 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfectionist Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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The calls come with a cry of anguish and frustration: "I've got to present a 10,000-word thesis tomorrow and my printer won't work!"; "All I'm getting is pages of gobbledygook!"; "I spent days formatting the document and it's come out plain!". Usually they've wrestled with the problem for hours and read the manual till they're cross-eyed but nothing's working. Yet the truth is, half the time the problem can be solved in minutes with "The Magic Space".
You'll notice that when you save a file in Word-Perfect, even if it's only a dozen words, when you check the directory list the file actually contains several thousand bytes. The reason is that great quantities of information are saved which are just not displayed: printers, fonts, styles and formatting, a host of data that you can't see, but which as often as not is causing the problem that's making you tear your hair out. Hence the magic space.
You see when you start a new file WordPerfect attaches to it all the relevant data for your particular computer. But if you retrieve a file that has been previously produced it will follow the instructions given by that file's hidden data. So much of the time the intransigent problem is being caused by information you didn't even know was there, which might have been saved for another machine, or for an older configuration that you've since changed.
If you start WordPerfect and tap the space bar, that single space is enough to create a new file configured for your current setup. Then when you retrieve the old file, it automatically sheds its old data casing and picks up the current one.
When you save this file the program will ask you for a file name-after all this is now a new file-and if you give it the old name you'll overwrite the first file and be confident that the new one is configured for your computer.
Makes sense doesn't it? Yet you'd be surprised how, through this simple process, I've saved many a hapless buff from insanity.
User Group
Melburnians' blood must flow bits instead of blood. As well as the biggest and strongest PC group in the country we are also home to the biggest and strongest WordPerfect Users' Group. It publishes a first-rate newsletter and meets every month at Practical Training, 7th floor, 468 St Kilda Road at 6pm. The next meetings are July 27 and August 26.
Every meeting includes demonstrations of several features from the program, with hands-on practice in PT's excellent classrooms. And whenever anything new is happening, the Group is first to know.
There's lots of cross-fertilisation between the two groups, and ultimately it's good for both if we maintain awareness of each other's events, so if you're a keen WordPerfect user, check it out.
Reprinted from the August 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
