ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: Really love your column and look forward to it each Sunday morning. My question is: Suddenly, when I receive a hyperlink and I click, up comes WORD program. Cannot figure out why suddenly this is doing this.  I don’t receive any error messages, it just goes into my program WORD, which of course shows gobbly-gook. Never did before. Hope you can help me.  Really appreciate your help.

– Doe T.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

 A: It may not be obvious from casual use of your web browser Doe, but Windows uses the same mechanism to know what program to use to open a hyperlink as it does with a file that is resident on your local hard drive.  Specifically, that mechanism would be the venerable file association.  I’ve covered file associations in the column before, most recently in issue #225, Nov 13, 2011, which you can read in the column archives on my website, ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com).  The cause of your problem is that somehow the program that Windows associates with the file extension .htm or .html has been changed from your browser to Microsoft Word.   It’s impossible to know exactly how that happened, but it’s pretty easy to change it back.  Go to the Windows Control Panel and select “Default Programs”.  In the list of programs, find your web browser and select it.  Click “Choose defaults for this program” then click “Select All” followed by “Save”.

Q: I work on science projects with 3 schools and have a number of emails that I want to move to a plain computer file and then burn a copy for emergency use.  I am old and about a low medium knowledge person. I have a Pentium 4 processor with XP (massive free space).  I use Firefox as my browser and ATT is my internet provider and yahoo.com is the eventual email source.  So, how do I go about making a file on my C drive  and making each of about 40 emails an entry in that file. I can do them one at a time if needed or I can select if that is possible or I can move all 139 emails and delete as required.  Sorry if I have used wrong terms.

– Jim W.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: I would grade your terminology as above-average, Jim.  You’d probably cringe if you could see unadulterated versions of the e-mail that I receive on a routine basis.  As for your problem, the biggest challenge in what you’re trying to accomplish is combining the e-mails into a single large file.  In addition to the textual body, an individual e-mail encapsulates formatting data, address and routing information, and any files that happen to be attached.  I’m going to assume that what you’re trying to do is put together a readable document that contains these 40 e-mails so that you can handle them as a single entity for the purposes of printing or giving out copies.

40 isn’t really a very large number, so rather than try and dream up some elaborate automated method that relies on Geeky tricks to work, I would recommend that you simply open each e-mail one at a time.  Select (with your mouse) the part that you want to save, right-click and select copy.  This puts the selected text on the Windows clipboard, from where it can be pasted into another program.  Use something like Word, or WordPad, and paste the copied stuff.  Repeat this for each of the e-mails you want to save.  It should take you around 30 minutes to complete your collection once you figure out how to do it.  Good luck!