18th February 2002

"Why were there little boxes scattered throughout that e-mail message?" No, it wasn't hacked by FedEx. The sender was inadvertently "stupid." And now, I'm here to tell you how to stop the insanity before it happens again. Oops! Did you see that? It's what Microsoft calls a "smart quote." However, certain applications can't map these characters properly. It all has to do with the way a document (or e-mail message) is encoded. If you do your editing in Microsoft Word, and then paste that text into another document (in another program), you may see weird blocks where you originally had apostrophes, quotation marks, ellipses, or emdashes. They've shown up in Lockergnome newsletters before, too. The "text/html" encoding can't interpret the characters, so all you see are cute little boxes. Let's turn those "smart" features off, shall we? In Microsoft Word, click Tools | AutoCorrect | AutoFormat (and AutoFormat As You Type). Take the checkmarks out of the appropriate "Replace" fields. For the ultimate in cross-compatibility, this entire (Replace) section should be cleared of all checkmarks. Get smart by making Word stupider.