suite is that it has tools or tool-sets with which I
am unfamiliar. I find toolbars to be one of the most useful inventions
since the world moved to Windows, followed by tabbed dialog boxes. Menu
trees and branches are a necessary evil. CorelDRAW adds some new
interface elements to the equation. For years CorelDRAW has featured
roll-ups as part of the graphics environment. For those unfamiliar with
the term, roll-ups are best described as mini-dialog boxes for specific
tasks or groups of tasks. They can be minimized to just a title-line.
Like window blinds - no pun intended - you can pull them down or, with
the click of an up-arrow, snap them up into their title-bar housing.
This way you can see which Roll-ups are available on your desktop at any
time. A useful technique is to stack roll-ups one under the next. Then
expand or contract each, as you need it. DRAW7 remembers which Roll-ups
you left on the desktop from one session to the next.

CorelDRAW has also had flyouts for quite a while now. A flyout is a
toolbar button with a little black triangle in the corner to signify it
is more than a uni-purpose button. When you click on the little black
wedge, related toolbar buttons extend into the desktop area. This is
another way to compress interface tools in the limited working area of
your desktop, which is basically your screen area.

Are you starting to get the impression there are layers within layers to
the interface? What appears on the surface to be a blank page on a blank
virtual desktop quickly becomes a powerful toolset.

Next up is the new Property Bar. No, this is not a place where you
settle real estate claims over drinks. The best way I can explain the
Property Bar is to call it a context-sensitive toolbar. If you are
familiar with the right-click, context-sensitive shortcut menus that
exist all over Windows95 and Windows95 applications, you'll understand
how the Property Bar works, even if you don't understand how to use it!
Depending upon what you are doing at any one moment, the Property Bar
offerings change, giving you specific buttons and settings to work with.
It's a great concept, but a little disorienting for the new DRAW7 user.
The old-timers probably can't get enough of it.

Add to this the ability to customize nearly everything about the
interface and you have a potent and disorienting combination of tools
and choices.


Text and Styles

Yes, styles. Taking a page from Microsoft Word, perhaps, CorelDRAW 7
lets you create, define and save styles for text. You can save these
styles in the default template or create templates in which to store
special styles for brochures, flyers, etc. When you change a style
definition, all the text formatted with that style reflects those
changes.

DRAW7 has two types of text: artistic and paragraph. Artistic text is
what you would use for big, bold headline fonts. Paragraph text is for
body text, which should remain easy to read.

Artistic text is often "converted to curves" which basically makes the
text a graphic object, which can be shaped, molded, filled, etc. You
can't convert the text back to ordinary editable text, so it's a good
idea to triple-check spelling, capitalization etc. before converting.
Converting text to curves is not the same as fitting text to a path. You
can create both the path and the text before fitting the text along the
path. Or first create the path, then type the text right along the path
on the fly.

You also have many options to stretch out the spacing between characters
and word, even between lines of text. You can even yank individual
letters above or below the baseline.


Color Models

CorelDRAW 7 supports RGB, CMYK and HiFi (LAB) color models. RGB is what
your monitor uses to display color, components of Red, Green and Blue.
This is also the model used on the Internet for web graphics. CMYK
(i.e., Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) is used by high-end ink jet
printers as well as the model used to create four color separations and
plates for printing presses. HiFi, is a device independent color model
based on how the human eye sees color. HiFi has been around for a while
but is gaining popularity because file sizes are smaller and fidelity is
better. For color matching, CorelDRAW 7 supports the PANTONE matching
system (PMS). That means a lot more to the graphic artists out there
than it does to the rest of us. Suffice to say it's a way to select a
color from a "swatch" system before you create it. Swatch books let you
see how the color will look on coated or uncoated paper.


A Drawing By Any Other Name

DRAW7 is primarily a vector-based drawing application. This means you
are creating drawings with lines and points, or what I think of as
"drawing math." Vector-based illustrations have a distinctive look to
them. (Check out the WMF files you have in your clipart folder.) Line
art, lots of straight lines and geometric shapes. You can resize vector
artwork without losing much, if any quality. And the file sizes are
smaller than bitmaps. Also, most vector art is grouped, meaning it is
composed of more than one piece grouped into a whole. DRAW7 lets you
ungroup artwork so you can modify individual sections while keeping the
rest of the image as is.

I say DRAW7 is primarily vector-based, because Corel seems to have
blurred the line somewhat. There is a BITMAP menu item. You can import
bitmaps and apply bitmap effects in DRAW7, though these are basically
duplicates of what you can do with the bitmap/photo manipulation
application Corel PHOTO-PAINT 7.

Just because you import a bitmap, doesn't mean you have to keep it as a
bitmap. (Bitmaps are pixel-by-pixel drawings, the most common format is
the BMP file, which is uncompressed and large. Both GIF and JPG formats
are bitmap-based as well, but feature compression for significant file
size savings.) There is an Autotrace trace function, which converts
bitmaps to vector illustrations or you can manually trace the object
(time-consuming and exacting). Finally, you can use Corel's OCR-Trace
applet, which is the most advanced of these three options. Many of
DRAW7's features can only be applied to vector artwork, thus the need
for converting to vector format.

However, you may just want to apply one of the PHOTO-PAINT 7-like
filters within a DRAW7 desktop. I imported a JPG image of my son Matthew
holding his new brother Luke and applied an Emboss effect with a
brownish color. The effect comes across - on screen, anyway - as
bronze-like.


Getting Technical

Since version 6 of CorelDRAW, DRAW has had the ability to include
dimension measurements for straight lines and degrees for angular
measurements. These are the measurements you would see on floor plans or
blueprints. DRAW also gives you the ability to change the unit of
measure as well as the placement of the measurement text to above, below
or on the dimension line.

DRAW7 also helps you align multiple objects across an entire page
vertically or horizontally or within the boundaries of a selection
marquee. This is less for precise placement than aesthetically pleasing
layouts.


Trim, Weld and Intersect

Some of the first interesting tools I came across in DRAW7 were Trim,
Weld and Intersect. Trim works on overlapping objects. The first
selected object trims (i.e., subtracts from) the second selected object.
You can choose to leave either of the originals behind, in effect
applying the effect to a new image. Both Weld and Intersect also support
this option. The Trim tool is known as the "cookie-cutter" tool because
of the way it removes a shape from an object.

Welding removes internal lines from overlapping objects, leaving only
the outline. The best application of this I've seen is to turn so many
long rectangular shapes into a serviceable street map.

Intersect creates new object where originals overlap. You can create odd
shapes by intersecting common shapes. Two overlapping circles
Intersected can form a football-like ellipse. Two circles overlapping a
square on each side can create a vase shape.

I created several examples with these tools. I created a football shape
with Trim, an "H" shape from three rectangles using Weld and,
inadvertently, a pseudo text mask for the word WindoWatch and a filled
rectangle with the Intersect tool.


Special Effects

I'm not talking Hollywood F/X here. But these tools do have a good
amount of razzle-dazzle to them. I'll cover a few here. basically the
ones I've had early success with.


Pushing the Envelope

DRAW7 lets you apply envelopes to text and graphics. Envelopes constrain
or expand the object to a particular shape, which can be further
modified as needed. You can choose from envelopes restricted to straight
line manipulation, curves, completely unconstrained - using node editing
points to pull and stretch the envelope like taffy - or choose from the
many preset envelope shapes. Envelopes would let you shape the word
"fish" into the classic fish shape to add emphasis to your message.

Also included in this group sample is an Extrude example. An Extrude
lets you extrude flat objects into a virtual third dimension, adding
some oomph to the word Super Sale, for instance. A nice feature of the
Extrude tool is an interactive Corel "C" logo that you can grab with the
mouse cursor to twist and turn to any angle you desire. Once you have
the depth you want, you can select To and From colors, as well as the
color for the face of the object or text. Adjust your lighting, get just
the right 3D tilt, then slap a thin outline around the Extruded object
to get that little added bit of emphasis.

Also note that I simply took screen shots of my samples. When I printed
them from DRAW7, they did not have the jaggies they exhibit here. DRAW7
lets you apply anti-aliasing to text to smooth over the rough
stair-stepping edges.


A Ghost of a Chance

Another special effect you can apply to the oohs and ahs of family,
friends and coworkers, is transparency. In this example I placed a
descriptive word over a piece of clipart, selected the word and applied
about 50% transparency to it.


Shadow and Perspective

By using the mirror effect, you can create a shadow. To get the effect
in the sample, I selected a vertical mirror, applied it to a duplicate
so that I'd retain the original image. Next I pulled the mirrored
duplicate below the original, pulled on the corner to slant it and
applied a shade of gray. (I could have experimented further with a blend
or a gradient fill, perhaps, to have the shadow lighten further from the
original object.)

Along with this sample, is the word horizon on which I applied a
two-point perspective. When you apply the perspective tool, vanishing
points become attached to the object. Oddly, they don't really appear
immediately. You have to pull on one of the node editing points, then a
vanishing point "X" appears. Once you see the X, you can tug on it to
adjust the vanishing point. This may trigger the second vanishing point
to appear. I think in this example it's fairly clear, if you mentally
extend the parallel lines in the word horizon, where the vanishing
points are.


The Power of the Power Clip

Finally, I'd like to talk about the Power Clip tool. What the Power Clip
lets you do is use one object as a container for another. The container
becomes a mask for the other object. Any areas of the object being
contained that would spill over/out of the container are trimmed away.
You can get similar effects using Combine or Intersect, but the Power
Clip is so simple, it's surprisingly easy to get impressive results. You
just select the container and the object to be contained. That's it! In
the following example, I typed and sized the word speed in a font that I
thought looked appropriate. Then I used this speed as a container for a
sports car. The word, font and image all work together with the
precision and teamwork of a pit crew.

I found that for the power clip to be effective when you use text as a
container, you should look for a thick-bodied headline style font. Then
the trick is to size the font so that it just contains the boundaries of
the object. In my example, the word speed and the car itself are about
the same size. Note that you can't apply this effect to a duplicate, so
if you don't like the results you can undo the Power Clip, make some
adjustments and try again. Finally, if you were using landscape or a
cloud-filled sky as the object to be contained, you would obviously want
the image to be larger than the container.


Conclusion

It's rare for a truly powerful program to be easy to use, and DRAW7 is
no exception to this rule. The interface - at first so plain and
unadorned - is really hiding many, many tools and capabilities just
under the surface. You would probably need to use DRAW7 most everyday to
become completely competent with it. I'm sure it will take years to
master.

I should mention that CorelDRAW 7 has support for the Internet in a
Publish to the Internet capability. This time out I didn't get a chance
to use it. But this sort of Internet support is becoming standard in the
software industry, as witnessed by the current incarnation of Microsoft
Office.

I would not undertake the combined investment in time and money lightly
when trying to make the decision to purchase CorelDRAW. Clearly it is a
tool for professionals, not dabblers. Even so, DRAW7 succeeds best when
it makes a truly impressive effect, like the Power Clip, require just a
few button clicks to accomplish.

Next issue (September 1997) I hope to look at the other two major
components of CorelDRAW 7, i.e., PHOTO-PAINT 7 and CorelDREAM 3D 7.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Jack Passarella is the WindoWatch Word Editor. His talents are enormous
as we can readily see as he struts his and CorelDraw 7's stuff.



   ww page 11
  Office 97: Using the Desktop Publishing Features
  


                     Desktop Publishing with Word97
                   Copyright 1997 by Jack Passarella


Introduction

With Word97, Microsoft has added some impressive new desktop publishing
features to the - arguably - primary application in their flagship
(i.e., cash cow) Microsoft Office suite. Chief among the innovations and
renovations is WordArt 3.0, followed closely by the new flexibility in
text boxes, specifically the ability to link text across text boxes.

Those are just the highlights. You'll find plenty of other new and
improved graphic tools to apply to personal and semi-professional DTP
documents. If you need to produce brochures, newsletters, flyers, etc.,
Word97 may be the only tool you need to get the job done.

Be sure to check out the Newsletter Wizard. It will generate a four-page
newsletter layout demonstrating the use of linked text boxes across
pages, colored shapes, tables and columns, along with supplying styles
specifically for use with a newsletter.

You will have choices for a Professional, Contemporary or Elegant design
in either color or black & white. You even have the option of reserving
space for the mailing label.


Back to the Drawing (Board) Toolbar

Take a look at the new Drawing toolbar and you'll find some welcome
additions. You have the ability to change the color of fills, lines and
fonts. You can change line and arrow styles, apply various types of drop
shadows or 3D effects.

I haven't even had time to work with all of the new features! Word97 has
drawing layers and gives you the ability to move objects up or down in
the layers; you can align objects to a grid, or nudge them here or
there. Some of these terms and techniques I just started coming across
in Corel DRAW7, so it's clear that Word97 is trying to fill a graphics
arts need for those with not-quite-professional aspirations or
requirements. Even so, there is plenty here to experiment with and put
to good use.


WordArt 3.0

WordArt 3.0 was the first graphics feature that caught my eye. I had
used WordArt before and found it adequate but anemic. Now you have an
initial choice of thirty options in the WordArt gallery.

Some of these gallery choices are good enough to use as is for a logo, a
newsletter title, a web page heading, etc. Others you can use as a
starting point for your own tweaking.

Let's pick an example: You can start with a basic shape and then edit
it. I applied a shape and free rotated the text in the second example,
then applied a different line and fill color. Finally I changed the
letter spacing to Very Tight, which produced some stylistic overlap. I
could have also set the letters to uniform height, changed the alignment
of the text, or even used uniform letter heights.


AutoShapes

You can take a basic AutoShape and mold it into something more exciting
than a two-dimensional blob. From the AutoShapes/Stars and Banners menu,
I selected Explosion 1.

Working with that basic shape, you can add color, text, even depth.

When you right click on the AutoShape, you have an option to add text,
which creates a text box. The text you type conforms to the shape as
much as possible. You can adjust 3D settings to change angle of tilt,
angle of lighting

I made adjustments to the depth of the 3D effect, then changed the
texture from matte to plastic, and changed the lighting angle and degree
of tilt.


Text Boxing

The AutoShapes section touched on one of the uses for Text Boxes. You
can also dress up text boxes without using AutoShapes. You can create a
text box, then use Fill Effects to apply a gradient of varying
complexity.

I selected a two-color gradient: yellow to red from the center. You
could also select pattern fills or the more professional-looking
textures. You could also use a picture as a background to the text box.
And, if you wanted you could rotate the text inside text boxes in
90-degree increments. (Note: If you purchased Office 97 on CDROM, you'll
find approximately 3,000 clip art images, 140 photos, 31 sounds and 20
videos.)

Perhaps the biggest "innovation" for Word97 Text Boxes is the ability to
link two or more boxes, which allows for text to automatically overflow
from one box to the next.


The Missing Link... Found

The Newsletter Wizard demonstrates a linked text box by not having lines
surround the linked text boxes, and by including underneath the first
linked text box another text box (non-linked) stating that the article
is continued on page three. On page three another non-linked text box
notes that the article is continued from page one. This text box is
placed above the second linked text box. With the combination of linked
text boxes accompanied by non-linked "continued-to-and-from notice" text
boxes, you get a professional appearance. To demonstrate the linked text
box, I kept a line around the text boxes and included shading to
differentiate linked text boxes.

If I wanted to have an article continue from page one to page three and
make it transparent, i.e., to hide the actual mechanism of the text
boxes, I could turn off shading and lines just as the Newsletter Wizard
does.

Another nice touch in the wizard (contemporary newsletter) was the
creation of a blue-filled rectangular backing a regular word table. As
you can see, text boxes open up a whole new world of DTP possibilities
for Word97.


Borderlines

Another new feature, which could easily be used to excess, is the
ability to create artistic borders around pages. The choices are more
suited to the type of flyers you find magically inserted under your
windshield wiper after you've spent to much time looking for Cherry
Garcia in the local EverFresh Market.

You'll find the borders under the FORMAT menu, BORDERS and SHADING, then
click on the PAGE tab and click on the ART drop-down list box. There are
many choices in both color and B&W. I believe I read somewhere there are
160 choices. You have the ability to apply the page border to the whole
document, to a section or to the whole document except the first page.
Further, you can turn off the border on selected sides of the page.

Paragraphs can have borders in various styles, but you don't get the art
choices. On the other hand, using color background fills can produce
pleasing results. Paragraphs with gray-shaded or colored fills resemble
text-box effects without getting into text box position and settings
management.

In my example I changed the font color to white to make the text stand
out. You can apply pattern fills to paragraphs, but I find this ability
less useful than using colors. Sometimes it's painfully annoying! Decide
for yourself. What do you think? Shades of gray I would classify more as
a color fill, rather than a pattern fill.


Layers within Layers

Word97 now includes drawing layers, which enable you to change the layer
order of shapes. In my example, I created the ellipse, triangle and
square in that order. Each successive AutoShape was layered on top of
the one created previously.

Next, I copied the three shapes and right-clicked on the ellipse and
selected ORDER, Bring Forward. Finally, I right-clicked on the square
and selected ORDER, Send Backward. You also have the ability to send the
AutoShape behind or in front of text.

Finally, I SHIFT-clicked each of the three shapes to select them all,
then right-clicked and selected GROUP to group the composition into one
object. Now the group can be treated as a single unit until I might
decide to break them apart again.


Become a Columnist

Don't forget you still     columns or set your      If you wanted to vary
have the ability to use    own spacing. You can     column definitions,
Word's columns             even have vertical       you would be advised
feature, not to            lines inserted           to create the sections
mention the                between the columns.     first, then define the
occasional drop-cap.       Columns can apply to     column formats
You can employ             the whole document
evenly spaced              or just to a section.


Conclusion

Now that this column has reached its natural conclusion, I have to admit
everything wasn't as simple or effortless as the final result might
appear.

I had many bizarre experiences where graphics jumped across several
pages. At one point several graphics plopped down one on top of the
other. I still have no idea why this happened. I wasn't using exact
placement, trusting my fortunes to the paragraph-preceding placement
default. I noticed the vertical positioning of graphics changed to weird
settings. E.g., one graphic had a vertical setting in relation to its
paragraph of -5.43 inches. Why? I have no idea.

Eventually, I began placing graphics inside text boxes, but even these
soon developed a frustrating mind of their own, often defying click &
drag placement. I manually set some vertical spacing positions to where
they well fit at the time. I used the lock anchor setting to get the
text boxes to stay put. I'm still not sure of the best settings, but I'm
confident this is something I can master with time.

Next there was the crash when I wrote the section on columns. I tried to
insert a section break after my Columnist section but before the
Conclusion section so that I could revert back to "one" column for the
end of the article. My screen froze and WINWORD.EXE bowed out less than
gracefully. I recovered my document from the point before columns.
(AutoRecover was nowhere to be found!) This time I inserted my section
breaks before I defined the column formats. That seemed to work best.


Obviously, I have only touched the surface of all the things you can do
with Word97's desktop publishing features. Microsoft has added a lot of
features that have previously been the sole province of dedicated
graphics and desktop publishing packages. Those packages, I'm sure, will
still be required for the pros, but for the rest of us, who only
occasionally dabble in the DTP arena, it's nice to have the features and
flexibility Word97 now offers.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Office 97 produces many powerful publishing tools as Passarella
indicates. Jack is looking at a number of graphics programs for
WindoWatch appearing over the next six months.



   ww page 12
  Microsoft's IntelliMouse                       An Evaluation and Review
  


            Worthwhile Improvements on the Venerable Mouse!
                  Copyright 1997 by Linda L. Rosenbaum



Although Microsoft is far better known for their software, operating
systems and applications, they also have a number of hardware products
that are very popular and well known. One of these, the Microsoft Mouse,
has taken on more and more importance and functionality in the newer
operating systems. Microsoft has been producing a mouse for many years.
Several years ago they came out with a new design for the standard two
button mouse that became known as the ergo mouse. The notion was to make
it more natural for the hand to use and hence to also be more
ergonomically correct (i.e. to help offset problems that can arise from
long term use of a keyboard and mouse). Last fall Microsoft released a
new design that went a step beyond the version 2.0 mouse with the
ergonomic design. It is called the Microsoft IntelliMouse, and comes
with a wheel between the two standard buttons enhancing what can be done
with the mouse.

The IntelliMouse can be purchased for approximately $60 and comes with a
three year warranty, as well as the software needed to utilize the
mouse. The IntelliPoint software works in both Windows 95 and Windows NT
3.51 or later. The IntelliMouse will also work with any standard
Microsoft mouse drivers.

The system requirements for the IntelliMouse are as follows, per
information on the Microsoft Web pages:

To use the Microsoft IntelliMouse as a two-button mouse, you
need:

- One of the following: Windows 95 or later, Windows version 3.1 or
  later, MS-DOS version 3.1 or later, Windows NT Server version 3.51
  or 4.0, or Windows NT Workstation version 3.51 or 4.0

- Round mouse port (PS/2) or 9-pin serial port (coupon included for
  25-pin serial port adapter).

To use the Microsoft IntelliMouse wheel, you need:

- IntelliPoint version 2 software (included)
- One of the following: Windows 95, Windows NT Server version 3.51 or
  4.0, or Windows NT Workstation version 3.51 or 4.0 operating systems
- An application that works with the IntelliMouse Wheel
- 3.5" high density disk drive

In order to take full advantage of the new wheel, you must be using an
application that has been written to include the ability to utilize the
wheel. A partial listing of such applications, per the MS Web pages, is
as follows:

Microsoft:
  - Windows 95 Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0
  - Office 97
  - Microsoft Excel 97
  - Word 97
  - Microsoft Access 97
  - PowerPoint 97
  - Outlook 97
  - Publisher 97
  - Encarta 97 World Atlas
  - Automap Streets Plus and Deluxe Edition
  - Automap Trip Planner
  - Picture It!
  - CarPoint
  - Expedia
  - Visual FoxPro
  - Works 4.0a

Micrografix:
  - Windows Draw 5
  - ABC FlowCharter 7
  - Small Business Graphics and Print Studio
  - Graphics Suite 2
  - Picture Publisher
  - Designer

Intergraph:
  - Solid Edge
  - Imagineer Technical
  - Workshare

3Deye:
  - TriSpectives
  - TriSpectives Technical 2.0
  - TriGallery
  - TriWeb
  - TriWeb Professional
  - TriDraw
  - TriDraw Technical
  - TriWizard

Visio:
  - Visio Professional 4.5
  - Visio Technical 4.5

Hilgraeve, Inc.:
  - HyperACCESS for Windows 95 and NT 7.00

Digital Directory Assistance, Inc.:
  - PhoneDisc PowerFinder 2.5.3


Since first acquiring the IntelliMouse, I have discovered a superb
application that adds wheel functionality for programs that do not have
it built into the program itself. I will discuss this in detail later on.

As indicated above, the IntelliMouse can be attached either via a PS/2
port or a standard serial port. I was attracted by the fact this mouse
can be used on either port, rather than needing a different version of
the mouse itself. The MS Mouse 2.0 can be used either as a serial mouse
or a PS/2 mouse, but the same mouse cannot be used as both. I believe
this enhances the value of the mouse because if you decide to change the
connection you want to use, you do not need to purchase a new mouse.

I purchased our first IntelliMouse at a local computer show several
months ago. It came with all the necessary hardware, the mouse and
serial port and PS/2 port connectors, version 2.0 of the IntelliPoint
software, and a rather skimpy manual that described the physical
installation of the hardware along with the installation and basics of
the software.

When I first attached the new IntelliMouse to my system, I used the same
serial port (com1) that I had been using for my MS Mouse 2.0. We shut
down the system and made the switch. When I turned the system back on,
NT 4.0 loaded just fine. NT was able to use the new mouse with no
further configuration changes. This invoked a sigh of relief, since it
is quite difficult to navigate NT 4.0 without a functioning mouse.

I next installed the IntelliPoint 2.0 software. This was as simple as
inserting the floppy diskette into the floppy drive and running
setup.exe. The installation of the software was without problems and
after a restart, I was able to start experimenting with my new wheel and
new mouse software.

The installation created an applications group called Microsoft Input
Devices, Mouse. In the Mouse folder are two shortcuts - one to access
the IntelliPoint 2.0 software and one to access the online users guide
for the IntelliPoint software. In addition, the IntelliPoint software
and settings can also be accessed via the Mouse icon in Control Panel.
When I restarted after installing the new software, I was greeted by
some sort of tips screen, as well as the ability to go into help, and to
configure my new software. I now get a mouse icon in my task bar, and
can access the mouse settings at any time by double clicking on the icon
in the task bar.

On the next page you will find an image of my Mouse Properties with the
IntelliPoint 2.0 software installed.

The tab called Plannet Crafters Flywheel was not added by the
IntelliPoint software, but rather by the program I referred to above
(Flywheel) which gives me use of the wheel in many programs that do not
have it natively built in.

The features that can be set via the StepSavers Tab, which shows all of
the various tabs that are available as part of the mouse properties. I
have not activated any of these particular features.

The next tab, called Pointers, is where you set the various cursors,
animated or otherwise, for use in NT 4.0. The IntelliPoint 2.0 software
comes with a few new cursor schemes and right now I have one activated
that is called Entertainment.

The Basics Tab is where the following can be set/configured:

- Pointer Speed - adjusts how fast your pointer moves in relation to
  how quickly you move the mouse.
- Button Selection - sets the primary mouse button, the button you
  want to use for clicking and double clicking.
- Double Click Speed - changes the speed at which your programs
  respond to a double-click.

The Productivity Tab is where the following can be set/configured:

- Odometer - keeps track of the distance your pointer has traveled
  on the screen.
- Orientation - defines the relationship between the way you hold
  the mouse and the direction the pointer moves on the screen.
- ClickLock - "Locks down" the mouse button after a single click. Just
  click and hold down any mouse button for a moment (defined by you in
  settings for this feature), and your click is locked. Click again to
  release ClickLock.

The Visibility Tab is where the following can be set/configured:

- Sonar - displays a series of concentric circles around your pointer
  when you press and release the CTRL key.
- Vanish - hides the pointer whenever you type.  Pointer reappears
  when the mouse is moved.

The Wheel Tab is where the following is accomplished:

- Turn the wheel on and configure settings for the wheel itself.
- Turn the wheel button on, which allows you to treat the wheel as a
  third mouse button. I have my wheel configured to act as a
  double-click, which means if I click on the wheel once, it is the same
  as doing a double click with my left button.

There are two other features available with the IntelliPoint software in
Windows 95. One is PointerWrap, which automatically moves the pointer to
the opposite edge of the screen when the pointer reaches the edge of the
screen. The other is Trails, which displays a comet-like trail whenever
you move the pointer, making it easier to see.

The General Tab is where the mouse driver itself is changed, if need be.
When I first installed the IntelliMouse on the serial port, the change
button in this tab was grayed out. I later learned that this is standard
behavior for this particular mouse in NT 4.0 and as of the time of this
writing, no fix has been released by Microsoft. Several weeks later, I
switched the IntelliMouse to the PS/2 port built into my motherboard,
and the change button became usable.


Shortly after installing the new mouse and its software, I discovered I
had two new event log errors on boot up, and one on shut down. The two
on boot up were warnings. One referred to msinport and was described as
follows:

  The description for Event ID ( 26 ) in Source ( msinport ) could
  not be found. It contains the following insertion string(s): .

The second referred to msbusmou, but with the same description as above,
except replacing the reference to msinport with msbusmou. The event log
message recorded on shut down was called an "error." It referred to
mouclass and the description in the event log was as follows:

  Could not disable interrupts on connected port device
    \Device\PointerClass0.

Since the mouse seemed to be working fine, despite the above event log
messages, I did nothing about them at that point in time. I later
learned that all I was seeing was typical of the behavior of the
IntelliMouse with the IntelliPoint software installed in NT 4.0. I also
learned that I could disable the particular drivers via Control Panel,
Devices and not get the event log messages. If the IntelliMouse is
installed via a serial port, the device driver called mssermou cannot be
disabled, because the mouse will not work. But if the mouse is attached
to a PS/2 port, this device driver can be disabled.

I did this disabling after I switched my IntelliMouse to the PS/2 port.
I changed the msbusmou, msinport, and mssermou device drivers to start
up manually rather than automatically by the system. To make this
change, first open up Devices in Control Panel. Highlight the device
driver you want to modify. Go into startup (one of the buttons off to
the right hand side). Change Startup Type to be manual. All still works
just fine on my system and I no longer get the event log messages
described above.

Flywheel from Plannet Crafters, Inc. is the additional software program
I discovered later on that enables the wheel in many programs that do
not have that ability built into the software. A trial version of the
program can be downloaded from http://www.plannetarium.com/. Flywheel
costs only $10 for a standard license and can be purchased online or via
email, regular mail or fax. Flywheel works in both Windows 95 and NT
4.0. I purchased the standard license online within five minutes of
first installing the trial version. I had my registration information
from Plannet Crafters via email within several hours of my purchase,
even though this was done late at night. I have been able to upgrade to
later versions of the program easily and at no additional cost.


In addition to allowing the wheel to be used for basic scrolling in all
applications, including those that don't have native support for the
IntelliMouse, Flywheel also includes support for two totally new wheel
features - Window Cycling and Alternate Scrolling Mode. The readme for
Flywheel describes these two new wheel features as follows:

Window Cycling - Pressing Control+Shift and rotating your wheel will
cycle through the open document windows in applications that support the
MDI Next / Previous Window commands. This includes the majority of
applications that have a "Window" menu item.

Alternate Scrolling Mode - Pressing Control+Alt and rotating your wheel
will do the opposite of the currently defined scrolling mode. The
default scrolling mode is line-at-a-time, in which case this feature
allows you to instantly do page-at-a-time scrolling when needed.

The readme for Flywheel also notes the following under "Known
Anomalies":

  Flywheel works seamlessly with the vast majority of current
  applications. However, there are a few issues that you should be aware
  of. We encourage you to report any other problems you experience.

  Netmanage Ecco 4.0 & Microsoft Excel 97 - If you use a horizontal
  splitter window to divide the main window into two sections, Flywheel
  will always scroll the top window.

  Microsoft Outlook 97 with WordMail enabled - When using WordMail,
  Flywheel's Alternate Scrolling Mode will not do anything.

  Corel WordPerfect - This application scrolls more than one line for
  each single scroll. This isn't a "bug" but it may appear that each
  wheel click scrolls too far. A future update to Flywheel will include
  an option to specify the lines-to-scroll on a per-application basis.

  Some NT Applications might scroll twice as many lines as they should
  when Flywheel is running. This will be fixed in an update to Flywheel.
  In the meantime, please see the next section on excluding apps from
  Flywheel.

  Microsoft Internet Explorer V4.0 Platform Preview - This version of
  Flywheel works with IE4! However, if you install a later version of
  IE4 and experience any unusual behavior with the wheel, you can easily
  disable Flywheel support for IE4. To do so, set the following registry
  key to a value of zero (0):

     HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Plannet Crafters\Flywheel\IE4Support


Although neither the IntelliPoint online documentation nor the manual
makes any reference to using the IntelliMouse in DOS, I did discover
that a DOS driver is indeed available. Previously I was using an MS
Mouse 2.0 with version 9.01 of the mouse drivers. In DOS, all that I
needed to load the mouse were the following two lines in my autoexec.bat
file:

  SET MOUSE=C:\MOUSE
  C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.EXE /Q

The first time I booted into DOS after installing the new IntelliMouse,
the mouse driver did load just fine. But the reactions of the mouse were
not quite the same as they had been before and I had not installed any
software to change the settings in DOS. I saw that there was a mouse.exe
file located in the folder when I installed the IntelliPoint software. I
manually edited my autoexec.bat file by "remming" out the above two
lines and adding the following two lines:

  SET MOUSE=D:\MSINPUT
  D:\MSINPUT\MOUSE\MOUSE.EXE

After making these changes I rebooted and voila, I was now using the new
mouse with the newer DOS drivers. And much to my pleasure, the reactions
of the mouse were just fine. I have no idea if the settings for the
IntelliMouse can be changed in DOS, as I have not had a need to find
out.

I do not use Windows 95 enough to be able to write about the
functionality of the IntelliMouse and IntelliPoint software in Windows
95. Suffice it to say, after my usual battle with Windows 95 when
installing new hardware, I did get the mouse and software working just
fine. I expect the enhancements and features I have detailed in this
article should apply equally as well to someone using Windows 95.


I love the Microsoft IntelliMouse. I find the wheel to be incredibly
useful. I also like some of the added features available in the
IntelliPoint software. I particularly like ClickLock, and sure miss it
when I am at work, where I use an MS Mouse 2.0 with the drivers that
come in NT 4.0. ClickLock allows me to keep scrolling with the mouse
without having to hold down the mouse button the entire time. When
scrolling through a long document, web page, listing, and so forth, this
saves a lot of effort and makes the scrolling seem effortless. The
downside is that ClickLock invokes itself even when you do not need it
to. So one has to do another click to release it. I far prefer to have
ClickLock and have to remember to do the second quick click to release
it, then to not have its use at all. I also find ClickLock works better
for me when I am doing long scrolls. That is because the wheel only
scrolls a few lines at a time (set up I chose) and hence ClickLock can
be much faster and more efficient. I also miss the ability to scroll
with the wheel when I am at a computer that does not have an
IntelliMouse. We now have an IntelliMouse on two different NT 4.0
systems, both using the PS/2 port that comes built into the
motherboards. I think anyone in the market for a new mouse, or even
looking for enhanced usability with their mouse, should give the
IntelliMouse serious consideration.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

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 72540,344@compuserve.com.



   ww page 13
  A Book Review from the O'Reilly Collection
  


Shockwave Studio: Designing Multimedia for the Web
By Bob Schmitt
From O'Reilly Associates
ISBN1-56592-231-X
US $39.95
CAN $57.85


                               Shockwave
                     Copyright 1997 by David Kindle
                            Litton/PRC Inc.


Soon after the web browser was released many plug-ins have been
developed and initially given to the public for free use. Some of these
have proven useful while others completely worthless. A plug-in which is
stirring up quite a bit of talk among web gurus is Macrodmedia's
Shockwave. People are using this plug-in to design everything from
interactive games to on-line stores. After hearing how great the tool
was I set out to find out why, by using the book written by Bob Schmitt,
entitled Shockwave Studio: Designing Multimedia for the Web.

After looking over Schmitt's book, my first reaction was "Wow, I can
really do a lot with this tool!" I'm very pleased to say that this
statement, in fact, proved true. It seems to me that the power of
Shockwave is only limited to ones imagination. Remember I'm in no way
affiliated with Macrodmedia nor do I get paid to endorse their products.
Shockwave is, indeed, an excellent tool providing a bang-up method of
making web pages look fantastic.

Schmitt's book does an excellent job of showing you the basics as well
as some of the more advanced techniques. He does a great job explaining
how each technique applies to the finished product. Sometimes tutorial
books show you how to do many things but they never get down to how you
could use these features on your own page. Shmitt, however, does a fine
job of giving you the information you really want and will really use.

The book has some excellent tips on such things as making movies smaller
so they will download faster, and how to correct palette problems so
your application looks good on all platforms. I found these tips
exciting and most useful on my own web page. One aspect of this book
that I found most impressive was its length. The book is around 200
pages and I'm happy to report it is 200 very useful pages. Many of us
have gone out and bought one of those 500 page bibles, brought it home
with the intention of reading it cover to cover and didn't. In this busy
life, unfortunately, there is not enough time to read all these books
thoroughly and they predictably end up as reference materials.

Shockwave Studio sticks to the information you want to read about: From
animating and making smaller movies using Shockwave to "avoiding palette
problems and implementing audio compression with Shockwave". The
important elements of design for the WEB are covered and often
graphically illustrated which is but one of the things I like the most.

Another nice feature of the book was its attention to detail. Instead of
giving me a 500 page bible with a bunch of black and white ugly images,
I received 200 pages with bright colors and wonderful looking graphics.
This not only made it more fun to read but it also made some things just
plain easier to see and understand.

Along with tutorials one always needs examples. This book provided
examples and even had them on CD-ROM so you could take them apart
yourself. Computer books these days have to come with software and this
one sure came through. Besides examples and tutorials there are a lot of
useful files on the CD-ROM, including a full working version of
Macrodmedia's Director.

Normally I don't like to be completely positive when I critique a book
or a software application but with this particular book, I couldn't help
myself. The book is very useful, informative, and exciting. I was able
to get though it in no time and learned exactly what I wanted, which in
a nut shell, like the book, is how to get the job done.

I guess I'll have to save up those negative comments for next time but
don't hold your breath.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

David Kindle is a Multi-Media training specialist currently employed by
Litton/PRC Inc. He is assigned to their FBI contract and is a member of
the computer based training team that is developing training for the FBI
fingerprinting system. He is a regular WindoWatch contributor and is a
student at the George Washington University earning a Masters degree in
Information Systems. David can be reached at aceman@erols.com



  ww page 14ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


                         Let Word Work For You
                      Copyright 1997 by Tony Lima


Introduction

Last month, I showed you how to use document templates and style sheets
to cut down on time you spend formatting a document. This month, you'll
learn how to let Word actually do some of the typing for you. Three
features are essential for this: AutoText, the Undo and Redo buttons,
and simple keyboard macros.

All set?  Let's go!


Using AutoText to Type Repetitive Text

AutoText lets you create a shortcut for entering text. To use AutoText,
you first set up a keyword that describes the text. By typing the
keyword and pressing <F3>, Word will automatically fill in the text,
substituting it for the keyword.

I use AutoText to automatically insert the signature block in my
letters. My signature block looks like this:

  Sincerely,

  Tony Lima

To create AutoText, first highlight the text you want to use, then add
it to the AutoText dialog box by selecting Edit/AutoText. Let's first
highlight the signature block above:

1. Position the mouse cursor at one end of the text block you want to
   use.

2. Hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse cursor to the
   other end of the text block.

3. Release the mouse button. The text block will be highlighted. Then
   select Edit/AutoText.


Word automatically selects the first few words to use as the AutoText
name. This is the keyword that will let you insert text. I usually
shorten the keyword to the first few letters because the main point of
using AutoText is to save typing. Let's call this text sinc. Type those
four letters into the Name area and click the Add button to add this
macro.

Of course, you can always go back and change the keyword later if you
don't like the name Word assigns.

Now test the abbreviation. Type sinc and press <F3>. The text will be
automatically inserted, replacing the keyword.

Here are three handy hints for using AutoText. First, you don't have to
press <F3> immediately after typing the keyword. Finish typing your
sentence, then click the mouse cursor somewhere in the middle of your
abbreviation and press <F3>. The text will appear immediately!

Second, you don't need to use the Edit/AutoText menu if you're willing
to let Word assign the AutoText name. Just highlight the text you want
to use as AutoText and click the AutoText button on the toolbar.

Third, you can specify whether the AutoText entry is to be available to
all documents (by including it in the default template normal.dot) or
only to the template used to create the document on which you're
currently working. As I pointed out last month, I use a template to
create my business letterhead. My "sinc" AutoText is available only in
that template. To use this option, click the pull-down menu next to the
area under "Make AutoText Entry Available To:".


Using the Toolbars:  Undo and Redo

You've probably used Edit/Undo before. I often find that I reach for
Undo immediately after smacking myself on the forehead exclaiming, "Now
why did you do something that dumb?"

Undo reverses your previous actions. I most often use it to undelete a
block of text that I change my mind about. However, if I followed my own
advice from two months back, I would have saved that text in a temporary
file for future use. Do as I say, not what I (sometimes) do.

You may have invoked Undo from the Toolbar using the Undo button. Don't
confuse this with the Redo button discussed later in this section.

One thing you may not have noticed is the pull-down list arrow next to
each key. Both Undo and Redo keep a list of previous actions. If you
pull down this list, you can reverse virtually any previous action
without changing anything else you've done.

Redo actually does two different things. Not only that, but the menu
selection Edit/{Redo,Repeat} is different from the Redo button. If you
have just selected Undo, Redo will reverse the Undo. If you haven't
selected Undo (or have just finished Redoing), Edit/Redo becomes
Edit/Repeat. Clicking it will repeat some previous actions, including
editing, formatting, and spell checking. However, the Redo button does
not change; it is always Redo and never Repeat.

Confused? An example should help clear this up. Suppose you've changed a
block of text from normal to boldface. You undo this change by clicking
the Undo button. The text is now normal. You then change your mind again
and want the block back to boldface. Clicking Redo will change it back
(to boldface). Like Undo, the Redo button has a pull-down list arrow
next to it. The list contains previous Redo operations.

Edit/Repeat allows you to repeat previous actions. Mark a block, format
it the way you want, then mark another block you want formatted the same
way. Instead of going through all the formatting operations, just select
Edit/Repeat and Word will take care of it for you.

Undo, Redo and Repeat are quite useful for those of us who regularly
make mistakes. Of course, if you never make mistakes, you won't find
them quite so useful.


Recording and Using Simple Keyboard Macros

What operations do you find yourself using over and over? Three
functions I do all the time are inserting centered page numbers at the
bottom of each page; changing a block of text to superscript; and
changing text to subscript. I've added keyboard macros to the Insert and
Format menus that take care of these operations for me. Let's see how to
add the CenteredPageNumber item to the Insert menu.

1. Select Tools/Macro/Record from the menu. Fill in the Record Macro
   dialog box.

2. We want to assign this to the Insert menu, so click the Menus button.
   The "Customize" dialog box will open. Select the &Insert menu so the
   dialog box looks like this:

3. Click the Add button to add CenteredPageNumber to the Insert menu.
   Then click Close to close the dialog box and start the macro
   recording process. You can easily tell macro recording is turned on
   because the recording controls will appear in the upper left corner
   of your text. The right button pauses recording, allowing you to
   perform other tasks without adding them to the macro. The left button
   stops the recording and saves the macro.

4. Select Insert/Page numbers to open the Page Numbers dialog box. The
   only change you need to make is to change the alignment from Right
   (the default) to Center.

5. Click the OK button, then the left button in the macro recording
   window (the Stop button). Then open the Insert menu.
   CenteredPageNumber should appear at the bottom of the menu.

If you want to make sure your macro is working, open a new document and
select Insert/CenteredPageNumber. Then select View/Header and Footer.
Switch to the Footer view and you'll see the page number centered on the
page.


Conclusion

Word can do a lot of the work for you if you give it a chance. By
learning to use AutoText, Undo and Redo, and simple macro recording, you
can save yourself a lot of time and effort. Remember, when working with
any word processor, your main objective is to first get your thoughts
into a file. Save the editing and formatting for later. These three
features let you create that file faster. That means you won't forget as
many thoughts!


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

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. His most recent book is Access 2.0
Projects for Windows (Benjamin-Cummings Publishing, 1995, ISBN
0-8053-4266-4.) In his other life, Tony is a professor of economics at
California State University, Hayward. E-mail him at
tony.lima@toadhall.com.



  ww page 15ͻ
  FIRST WORDS                                                           
 ͼ


                         Introducing Mail Merge
                 Copyright c 1997 by Michelle Lundquist


      (Word Editor's Note: Michelle begins an exploration of Word 6's
      mail merge feature. In the future, she plans to actually go
      through a live project. For now, she introduces the subject and
      how she has spent years watching it become easier and more
      powerful.)


Through The Years

I can remember when I first starting using a word processing program in
college. It was the simplest of programs, basically one small step above
an electric typewriter. I can remember being one of the few individuals
brave enough to try the mail merge feature in order to expedite the
large mailings our department was putting out.

Back in the early days, you felt like a computer programmer after
completing even the simplest of letter mail merges. As many of us
remember, word processing software six-to-eight years ago was pretty
much DOS based. Remembering all the combinations of "CTRL" keys and "F"
keys was enough to drive the most patient among us crazy. I was using
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at this point but it was much the same as that
early mainframe word processing program. The simplest of mail merges was
cumbersome, a bit confusing and usually forced me to keep a cheat sheet
handy to remind me of how I'd done it before!

The advent of Microsoft Word 2.0 was like a godsend when it arrived on
my PC. It began to take the mystery out of using the mail merge feature
that had always existed before. Don't get me wrong: it was still a
multi-step process. But it was the beginning of what is now possible
with Microsoft Word 6.0

As I look back to when I first received the upgrade to Microsoft Word
6.0, one of the first things I went to was the Mail Merge feature. At
this point in my career I had moved into a marketing role within my
company and was using mail merge more and more. At the time I had the
sole responsibility for all mailings to about 300 of our core customers.
WinWord 6 began to simplify this feature, but it still involved many
layers to get through a simple merge. And remembering how it was done
each time was a chore.

Before we move on, let's get one thing straight. Calling this feature a
"Mail Merge" is a misnomer because it is not solely used for mailing
projects anymore. As you will see once you begin using the feature, it
offers so much more than what the name implies.


Many Roles of Merging

On an ongoing basis I find new ways that mail merge can help in my day
to day company communications. Some of the mail merges I create are:

    - Letters
    - Memos
    - Envelopes
    - Labels
    - Distribution Lists

My rule of thumb is any time you have to broadcast a document to more
than 10 people, use a mail merge! This is especially true if the
recipients are a reoccurring list of people you will be sending
information to again. By setting up the list once, you can refer to it
over and over, saving yourself valuable time in the future.

The computer calls these lists containing the merge information the
"Data Source". Once created and saved the data source lists are commonly
given a ".txt" file extension and contain the necessary delimiters,
i.e., separators, so the computer can understand where one record ends
and another begins.

When you first start out it is sometimes confusing to understand why the
mail merge needs this data source and how it should be formatted. The
best part of Word 6.0 is its step-by-step instructions, which are clear
and concise as they walk you through the mail merge process, including
how to create a data source if one does not already exist.

Word also offers flexibility if you already have a data source, say from
a database or a file given to you by someone else. The only criteria is
that it be a text delimited (*.txt) document. This is the fastest and
easiest way for Word 6.0 to understand the information you are bringing
in, making it easier to create and complete the mail merge.

Creating and storing the data source is the first step towards using the
mail merge in diverse ways. This feature will allow you to take one list
and make a multitude of output formats: a letter, envelopes, labels and
even a distribution list.

Another powerful feature of Word's Mail Merge is the ability to bring in
data information from a variety of other program sources. I have
successfully brought in information from spreadsheets and relational
databases, along with simple delimited text.

In future issues of WindoWatch I plan to take you step-by-step through a
simple Mail Merge. I'll also be able to show you how to use the mail
merge feature in a variety of ways other than mailing projects.

These future articles will show you how to bring in various types of
data, create different types of merge documents and how to then create
multipurposes for this data for other distribution documents. After very
little exposure to this feature of Word, you will immediately begin to
see its power and flexibility. So... stay tuned!


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Michelle Lundquist is the Marketing-Communications Manager of a
Commercial printing establishment. She has made regular contributions to
the FIRSTWORDS section of WindoWatch, The FIRSTWORDS articles have
attracted many new Internet users to the WindoWatch fold.



   ww page 16
  WordBasic Macros                                                                           Part II
  


                Christopher Greaves'  WordBasic Workbook
                  Copyright 1997  All Rights Reserved



Table of Contents:

PART I   Vol 3  No.6

           Templates                                                3
           Recording a macro                                        4
           Examining macro code                                     5
           Editing macro code                                       6
           Organizing macros                                        7


PART II  Vol 3  No.7

           Save-and-print-and-close macro                           8
           Beeper Macro                                             9
           Cloning macros                                          10
           Displaying character codes                              11
           Enhancing macros                                        12

FUTURE TUTORIALS

           Rebuilding a table                                      13
           No-fuss table formatting                                14
           Setting grid lines on selected cells.                   15
           Setting grid lines around all cells of a table.         16
           Macros to grab footnotes                                17
           Text selection techniques                               19
           Macro to set standard page layout in portrait mode.     22
           Macro to build an informative footer                    23
           Macro to shrink and grow fonts                          25
           Utility functions                                       26
           Using utility functions in macros                       27
           String functions                                        28
           Process management functions                            29
           Macro to process al tables in a document.               30
           Macro to Apply Paragraph styles to selected paragraphs  32
           Macro to apply character styles to selected text        34



Save-and-print-and-close macro

We will record and examine a macro, which will wrap up our document
editing efforts. For this exercise you will need to start a new
document, key in a small piece of text, and save the document. After
that, you will be ready to record your macro.

  Choose Tools, Macro.
  In the name box type "SaveAndPrint".
  Macro names are case-insensitive; it doesn't matter whether you use
    upper-case or lower-case letters; a mixture of letters makes it
    easier for us humans to read.
  In the dialogue box you'll see "macros available in All Listed
    Templates"; that means that our macro will be recorded in Normal.dot.
    We can move our macro over to our user template once the macro is
    tested and working properly.
  In the description box type "Saves, Prints and Closes the current
    document."
  Choose Record, Confirm
  Note that
      1. The Mouse pointer has a recording cassette attached
      2. A miniature floating toolbar has appeared on the screen
      3. The status bar shows RECording.
  Choose File, Save; File, Print, Confirm; File, Close.
  Your printer should spring into life; the document should clear from
    the screen.
  We are still recording a macro!
  Choose Tools (or File), Macro, Stop recording.
  Choose File, 1 to re-open your file.
  Choose Tools, Macro.
  In the name list select "SaveAndPrint".
  Choose Run.
  Use Tools, Macro, SaveAndPrint, Edit to examine your macro code. Click
    in each command and press the <F1> key to examine the help screen.
  FileSave has no parameters, but we don't need to remember that.
  FilePrint has a lot of parameters, but we don't need to remember that.
  FileClose has a few simple parameters but we can always look them up
    in the Help file!
  While you are in your macro code screen, choose File Print; compare
    the named parts of the File print dialogue box with the parameters to
    the File Print command.
  Why do we not need to put an argument with the FileClose statement in
    this macro?


Beeper Macro

From time to time we will appreciate an audible tone coming from our
macros, either to let us know that they are working, or to signal a
special event. We will write a simple macro from scratch, without using
the macro recorder.

  Choose Tools, Macro
  In the name box type "Beeper".
  Macro names are case-insensitive.
  In the dialogue box you'll see "Macros available in All Listed
    Templates". Our macro will be saved in Normal.DOT. You can always
    move it out (refer to Organizing Macro Code).
  In the description box type "Emits an audible beep".
  Choose the Create button (not "Record")
  The macro toolbar appears.

        Sub MAIN
        End Sub

  Word generates the SUB and END SUB statements for you; the text cursor
    is waiting on the blank line.
  Type "BEEP", without the quotes, on the blank line.
  Slide the mouse, but don't click, over each of the buttons on the
    Macro toolbar until you locate the START button.
  Click on the START button.
  Word emits an audible beep.
  Examine your macro code. Click on the BEEP command and press the <F1>
    key to examine the help screen.
  Within the Help screen, click on the underlined word EXAMPLE near the
    top of the screen.

In the next exercise we will create a second Beeper macro,
by copying the code directly from the example.


Cloning macros

We will re-enter the world of beeping, and grab a sample chunk of code
from the macro Help files.

  Choose Tools, Macro, Organizer
  Close the copy of Normal.dot in the left panel and open your User
    template.
  You should see just the RESTART macro listed there; in the right-hand
    panel is listed the BEEPER macro.
  Click on BEEPER to highlight it, click on the COPY button to copy
    the macro across to your user template.
  You now have a copy of Beeper in both templates.
  Click to highlight the BEEPER of Normal.dot, click on the RENAME
    button.
  Type the new name BEEPMULTIPLE.
  Close the dialogue box.
  Choose Tools, Macro, BEEPMULTIPLE, Edit to edit your macro.
  Click on the Beep command and press the <F1> key to bring up the Help
    screen.
  Within the Help screen, click on the underlined word EXAMPLE near the
    top of the screen.

We are going to copy the Sub BeepThreeTimes code.

  In the WordBasic Example screen, choose the COPY button.
  In the copy window, scroll down until SUB BEEPTHREETIMES appears.
  Select the text downwards up to and including END SUB.
  Click on the COPY button to place the selected text in the clipboard.
  Switch (<ALT><TAB>) to the macro document.
  Select all the text in the window, and paste the contents of the
    clipboard.

    Sub BeepThreeTimes
          For x = 1 to 3
                  Beep
                  For timer = 1 To 1000   'Delay loop between beeps
                  Next timer
           Next x
    End Sub

  Change the macro text from SUB BEEPTHREETIMES to SUB MAIN.
  Close and save and then run the BeepMultiple macro.
  All macro bodies begin with a SUB MAIN.
  We try to group like-minded macros by name, hence BEEP and
    BEEPMULTIPLE, rather than BEEP and MULTIPLEBEEP.
  Edit your BeepMultiple macro to emit five beeps instead of three beeps.
  While you are in Edit mode, you can click the Start button on the
    macro toolbar to test your macro.


Displaying character codes

We will now type in a macro from scratch. The macro's purpose is to
display the ASCII decimal code of the character to the right of the
cursor. This is a useful technique for discovering why Word displays
what it does.

  Choose Tools, Macro
  In the name box type "DisplayCharacterCode".
  In the dialogue box you'll see "macros available in All Listed Templates".
  In the description box type "Displays the ASCII code".
  Choose the Create button (not "Record")
  The macro toolbar appears.

      Sub MAIN
      End Sub

  Word generates the SUB and END SUB statements for you; the text cursor
    is waiting on the blank line.
  Type the following text, starting on the blank line.

      MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))

  Your macro looks like this:

      Sub MAIN
         MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      End Sub

  Place the text cursor between the "o" and "x" of MsgBox. Click
    the Start button on the macro toolbar.
  Word displays a small dialogue box declaring the ASCII code of the
    letter "x" to be 120.
  Discover that the code of upper-case "S" is 83 while that for
    lower-case "s" is 115.
  Click on the macro command SELECTION$ and tap the <F1> key
    to read the help file.

       Selection$() returns text characters to whatever called it.

  Click on the macro command ASC and tap the <F1> key to read the help
    file.

       Asc() returns the ASCII code of the text character to
       whatever called it.

  Click on the macro command STR$() and tap the <F1> key to read the
    help file.

       Str$() converts a numeric value to text characters.

  Click on the macro command MSGBOX and tap the <F1> key to read the
    help file.

       MsgBox displays a small dialogue box.

  Our macro line can be read as "Display the string version of the ASCII
    decimal code of the character".
  What is the ASCII code of a carriage-return (Enter key)?


Enhancing macros

We can often enhance a macro to make life a little easier for us.

  Insert the command CharRight on the line after the MsgBox command.
    Your macro now looks like this:

     Sub MAIN
     MacName$ = "DisplayCharacterCode"
     MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
     CharRight
     End Sub

  Each time we run the macro, we will automatically be moved one
    character to the right. In this way we can scan through a document,
    one character at a time. You may find it annoying that we need to
    click on OK each time we run the macro.
  Make a copy of the MsgBox line. Your macro now looks like this:

      Sub MAIN
      MacName$ = "DisplayCharacterCode"
      MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      CharRight
      End Sub

  Locate the ADD/REMOVE REM button on your macro toolbar.
  Place the text cursor on the first MsgBox line and click on ADD/REMOVE
    REM. Your macro now looks like this:

      Sub MAIN
      MacName$ = "DisplayCharacterCode"
      REM MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      CharRight
      End Sub

  The first MsgBox command (that works!) has been REMarked out of action
    ("Remmed Out"). It appears only as a comment to the macro processor.
  Change the MsgBox on the second line to be PRINT.

      Sub MAIN
      MacName$ = "DisplayCharacterCode"
      REM MsgBox Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      Print Str$(Asc(Selection$()))
      CharRight
      End Sub

  Run your macro (START button) and observe the status line at the foot
    of your screen.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Christopher Greaves writes Computer Based Training programs. This is the
first part of a training workbook for WordBasic. The guy thinks macros!
Maybe there is hope for macro dummies like me! Born in England, an
Australian by choice, Christopher lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
You can send your comments and questions to him at
christopher.greaves@pro-mail.com or to christopher.greaves@pro-mail.com



   ww page 17
  Games Reviewed
  


                               Lighthouse
                     Copyright 1997 by Lynn Alford



Lighthouse by Sierra
http://www.sierra.com


Brief Description

You are a writer who has taken a cottage down by the coast so you can
concentrate on your work. Getting your phone messages one evening
reveals that your neighbour is in trouble and want you to come. Since
you have nothing better to do, you find the keys and get into your car.
This is an adventure game meant for experienced game players. The cursor
only shows you direction of movement. When you face a table of small
items, you have to click all the items to find the things on the table
you can carry. Some of the puzzles, it is obvious what you need to do to
solve the puzzle. Others are simply trial and error solutions. There is
a puzzle-box you find early in the game that has elements of both.

The graphics of the game are lovely.

I'd say it's mainly 3-D rendered stuff, with a lot of texture mapping.
The music is lovely, it adds to the atmosphere without being
distracting. There is a story behind the game, that is slowly revealed
as you progress.


Game Play

This is a game where it is necessary to be very careful to look
everywhere and try to pick up everything. It is easy to miss an item
since the cursor does not give you hints on which items may be picked
up. You carry a few items in hand, which you can use on the screen and
the rest will be put into your bag. It is easy to exchange items by
selecting one then clicking on another.

There is a lot of alien machinery in this game. Some of the items you'll
need to try one control at a time and see if you can find out what each
control does. Some of the more complex machines need a large number of
things done, in a fairly controlled order.

Major hint for the game. It is not necessary for you to follow the
kidnapper immediately. You'll know what this means when you reach that
point.


Gripes about the game

It is very difficult to figure out if the reason that you can't progress
beyond any block in the game is that you've missed something obvious in
the immediate area or if you need an item from another area. Such as
almost being able to move the submarine, but not being quite able to do
so.

Another major problem with the game is that at times, there is an item
somewhere on the screen you need to manipulate that conflicts with the
movement arrows. You may accidentally turn around when you really wanted
to pull or push a lever.


Conclusion

An interesting and entertaining game for experienced game players. It
would be very confusing and frustrating for those without much
experience. Even experienced players may want to keep a walk-through for
this one on hand. Once you really get involved in the game, the
storyline is quite good.

What I've seen of the game would be suitable for the entire family,
though I haven't played it through yet.

This game does contain most of the features that adventure game players
find irritating. It is slow moving, it takes some time to really get
into the story of the game. There are times when you have to
hunt-the-pixel to find the right spot to pick or manipulate something
small. There is at least one *really* irritating puzzle where you must
get the timing just right. The machines don't give you hints to the
method of operation so you just have to keep trying levers and switches
until you learn how to use the machine.

I would suggest that this is a particularly good game to play with a
group of people. Because of the level of difficulty involved, different
approaches may solve problems much faster than one person trying it on
their own.


Some final thoughts on the game.

If you loved the idea behind LucasArts The Dig, but thought that game
was much too easy, you should try this one. If you want to try a game
with alien technology, but aren't ready for a very difficult game, then
you should try The Dig instead.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Lynn Alford is the WebMaster at the Centre for Interactive Multimedia at
John Cook University in Australia. She understands the workings of HTML
as well as the WindoWatch Games Editor. Her pages are always a treat and
can be seen at http://www.jcu.edu.au/~imla/games2.html and
http://www.jcu.edu.au/~imla/ Email can be sent to Lynn at
lynn.alford@jcu.edu.au.



   ww page 18
  The WindoWatch Art Gallery
  

                    Another image from Herb Chong !


Venus
Copyright 1997 by Herb Chong

    Herb's original digital art work, Venus, 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 page 19
  CompuMania
  


                           One Woman's Story
                  Copyright 1997 by Peter Neuendorffer


Alice was wheeled down the long yellow-tiled corridor in four point
restraints. Throngs of photographers tried to get her picture, but as
the steel doors clanged shut, they were left outside to ponder the fate
of this once highly respected computer scientist. I gave a brief
statement and then shook my head sadly.

     How was it that Alice had fallen so far, so fast? She had just been
featured in a two-hour interview on Nova, and with Tom Brokaw on the NBC
  nightly news "In Her Own Words." It was a mystery to all but those who
             knew her as well as I do. What had befallen this bastion of
                                               computational competency?

Before she was admitted to the Gates Home for the Virtually Impaired,
Alice, was wearing 360 virtual glasses, and in each arm she waved a
radio-controlled mouse. Her left shoulder sported a min-laser jet
printer, her right shoulder nestled a digital camera for her web pages
which trailed behind her.

Alice consented to an interview. "It all started when I tried to keep up
  with the latest thing," she recalls. "I had to be on the cutting edge,
     and have the latest gaming and office technology at my fingertips."

"Now, I would be able to manage my finances, order the groceries, and
plan my endless vacations to paradise. I would be part of the vision for
the common man, computing at our beck and call for the fraction of the
price of a new car. All I had to do was shell out $2000.00 every two
years! Piece of cake. The American dream was mine for the taking "

   Alice said she knew little of computers when she bought one. When she
    was informed that her FAT was corrupted with a virus, she had stared
 blankly at the technician. When she discovered the wrong cord had fried
  her motherboard, she merely blinked. When she found out that her modem
     was too slow to surf the Internet, why she ran out and bought a new
state-of-the-art modem. She bought thousands of dollars in software, and
   then bought the bug fixes for the software she had bought. She slowly
   began to learn a bewildering array of technical buzzwords - RAM, ROM,
    Default etc. She noted that when she plugged in her toaster, it made
  toast, but evidently this computational thing was something different.

One day Alice discovered she could make her computing portable, and she
slowly began to assemble backpacks full of equipment. She sold her house
and moved in to the alley next to the computer store. She had arrived.
She set up a multimedia presence and predicted changes in the economy
with the precision that only a homeless person could. She discovered all
the computer equipment was too cumbersome, so she gave it all away. She
was having so much fun being homeless, that she decided to check into
the local mental hospital. The interactive dream for the common man was
at last hers.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Alice and Peter have been making satirical waves in the Boston area for
some time. Peter Neuendorffer was part of the original WindoWatch group
writing about Alice and his various programming interests. Peter is a
Windows programmer specializing in text search applications. He may be
reached using email at petern@user1.channel1.com His Green Line Software
home page is http://www.channel1.com/users/petern



   ww page 20
  Corrupt File Chaos!
  


                     Combating Corrupt File Chaos!
                 Copyright 1995 by Christopher Greaves



This is the procedure I recently used to recover an 800K+ corrupted
document. I believe the procedure is generally applicable to all Windows
word processors.


SYMPTOMS

1) The word processor locks up during screen scrolling, or while
   processing with macros.

2) Loss of system resources: Program Manager, Help, About drop suddenly
   from 83% to 45% or even as low as 13%!

3) Can't scroll (PgDn or PgUp) past a certain point. There may be more
   than one location. See step 4 below.


CAUSE
  Unknown!


SOLUTION
  Rebuild the document using cut-and-paste.


STEPS

1) Backup up the original document. I chose to PKZip and then set the
   read-only attribute on the Zipped file. In this way I can easily
   start afresh by quickly unzipping the archive file.

2) Determine the approximate location of the corruption starting from
   the top of the document. Ctrl-Home to the top of the document and
   then PgDn until the screen locks up. Make a note of some unique text
   near the top of the screen. This text represents the limit of safe
   travel from the top of the document. Use a ruler to measure just how
   far the scroll box has traveled down the scroll bar. In my case on a
   seventeen inch monitor, the box had traveled six centimetres out of
   a possible twenty-two centimetres.

   Corruption existed about 6/22s into the document from the top.

3) Determine the approximate location of the corruption from the BOTTOM
   of the document. Ctrl-END to the BOTTOM of the document and then PGUP
   until the screen locks up. Note that you cannot scroll down past the
   corruption, but you can go directly to the end of the document. Make
   a note of some unique text near the BOTTOM of the screen. This text
   represents the limit of safe travel from the BOTTOM of the document.
   Use a ruler to measure just how far the scroll box has traveled UP
   the scroll bar. In my case on a seventeen inch monitor, the box had
   traveled eight centimetres out of a possible twenty-two centimetres.

   Corruption existed about 8/22s into the document measuring from the
   BOTTOM to the top.

4) Is there more than one point of corruption? In my case, 6 cm from the
   top and 8 cm from the bottom yields me 14 cm of potentially corrupted
   document. In my document I must account for 8 cm or 22 cm minus 14 cm
   equaling 8 cm. We will start work on the first and last corruption
   points, after which we can repeat this process starting at step 2
   above, removing the leading and trailing corruption point at each
   step.

5) Dump the file into a RTF format. Choose File, saveAs, and select Rich
   Text Format from the Save Files As type item in the dialogue box. You
   may choose to ZIP the RTF file into your archive at this point.

6) Use Vernon Buerg's LIST.COM or any suitable text viewer to examine
   the RTF file. Scan or Find from the top of the file forward to the
   text which marks the limit of safe travel in step 2 above. In my case
   I observed that a bookmark appeared to be heavily corrupted with
   strings of eight to one hundred asterisks. Browse backwards to a
   clean part of the document. We will edit or cut up to this point once
   we return to the word processor.

7) Again using LIST.COM or your favorite text viewer to examine the RTF
   file. Scan or Find from the bottom to the top of the file or backward
   to the text which marked the limit of safe travel in step 3 above. In
   my case I observed that another bookmark appeared to be heavily
   corrupted with strings of eight to one hundred asterisks. Browse
   FORWARDS to a clean part of the document. We will edit and cut up to
   this point once we return to the word processor.

8) Load the corrupt document, use Edit|Find to travel forward to the
   text identified in step 6 above. Shift-Ctrl-Home to select from that
   (safe) point backwards to the start of the document, Edit|Copy,
   File|New, and Edit|Paste into the new document. Save this new
   document as Code1 and close the document.

9) Back in the corrupt document, use Ctrl-End to skip right over the
   corruption! Note that you cannot scroll down past the corruption, but
   you can go directly to the end of the document. Use Edit|Find to
   travel backwards to the text identified in step 7 above.
   Shift-Ctrl-END to select from that (safe) point forward to the end of
   the document, Edit|Copy, File|New, and Edit|Paste into the new
   document. Save this new document as Code2 and close the document.

10) If you have a backup copy of your word-processing document, you may
    elect to grab the missing text from that document. Otherwise you
    will use the RTF file created in step 5 above.

11) Choose File|New to create a new document. Insert the RTF file into
    this document, but insert it as a plain ASCII text file, not as a
    RTF file. You will see all the RTF edit codes in the document. Ugly,
    eh? Save this file with a transient name ( Eraseme.txt is good! )

12) Locate the starting point of the corrupt text, delete the RTF codes,
    and paste the rescued text, without its formatting, at the end of
    the Code1 file from step 8 above.

13) Locate the ending point of the corrupt text, delete the RTF codes,
    and paste the rescued text, without its formatting, at the start of
    the Code2 file from step above.

14) Glue the Code1 and Code2 to form a new document.

15) If you had only one point of corruption (e.g. 13/21 and 13/21) you
    have finished. If you had more than one point of corruption (e.g.
    6/22 and 8/22 as in my example), then the new document formed from
    Code1 and Code 2 still has corruption. Start again at step 2 above
    and weed out the next two corruption points.


BOOKMARKS

This time I was in an 800 kilobyte MSWord 6.0c document which had been
built as a series of some 700 bookmarked text items. I was able to
navigate well by judicious use of the Edit|Bookmark command, first
selecting (click once) the bookmark which appeared at the top of the
screen in step 2 above, and then switching to display by location in the
Edit|Bookmark|Dialogue box to determine the bookmarks geographically
preceding the leading point of corruption. A similar technique let me
examine bookmarks following the trailing point of corruption. Use any
auxiliary structure available to you in order to move as close as
possible to the point of corruption without freezing the system.


CREDITS

...are due to the staff of Microsoft's help desk in Markham Ontario for
holding my hand as I formulated these steps. You done real good, guys!
While we're at it, thanks to every BBS Sysop who made the transmission
of this message possible.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Christopher Greaves writes Computer Based Training programs. You can send your
comments and questions to him at  christopher.greaves@pro-mail.com or to
christopher.greaves@pro-mail.com



   ww page 21
  Dear ISP!
  


                      Reflections of a ModemJunkie
                   Copyright 1997 by Leonard Grossman



An Open Letter to my ISP:

My local ISP has a number of classes of service, the most popular being
the Packrat account which permits 600 hours per quarter which includes
PPP and shell access. Also included are ten megabytes of free storage
online for web pages and other purposes for a reasonable fixed fee.
Additionally, the ISP has commercial classes of service available for
significantly higher prices.

The ISP updates the html.log for accounts in my class of service once a
night, usually between midnight and 4:00 a.m. After that I run
Analog2.11 http://www.mcs.net/~grossman/analog2.11/output.html to
prepare my stats pages.

During the past week the reports were truncated at midday on two
occasions and no data at all was provided for a third. After a few
complaints appeared in the support newsgroup, the owner of the ISP,
responded somewhat testily that if we relied on those reports we should
move up to a commercial class of service, which makes hit data available
immediately.


My reply:

Let me begin this article by stating that my internet activity is a
hobby, not a business. It may be an addiction but it is still merely a
hobby. It may be compulsive but it is a hobby. My wife has reminded me
more than once that I have not made a penny off of the Web.

I do host some web pages for not-for-profit organizations but my work on
those pages is totally uncompensated and voluntary. The vast amounts of
time I spend on those pages and other activities, my wife reminds me,
could be used in changing light bulbs, mowing the lawn or -- God forbid
-- sleeping!! Further, that time is not even tax deductible.

Like other hobbyists, I want the best. That is why I am with this
provider and why I stay there.

My interest in my html.log is purely one of curiosity. It is fascinating
to see what people are looking at and where they come from. It is
interesting to find out if efforts to publicize my pages are successful.
But even though I am just a hobbyist, I still want the information I
receive and post to be as accurate as possible.

Since the Packrat setup does not allow running domain lookups by a
chron, I run my logfile analyzer whenever I wake up late in the night.
When asked by the editor, "What's a chron? I've never heard that term
before."


The non-technical description: A chron or chrontab is set on the
provider's machine and causes a script or program placed on the server
to run automatically at a set time. I don't know if chron comes from the
same root as chronometer, but if I didn't want the domain lookups, I
could simply set a chron to run my updatelogs script at 5:00 a.m. every
day. However for security reasons, my provider doesn't permit domain
lookups to be run automatically. Therefore the bleary eyes because there
just isn't time when I get up for work.

I use WS_FTP to insure that the log has been completed some time before
I begin and then run Analog2.11.E The logfile analyzer I use is very
configurable.

One interesting feature is the ability to define what will be considered
a hit or a page. Therefore I ask the program not to include graphics in
its report. It would by default -- grossly inflating the number of hits.
On the other hand, I did require it to record downloads of *.zip files
as hits thereby giving me a record of the number copies of DiDa that are
downloaded from my page each day. Should I be happy or sad to discover
that about half of the visitors to my home page come there to grab that
file. Over a thousand copies were downloaded in June.

In any event, there may be a connection between the fact that I want to
run the analyzer and explanations of why I wake up at about 4:00 almost
every night. Sometimes I have to wait for the file to be completed
before I run Analog. I may be up an hour waiting for it to finish in
order to review the log. After all that, it is disappointing to find the
results to be truncated or missing.

I understand that another level of service is available. I understand
that there is no guarantee for complete logs on the Packrat account. I
keep convincing my wife we can afford it, even if one of our two twelve
year old cars just died and our daughter is starting college. And even
if I keep griping about TVs and lights left on all night -- while this
PC stays on so I can logon at the touch of a key without waiting to
boot!

I have also witnessed and noted this ISPs dedication to quality service
over the years.

That having been said: when I post an article pointing out that the log
is truncated, it is not to demand a level of service beyond what I am
paying for. It is to find out what happened. On a couple of occasions,
for example, by posting a notice I learned that I was running Analog too
early, well before the complete log had been created.

Now I check to assure the html.log is complete before I post a message.
By the way, the file which is approaches four meg a month is gzipped
regularly to save space and transferred at almost 10 K. Not bad at all
on an old 33.6 modem. My notices are intended to alert the provider that
something correctable may be happening on their system and perhaps the
cause can be determined. I also post to determine if others are having
the same problem.

In any event, for the second time within the past few days, my html.log
truncated around noon. What happened?


Dear Reader!

If you got this far, I hope you got a smile out of it... unless of
course you recognize yourself! Note: Several hours after I posted the
foregoing article, my html.log was updated -- in the middle of the day.
The missing data seems to have been restored.


                          +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

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. Perhaps one of the reasons is that
he has helped us discover fine shareware around the Internet! 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
  Understanding The Basics of Access !
  


                    Introducing Microsoft Access 2.0
                              By Tony Lima


   This article is adapted from the author's book Microsoft Access 2.0
   Projects for Windows (Benjamin-Cummings, 1995). Copyright c 1995,
   Tony Lima. All rights reserved.


Introduction

Database management software is designed to handle generic data. In
recent years some database programs have become so powerful that there
are spreadsheet and word processing interfaces to them. Access isn't
quite that powerful - fortunately, because otherwise we wouldn't be able
to use it to learn basic database operations. However, it is a
straightforward program that simplifies the process of setting up and
using a database.

In this series of articles, I'll introduce you to basic database
concepts and operations. You have probably used a word processor before.
Working with database software is different, requiring a different type
of planning and organization. This article and the next two will be
devoted to planning your database and learning some basic jargon. The
upside of this approach is you don't even have to have Access installed
to learn quite a bit about database design. And don't worry - I'll get
to hands-on examples in a few months.


Using a Database Manager

You have experience with a database (although you might not have called
it that). Your address book is a database of people with whom you have
regular contact. The information it stores includes names, addresses,
cities, states, zip codes and (most important of all) telephone numbers.
Let's use this example when defining a few terms common to database
operations.

Since database software is more generic than other application packages,
you must supply more information when setting up the database. However,
once the database has been set up and the data has been entered, a
database program simplifies some tasks a great deal. Among those tasks
are sorting, searching and retrieving data. Sorting data means
presenting the data in a different sequence from the way it's stored in
the database. Your address book is probably sorted by last name. In some
cases, perhaps, it's sorted by first name. However, if you're doing a
mailing to all your friends, the post office will appreciate it if you
sort the letters in order of zip code. Access will let you do this in an
instant.

Searching data means looking for an entry that meet certain criteria.
For example, you might want to find Chris Smith in your address book.
You'd search the book for the last name Smith. If there was more than
one Smith, you'd continue the search by looking for someone in the
Smiths with the first name Chris. If there was more than one Chris
Smith, you'd have to add more criteria to narrow the scope of the
search. For example, you might use middle name or city of residence to
select the correct Chris Smith.

Retrieving data means finding groups of entries that meet certain
criteria and copying them to another location. Suppose you were planning
a trip to San Francisco and wanted to retrieve the names of everyone you
know there. Database management software makes it simple to pull out all
the entries, selecting them using the criterion that the city name is
San Francisco.

Sometimes retrieving data takes some clever thinking. Suppose you wanted
to retrieve the names of everyone you know in the San Francisco Bay
Area. Using city name as a criterion won't work; there are too many
cities for that. However, if you know that all Bay Area zip codes begin
with 94 or 95, you can use that as the search criterion instead.

All this may seem like a waste of time if your address book only
contains a few hundred entries. After all, you can search that many
without a computer. But imagine if there were thousands (or millions) of
entries. That's the scale of the problems Access and other database
managers are designed to handle.


Using Microsoft Access

Microsoft Access is a full-featured database management software package
that takes full advantage of the Windows graphical user interface (GUI).
This interface lets you easily use database management features using a
mouse, menus, dialog boxes and the buttons displayed on the screen.

You can enter or change data, pointing to the specific location with the
mouse pointer. You can scroll through your data using scroll bars. You
can delete one or more entries by marking them and deleting the marked
block. Searching, sorting and retrieving are simple operations. You can
also create good-looking data screens that take full advantage of
windows features such as list boxes and option buttons. You can create
(and print) reports that mix various printer fonts.

The Help feature provides information about all the features of Access.
You can use Help any time when. The Help feature is discussed later in
this Overview.


Starting Access

Start Access the same way you start any other Windows program. First
locate the Access program icon in the Access program group as shown
below. (Your screen may look somewhat different depending on how Access
was installed.)

To start Access:
  1.  Start Windows if it isn't already running.
  2.  Double-click the Access group icon if it's shown on the screen:
      If the Access group window is already open, skip to the next step.
  3.  Double-click the Access program icon. A copyright screen will be
      shown for a few seconds followed by the Access main window as
      shown in Figure 0.2. Access is a large program, so it will
      probably take a few seconds to load; be patient. When Access is
      loaded, the screen should look like this:[**]


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


Note: You may not see the cue card window if you (or someone) has
previously checked the checkbox in the lower right corner of the window.
Also, Cue Card help was removed from Access95 and completely replaced
with Wizards. You'll see how to use some of the Access Wizards in future
articles. In any case, don't worry if the opening screen confronting you
doesn't look exactly like that shown above. Even if you're using
Access95 or Access97 (or even Access 1.x), you can learn quite a bit
about using Access from these articles. The basics haven't changed!


Examining the Access Main Screen

Unlike many other application programs, when Access is started, you
really can't do anything useful immediately. For example, when you start
most word processing programs, the first screen is a blank document.
Before you can do anything, you must either create a new database or
open an existing database. In a few months, you'll learn how to both
create and open (and close) a database. For now, let's just explore the
Access main screen.

The bar across the top of the screen is the application title bar. It
shows the name of the application running in that window. In this case,
of course, it's Microsoft Access. The button at the left end of the
application title bar is the application control menu box. Clicking it
once brings up the standard Windows application control menu. Double-
clicking closes the application. The two buttons at the right end of the
application title bar are the standard minimize and restore/maximize
buttons.

The menu bar lies immediately below the application title bar. Below
that is the Toolbar, a series of buttons that let you quickly accomplish
tasks instead of working through a sequence of menu selections. For
example, the button at the right end of the Toolbar is the Help button
which you'll use later to obtain on-line help. Immediately to the left
of the Help button is the Cue Cards button. A Cue Card is a set of
instructions that walk you through certain common operations. (As noted
earlier, Cue Card help only exists in Access 1.x and 2.0. In later
versions, Cue Cards have been replaced by Wizards.)

Finally, the status bar at the bottom of the gives you information about
the current status of your computer as well as feedback from the last
operation you asked Access to perform.

Most of the screen, however, is occupied by the blank main window. We'll
begin filling this window shortly.


Choosing Menu Options

Most Access tasks are accomplished by selecting one or more menu items
in sequence. Sometimes one menu selection opens a new menu, called a
cascade menu. The screen below shows the File pull-down menu from the
Access main screen. The Add-Ins item has an arrow next to it. This tells
you there's a cascade menu attached to that item. Menu items with three
dots next to them open dialog boxes.

You can select items from menus using the mouse or the keyboard.
Clicking a menu item will select it. Or you can hold down the Alt key
and press the first letter of the menu item. For example, pressing Alt-F
will open the File menu. You can then make a selection using the arrow
keys to highlight the item you want. When the highlight is correctly
positioned, pressing Enter will select the item.

Some menu items have keyboard shortcuts as well. Pressing Ctrl-O will
select the Open Database menu item.

However, it's often possible to perform the same task by selecting a
button on the Toolbar. This is both faster and easier than making
selections from cascading menus. For example, suppose you want to open a
database. You can either select File/Open Database from the menu or just
click the Open Database button on the Toolbar.


Getting Help

Access has an elaborate, context-sensitive help system. Context-sensitive
help gives you information about the operation you're currently working
on. Access also includes cue card help which leads you through certain
operations. Cue card help is similar to the numbered steps used in these
projects. The cue card button is immediately to the left of the help
button on the Toolbar. (Again, later versions of Access use Wizards
instead of Cue Cards.)

The easiest way to get help is to click the help button on the Toolbar.
You can also select Help from the menu or just press the F1 key. When
you select the question mark at the far right edge of the Toolbar,
you'll see a standard Windows help system. Access also includes a set of
Cue Cards which try to lead you through specific processes such as
creating a table or report. The Cue Card button is immediately to the
left of the help button. (Later versions of Access replaced Cue Cards
with Wizards.)

   Tip: When you select an item from a help screen, the Back button
   becomes active. Back is very handy. It lets you back up to the
   previous help screen.


Exiting Access

It's important to exit Access when you're finished working with it.
There are three ways to exit Access and return to the main Program
Manager window. You can select File/Exit from the menu. Or you can press
Alt-F, X to make the same menu selections. Or you can double-click the
application control menu box.


Conclusion

Next time, we'll delve into the mysterious world of database design.
This month's column has gotten you started with a couple of database
concepts, including sorting, searching, and retrieving. We've also seen
how to run and exit Access, two important functions.



   ww 

EDITORIAL

  Editor:                        Lois B. Laulicht
  Contributing Editor:           Herb Chong
  HTML Editor:                   Gregg Hommel
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  NT 4 Editor:                   Linda Rosenbaum
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  Associate Editor:              Paul Schmidt

  Contributing Writers:          John M. Campbell, Christopher Greaves,
                                 Leonard Grossman, Jon Helis, David
                                 Kindle, Tony Lima, Michelle Lundquist,
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  EDITORIAL BOARD                Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois Laulicht

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  Vol.3 No.7 ww End
