Accessing AutoFormat

By Anne Krishnan | October 13, 2007 at 2:00a.m.

By ANNE KRISHNAN

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

Q. Although I once could turn dashes into a solid line in Outlook Express and Word, the line now stays broken into dashes. Is there any way to make this line solid?

A. For this answer, I took to the Web, coming across a handy post on Experts.com.

According to Dale Wiley, the site’s Microsoft Word expert, Word automatically applies border styles to some characters. Usually, when you type three or more hyphens, underscore characters or equals signs, Word replaces them with lines — thin, thick and double, respectively.

This all has to do with one of the program’s AutoCorrect features, and it sounds like yours has somehow gotten turned off.

To turn it back on, go to the “Insert” menu at the top of your screen, scroll down to “AutoText,” then select “AutoText” again in the menu that comes up. Choose the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab and you’ll see the option to apply border lines as you type. Select that.

AutoCorrect is a pretty cool feature, by the way. If you have words that you type frequently — and frequently mistype — you can create customized rules to save yourself some aggravation. For instance, since I frequently mistype Durham as Durahm, I made a new rule to fix it automatically. Just click on the “AutoCorrect” tab in the menu above to add your rule.

Q. When trying to e-mail photos from files in “My Pictures” with Windows XP, I no longer get the dialog box that asks me if I want to reduce the size of my photos before sending. Can you help me recover that feature?

A. This problem — caused by a corrupted file — is common enough that Microsoft provides a guide for fixing it on its support Web site. But although the steps are fairly straightforward, the company warns that you must be careful because you’ll be editing your registry, a database that Windows uses to store hardware and software configuration information, user preferences and setup information.

“If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system,” the company writes on its Web site. “Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.”

That said, let’s continue.

The main tactic is to replace the corrupted Sendmail.dll file. Find it by clicking “start” at the bottom left of your screen. Click Run, then type %systemroot% 1⁄4system32. Windows will warn you again that you shouldn’t mess with this file. To proceed, click “Show the contents of this folder.”

On the File menu at the top of the screen, click “New,” then “Folder,” then name it “OldFiles” and hit enter. You’ll store the suspect file here.

Find Sendmail.dll (the files are in roughly alphabetical order), right-click on it and select “cut”. Go back to the OldFiles folder you just created, right-click and select “paste.”

Windows will insert a fresh copy of the Sendmail.dll file from its backup location and your problem should be fixed.

If this doesn’t work, Microsoft goes on to describe how to verify your registry settings. For that level of detail, see the Web site: support.microsoft.com ⁄kb⁄9883393.

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