An STW client reported to us a strange happening in her Microsoft Word documents.  Some times the spell checker just didn’t work.  It didn’t show the red wiggly line or auto correct words, and when she used Tools / Spelling & Grammar it said ‘The Spelling and Grammer checking is complete’.  And this was even if she’d typed in gibberish!

It transpires that her computer language was set to Welsh.  And although we immediately changed her Language Bar settings from her desktop, the problem persisted within Microsoft Word.

We resolved it by a combination of the following actions:

Language Bar Settings

The language bar appears on the desktop / start bar and is turned on by default.  This makes it easy to swap between languages.  The trouble is, this is only useful if you (or your computer) need to change between languages often.

The language bar was set to Welsh (CY).  We turned this back to English (UK) and then change the language bar settings so that it no longer appaers automatically.   One final setting we changed in the Language Bar settings was to turn OFF the ability to use keystrokes to swap languages.

Microsoft Word

The trouble was that even after we’d set the computer back to English UK, the documents were still set to Welsh (you can see this in the bottom bar of the document once you’ve clicked somehwere on the screen).

You can swap this around easily by simply double-clicking on the word ‘Welsh’ and changing the settings.  However, in this case the setting would revert back to Welsh when we opened a new document.

To fix this we simply used Windows Explorer to navigate to the Normal.dot.  Opened it and closed it immediately (making no changes).  Then when we started a new document in Microsoft Word the language setting was English (UK).

This left the existing documents to fix.  These were still showing Welsh.   We opened them, highlighted all the content (using CTRL + A) and then clicked To change this double click on the Language name, and select English (UK) from the Language window.  We also ensured that there was NO TICK against the option to ‘Do not check spelling or grammar’.

The customer is now happy that her typos are corrected!   I hope this post has helped you too.

Cat Young
STW Online
www.stw-online.net

What ever you did to our emails has successfully beaten back the spam emails.
I have today sent out a few hundred emails as part of a marketing exercise and many of the answers have come back into our `junk box’. This is not a problem, as I can sort through these. I’m anxious that there may be good emails that are getting blocked as part of your very successful anti spam block further up the chain of command!
Is there a way of checking this. It would just be peace of mind on my part rather than huge suspicion.

There are three levels of spam filtering in use here.

The SarcMark has been proposed as a a “new” punctuation mark to indicate when the writer is being sarcastic.  

The ‘inventor’ explained that he felt that written communication can be all too often miscontrued.  In his mind, as SMS texting, emails and online communities have taken off the need for somthing that explains your statement as ’sarcastic’ or ‘ironic’ has become more acute.   But do we really need this?

Most of you will be familiar with links on websites to ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’.  They usually sit at the foot of the page where they do not interfere with the main navigation of your website.  But how important are they really?

The short answer is ‘very’ !

You have two reasons to think of – protecting yourself and protecting your users / customers.   So, what should you be putting in these ‘documents’?  Read on to find out…

A customer phoned up and asked for her “Incoming and Outgoing mail server settings”.  Instead of simply handing them over I asked why.  “Because I’m setting up emails on my mobile phone” she replied.   Ah, it sounds so easy!  But HOW you set up your mobile phone to be able to send and receive your work email depends upon:

1. What type of mailbox you have set up
2. Which model of phone you use

In this case the customer has a Hosted Exchange mailbox through us and this means that she can only fully synchronise her emails, calendars and contacts if she (a) has a Windows Mobile device or (b) your phone supports ‘Push’ synchronisation.

Unfortunately the customer’s phone is a Nokia E71 and doesn’t support either of these.

However, our technical team have been able to help her set up a POP3 account on her Nokia phone, which gives her limited functionality.  Find out how….