Question amp; Answer;Watershed

14th May 1999, 1:00am

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Question amp; Answer;Watershed

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/question-amp-answerwatershed
Your technical problems tackled

Q Since I bought my home PC just before Christmas I have had a great time surfing the Net. However, what is really tedious is tracking down that useful site I found last week. Is there a way of keeping track of sites?

A Most browsers - the software you use to surf the Net - have a URL (uniform resource locator) facility for remembering the address of a site. If you are using Navigator then the menu bar at the top of the screen has a “bookmarks” option. If you click on this, the first item on the menu is “add bookmark”. Select this and your computer will remember the URL of the site and add its name to the list in the bookmarks menu. Next time you want to visit the site just open the bookmarks menu and scroll down to the site name.

In Explorer the equivalent of the Navigator bookmarks menu is “favourites”. You can add favourite sites to Explorer in the same way.

Q I have noticed that when using Word I sometimes find the odd word that doesn’t look right on the screen. For example, the word “all” sometimes looks as if there is a space between the two ls. I find this really annoying. Can I do anything about it?

A This problem is because some letters are wider than others. When there are two thin letters next to one another they do not take up the full space and it looks as if there is extra space in the word. The process of kerning (adjusting the spacing) will force the letters to take up the space that they need and should make the text look properly spaced.

To turn kerning on in the latest version of Word, select “font” from the “format” menu. Click the “character spacing” tab, then check the kerning box and set the font size to be less than that which you are using in the text of your document. This should cure the problem.

Q When I double-click on email addresses that have been given to me in a message - such as TES_Online@newsint.co.uk - I get the following error message: “Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed”. How do I remedy this please?

A When you are browsing the web and click on a link of the type “mailto:someone@somewhere.or.other.com” the browser tries to launch your email program and display a new message form. If you use Netscape, then Navigator’s own mail component is run. With Explorer it could well be that it is trying to run Outlook to send the message, and this may not have been installed or configured correctly.

Whatever mail program is installed on your machine, it needs a number of basic details before it is able to send a message. These are: the email address of the user, the full name of the user and name of the organisation (these are optional), and the name of an outgoing mail (SMTP) server which you can get from your Internet service provider.

An example for Netscape might be: Full name: Fred Smith.

organisation: The Anywhere Travel Company.

Email address: fsmith@anywhere.net

Outgoing mail server: mailgw.anywhere.net

These parameters can be set up in Explorer or Navigator, using the preferences option in the edit menu. Then select “email” and “general” and fill in the boxes.

Les Watson

If you have any computer problems, write to Qamp;A, TES Online, Admiral House, 66-68 East Smithfield, London E1 9XY or email TES_Online@newsint.co.uk

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