Avoiding address problem

Q. I have posed this question to you before -- without a response. I am trying again after another incident: My WordPerfect program (version 8.0) has, four or five times, eaten the address book.
This has happened on the Dell desktop and laptop that I own. The first incident -- a couple of years ago -- wiped out dozens of addresses. When I clicked to open the address book, nothing was in it. It has happened, as I said, several times since.
Have you ever heard of such a thing? Also, I prefer WordPerfect over Word, and I would like to do a floppy backup of the address book, something that seems like a good idea. Have you any idea where the address book is hidden and what it's called?
A. Better late than never, but I sure wish I had worked out your question before you got clobbered again by the same problem.
Address book problems appear somewhat common, and because the largest sets of customers using Corel's superb word processor are folks in law firms, the procedures for backing up data have been widely distributed in those circles.
Let me point you to a Web site with quite a few gems about WordPerfect, courtesy of Kendall Callas, who specializes in writing WP macros for businesses and clearly knows his stuff: www.microcounsel.com/index.htm.
Here is the answer for backing up the Version 8 WordPerfect database of addresses: Click on Tools at the top of the display and pick Address Book. Right-click on the Book icon and select Properties from the menu that pops up. This will display the name of the address book and where it is located. It most likely will be C: 1/4Corel 1/4Suite8 1/4Shared 1/4Address 1/4Database. So then right-click on Start and select Explore, and you can follow the folders to that item and drag its icon onto your floppy.
Instructions for WP versions before and after 8 are covered by Callas at his MicroCounsel Web site.
Q. I forgot to save your columns a few weeks ago in which you advised a reader how to replace the AOL e-mail handler with Microsoft Outlook. Could you please send me a copy of that response? My sister has a fairly new Gateway laptop with Windows ME (I think) and AOL 9.0 Optimized and I want to switch her to Outlook.
A. The check's in the mail, but your question has been coming in from so many readers that it is surely worth a revisit, and the AOL-to-Outlook e-mail topic has changed lately. America Online has dashed the hopes of a passel of third-party conversion-program sellers by issuing its own system for moving America Online e-mail into more robust software like Outlook and Eudora.
There was extreme pressure to do this. Almost everybody who decided to find software to convert their clunky AOL mail to Outlook used it to copy their inboxes to their hard drives and then dropped their America Online subscriptions for another Internet service provider.
While AOL e-mail improved greatly on the road to the current version 9.0, it continues to lack the full flexibility of Outlook and other programs such as Eudora and the Entourage e-mail module for Macintosh.
Outlook also offers message rules to shuttle garbage into the waste bin, give priority treatment to messages from friends and customers, and fire off customized "I'm away" replies.
AOL responded by converting its e-mail into a format known as IMAP that can be accessed by Outlook and many other programs. Open AOL and click Control + K (keyword) and type in the search term imap to call up the conversion instructions. You need to set Outlook by hand using the Tools/Accounts commands and entering information about servers, passwords and ports that is provided by AOL under the IMAP search.
The great benefit of this is that it lets many people who have come to appreciate other parts of AOL while they've learned to hate the e-mail feature have the best of both worlds. Also worth mentioning is that AOL subscribers can access their e-mail using a Web-based mail reader at AOL.com.
Knight Ridder Tribune