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HelpNet News No. 6, May 2001 ********NEXT HELPNET MEETING******** WHEN:
12:00 - 1:00, Thursday, May 31 (Bring Your Lunch) ******************************** IN THIS ISSUE:
A GREAT HELP RESOURCE FOR MS OFFICE: In the January newsletter, I mentioned "The Lounge," which is collection of message boards on MS software issues run by volunteers. You'll find it within Woody's Office Portal (<http://www.wopr.com>). You'll need to create a user name and password for yourself before you can post your own messages. I've had several occasions to use it myself and refer others to it, always with good results. Here's the latest example. Two weeks ago Amy Chase at the Forest Society of Maine tried to do a mail merge in Word 2000, but she couldn't find the "Mail Merge" command - it had disappeared from the "Tools" menu. When I checked my laptop, I discovered that I had the same problem. An extensive search of the MS Knowledge Base failed to produce an answer, although I did find some articles about other sorts of issues with Mail Merge when MS Offce 2000 was installed on a computer that already had Works 2000 Suite - a situation we both had. Amy posted an inquiry in the Lounge, and within a couple of hours we had a detailed solution to the problem. (I'm not going to go into the details here - E-mail me if you want to know.) The point is that the Lounge denizens came through quickly and for free! MICROSOFT WORD SECURITY UPDATE: Microsoft has issued a security bulletin and a set of patches to deal with a vulnerability in Microsoft Word (for both Windows and Mac), that would allow RTF document to run macros, bypassing the macro warnings in Word. Although there haven't been any malicious viruses written yet to exploit this vulnerability, it's potentially a fairly serious one. If you're curious, paranoid, or merely conscientious about security, you can read all about it, and download the patch appropriate for your system, at: <http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms01-028.asp> LOCAL ISP'S - HOW GOOD ARE THEY, AND DO THEY HAVE A FUTURE? I try to support our local organizations, including Internet Service Providers. Besides the intangible satisfaction of doing business with my neighbors, I've generally found I that I could better service this way than dealing with the big box outfits. However, the local companies keep changing on me. I was an early customer of Agate Internet, Bangor's first ISP, before that company disappeared in a flurry of unpaid bills. I then switched several years ago to MINT, which was based in Waterville. I found their service quite good, their tech people easy to work with, and they were very supportive of local initiatives, including donating Web space and a listserv for this HelpNet project. Then MINT was bought by Adelphia cable. Although I can't quantify it, I've had the impression that their service has gone downhill. I know I've have more problems connecting through the Bangor dial-up recently than I used to. Last week, their network went down for an extended time, perhaps 10-12 hours -- no dial-up, no E-mail, no Web services, no phone support, nada. I haven't seen any explanation of what the problem was, but I've ben left feeling rather insecure. ( I did send a message to MINT tech support today asking what happened.) There are other local ISP's serving this area, but I wonder whether any local company will be viable in the long term. What experiences have you all had, and do you think commercial Internet service is heading towards an AOL monopoly? WEB AUTHORING SUPPORT - HOW DO WE CONTINUE? This Saturday is the final session of our 3 Web workshop series. We'd like to set up a way to continue supporting the workshop participants, but we'd also like to make sure that whatever we do also serves the needs for all of you who did not participate in the workshops. If you have any ideas, please post them to this list. Jon
HelpNet is a project of Pine Tree Folk School, and is co-sponsored by Bairnet (the Bangor Area Information Resources Network) and by the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine.
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