Helping Help
WordPerfect file sleuth
Extracting lost Excel spreadsheets
Where it's @
Robust redirection
It's possible to change the colours that Windows Help uses to mark pop-ups and hypertext links, and it's easy to find the colours you want.
You set Help's colours in your win.ini file. First, make a backup copy of that file for safety's sake. Then launch the file in Notepad from either Program Manager or File Manager: Select File-Run, type win.ini and press <Enter>. Once in the file, find the section that starts with the heading [Windows Help].
You can define the colour for each type of link (jumps to different pages, pop-ups and so on) by adding a line below the "[Windows Help]" line. For example, to change the colour used for jump words to magenta (a red-blue combination with no green), insert the line JumpColor=255 0 255. Each number represents a different primary colour - in the order red, green and blue - with 0 signifying that you want none of that colour and 255 that you want it full force. See Figure 1 for a list of win.ini commands that control Help's colours.
Win.Inl line Defines
JumpColor=R G B Colour of jump text
Popup Color=R G B Colour of pop-up text
MacroColor=R G B Colour of macro text
IFJumpColor=R G B Colour of interfile jump text
IFPopupColor=R G B Colour of interfile pop-up text
Of course, Help has its default settings, which it uses if you don't give it other instructions via win.ini. JumpColor defaults to 0, 128, 0, producing the pale green we're all familiar with. The other settings all default to whatever JumpColor is set to. Therefore, to change all the colours at once to a single preference, you need only add a JumpColor setting.
There's also an easy way that you can experiment with colours without setting them: first, launch Control Panel from Program Manager's Main program group. In Control Panel, double-click the Colour icon. In the Colour dialogue box, click Colour Palette, then click Define Custom Colours. This sequence brings up the Custom Colour Selector (see Figure 2). As you change the red, green and blue values on the right, you can see a sample of the colour they create on the left. If you prefer, you can select a colour by dragging the crosshairs around the large square and adjusting the brightness with the slider on the right. When the box in the lower left has the colours you want, launch win.ini and enter them.
- Steve Hecht
Editor's note: These simple settings can make Help much easier to read, and therefore more helpful. This is especially true if you have a monochrome notebook. And if you want to distinguish between intrafile and interfile jumps (so you'll know when you're looking at a different file), the only way to do so is through win.ini.
Unfortunately, these colour settings don't work in all modes of all graphics cards, especially if you're viewing more than 256 simultaneous colours. When I set my Hercules Dynamite card, based on the ET4000/W32 chip, to 16-bits-per-pixel mode, all the "hot" text areas - including pop-ups, jumps and macros - defaulted to black, underlined text (the settings work in 24-colour and 256-colour modes). But on most systems and most graphics cards, the win.ini keywords work as advertised.
Every Windows program you ever installed has probably left .dll and .drv files in your Windows and Windows\system directories. It's smart to clean those directories of unwanted files. But how do you figure out where a given .dll and .drv came from?
Use WordPerfect's file viewing feature for this job. Select File-Open. For List File Types, select All Files (*.*) and browse the directory you would like to clean up. Select a .dll or .drv you're wondering about, and click View. WordPerfect will display information about that file - often including the copyright owner and the file's purpose. This is a big help when you're deciding whether to delete the file.
- John Orzechowski,
Editor's note: The easiest way to find your .dll and .drv files in WordPerfect is with the QuickFinder option. In WordPerfect 6.0 and 6.1, select File-QuickFinder, or once you're in the Open File dialogue box, click the QuickFinder button. In the resulting dialogue box, for Search In, select Subtree and enter c:\windows. For Path(s)/Pattern(s), enter *.dll, *.drv. Click Find for a list of the files worth considering. The View button will still show you where the file came from. When you want to delete a file, select File Options-Delete.
It's a shame File Manager doesn't have such viewers, but some File Manager replacements, notably Norton Desktop and PC Tools, also have viewers for .dll and .drv files.
If one of your Excel 4.0 workbooks becomes corrupted, you may lose access to all the worksheets within it. Here's how I managed to recover my worksheets after Excel reported a bad workbook file.
First, I opened a new worksheet file in the same directory as the damaged one. Next, in cell A1, I entered the formula =[workbook.xlw]sheet.xls!a1, where workbook and sheet were the names of my workbook file and one of its worksheets. I then clicked the lower-left corner of the cell and dragged it, first across and then down, until it covered at least as many cells as the data in the original worksheet. With those cells still selected, I first ran Edit-Copy and then selected Edit-Paste Special. This sequence brought up the Paste Special dialogue box, where I selected Values and clicked OK. I then repeated this procedure for each of the spreadsheets in the corrupted workbook to recover my data.
- Wendyanne D'Silva
Editor's note: A variation of this trick will work with Excel 5.0. The only difference is that your formula should read =[workbook.xls]sheet!a1.
There's no surefire way to save a corrupted file - if the information is gone, it's gone - but importing data to a new file is always worth a try. After all, if an important data file is corrupted and you don't have a backup, you have a lot to gain and virtually nothing to lose, as long as you make a copy of your original file before attempting to recover data from it.
If this procedure works, you'll still lose your formulas, formatting and charts - only your data will be saved. What's more, every cell that's blank in the corrupted file will contain a zero in the copy. You can eliminate these zeros by replacing the original formula with =if(not(isblank([worksheet.xlw]sheet.xls'!a1)), [worksheet.xlw]sheet.xls'!a1,"").
If you fail to recover your data using Excel, and you think it's still buried in a partially corrupted file, you might want to try the importing functions in other programs such as Word for Windows, 1-2-3 or Quattro Pro. One of them may be tolerant enough to let some errors pass, allowing you to get to the data that's still intact.
There's no need to put the usual "@echo off" command at the beginning of a short batch file. You can achieve the same effect - keeping the commands from echoing to the screen - by starting each line with an @ sign, as in @format a: /q.
- Sarah Gonzales
Editor's note: This is a good, quick way to keep commands from echoing, although a single @echo off command is easier if the file has more than three or four lines. Besides saving typing, starting each line with @ makes your batch files execute faster, since "@echo off" takes some time to process.
Using the > and >> symbols to redirect DOS output to a file is a common trick, but unfortunately, it is also a limited one. For instance, the command copy *.doc a: > copy.log not only copies the desired files, it also redirects the copy command's message ("1 file(s) copied") to a new file called copy.log, preserving a record of the copy and reducing on-screen clutter. If a file called copy.log already exists, > overwrites it, but >> appends the new output to it.
But what if the current directory has no .doc files? Then the copy command gives you an error message, and DOS has no way of redirecting or hiding such messages. Luckily, NDOS, the enhanced command processor that comes with Norton Utilities, does. In NDOS, >&> redirects error messages to a new file, while >>&> appends them to an existing one. If you want DOS's standard output and error messages to go to the same file, use >& for a new file and >>& to append. For instance, the command copy *.doc a: >>@ c:\copy.log produces no on-screen messages and logs each time it's used.
- Sam Werael
Editor's note: Most Norton Utilities users don't use NDOS, but this tip still works on their machines. You can load NDOS and the batch file temporarily with NDOS /C batname, where batname is the name of your batch file. To automate this process, put that command in another batch file, or in the Command Line property of a Windows Program Manager Program Item.
If you use OS/2 Warp, you can redirect error messages with the operators 2> and 2>>. To redirect standard output and error messages to the same file, add 2>&1 to the end of the command line, as in copy *.doc a: > copy.log 2>&1.