Q. I installed Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student Edition on my PC - Windows 8.1 - recently, but it seems to have disappeared lately! What can I do?

A. I have heard of this happening before with Microsoft's products with both Windows 8 and 8.1. Click on the search icon in the Taskbar, and type in Control Panel. Then select Programs, followed by Programs and Features. Office will be shown there. First, try clicking on Change and then Quick Repair. If this doesn't sort things out try the Online Repair option. If that doesn't work either, then you'll have to uninstall Office and reinstall it. You won't lose any files you have created using it, but you will lose any personalisation you made.

Q. How can I create hyperlinks in a word processed document, and then retain them when I turn the document into a PDF?

A. The technique for inserting hyperlinks: e-mail addresses or websites, in your text onto which your reader can click/tap and have an e-mail draft created automatically or be taken straight to the target website, varies between different word processing products.
Some will simply recognise the link as you type, which makes life very simple, but most require a little more work though not very much.
Here is a generic description of the likely steps required for those products that don't recognise the links as you type.
Your product may well have a small icon to insert hyperlinks alongside those above the typing area such as Save, Open, Print, etc.. To check this, hover your mouse pointer over the icons one by one to see their descriptions.
If you have one of these then, to insert a link, when you reach the point in your text where you want to insert a link, click on the Hyperlink Icon. This will bring up a small window. Select either e-mail or Internet, and then simply type in the information requested and click on Apply or OK.
If you don't have a Hyperlink Icon, check each of the text based menu options above the icons at the top of the screen to see which one has the hyperlink insertion option. The mostly likely one is the one headed Insert.
Using this technique, when you reach the point in your text where you want to insert a link, click on Insert, then Hyperlink, or your equivalent. This will bring up a small window. Select either e-mail or Internet, and then simply type in the information requested and click on Apply or OK.
Many of you turn your word processed documents into PDF files for use on the Internet, or for sending to contacts who may not the same word processing product as you.
Care is needed with this process if the documents to be converted contain hyperlinks.
Few of us can afford the Adobe PDF creating software, and many people turn to the often advertised “create PDFs easily and simply” products available on the Internet, often for free. The problem with these products is that the majority of them handle the conversion to PDF by effectively turning the entire word processed document into a single image, thus stripping out the hyperlink information.
If your word processing product is reasonably new, you don't need another product anyway since it will provide the ability to create PDFs itself and retain the hyperlink information.
You will find the feature – in most WP products – under File at the top of the screen. (If it isn't there, try looking under Tools.) Click on File, and look for Export, or better still Export as PDF. If the former, you will have to select PDF from the drop down file type box during the process. There will probably a small screen with choices, but in the vast majority of cases just accept the settings offered.
If you don't have these options in your WP product then it probably doesn't support PDF creation, but there is one more check you could make to be sure. Click on File, then Save As, and then see if PDF is listed in the file type drop down box.

Q. I use Outlook 2007 as my mailer, and have a very large number of old e-mails and attachment that I want to keep. However, the Outlook .pst file has now reached 17GB, which worries me. Is there a program that will strip off and save my attachments elsewhere to reduce the file size?

A. That certainly is some size for an Outlook file! I use Outlook too, but normally strip off (and save if relevant) attachments before filing them in Outlook. There are a number of commercial programs that do exactly what you want, but they tend to cost around £25 which seems expensive for a single-function application. Try Outlook Attachment Remover Add-In, which is free.

Q. How do I double space lines in Microsoft Word?

A. To double space, or change the spacing of text in other ways, in Microsoft Word follow these steps. Open Microsoft Word and the document you wish to modify. Highlight the text you wish to have double spaced, or select all if it is the entire document. Right-click the selected text and then left-click Format and then Paragraph, or just click straight on Paragraph, depending on your version of Word. In the Paragraph window under line spacing change from Single to Double and then click OK.

Q. I have created a Word document, and then converted it to a PDF file for distribution. The Word file was 68Kb, but the PDF file created was larger at 118Kb. Is there something I could have done to keep the PDF file to 68Kb?

A. PDF files are always likely to be larger - often much larger - than their WP equivalents; it is the price one pays for universal accessibility. Non Plain Text WP files, except perhaps Rich Text Format (.RTF) typically require the reader to have a copy of the same WP software, and perhaps even the same version of it, to be able to read the file. Even if the recipient has matching WP software, if unusual fonts have been used in the document, and the recipient does not have those fonts on their PC, it would still be difficult if not impossible for them to read the document. PDF files circumvent these problems - providing, of course, that the recipient has installed the reader! They can be opened by anyone with the reader, across all platforms, and the fonts used are embedded in the document so it doesn't matter if the recipient doesn't have them installed.

Q. Is it possible to scan a text document and then be able to edit the text, rather than always produce an image of the document?

A. A free utility called Simple OCR can do what you want. After installation it will start automatically and ask you to choose between using Simple OCR to recognise printed text or Softwriting, which converts handwritten text. The latter is a demo that lasts for 14 days. Click on Machine Print to select Simple OCR. Set the language to English UK and click Select. Click on Add Page and select a source. This can be a scanner to import pages directly, a single file or a folder of files. The last two options are useful if you don’t have a scanner and want to use images from a digital camera instead. A preview of the page appears. Click on Continue and the picture will be imported and converted to black and white. The Rotate image button next to the zoom controls can be used to turn the image so that it is the right way up. Next click and drag around any areas that you wish to exclude from the conversion. This might include images or any snippets of facing pages that were scanned as well. Click the Convert to text button to start conversion. The screen will be split in two with the image at the top and the converted text at the bottom. When all the red and blue words have been fixed, click on the ‘Save document as’ button to save the text as either a Word document or plain text.

Q. I use Excel quite often, and have managed to accidentally hit a key that has changed the way that the arrow keys work. What can I do?

A. Some keys are ‘toggle’ keys, which means a single press enables or disables some or other mode or function. So if any of the symptoms below happen, press the offending key to turn it off. Accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key can cause problems when typing passwords into boxes. Traditional keyboards have an indicator light for Caps Lock, but some wireless models instead rely on an on-screen indicator that is easily missed. The Scroll Lock (ScrLk) key mostly has no effect but in Excel, for instance, it changes the way the arrow keys work. Instead of moving the cursor to another cell, the arrow keys move the entire worksheet up, down, or sideways. If this happens, tap Scroll Lock to switch it off. If the numeric keypad stops working, and the number keys work like arrow keys, press Num Lock. When inserting new text into existing text, if typing replaces (overwrites) the existing characters, press the Insert key, which toggles between the normal insert mode and overtype mode. In older versions of Office, overtype mode is shown by an ‘OVR’ legend in the status bar. In Word 2007 onwards, overtype mode is turned on with a menu command.

Q. When I open a scanned document in my word processing package to check that it is OK before sending it in an email, it opens as gibberish. But if I open the scanned document from the original file, it is fine and I am able to read it. What is going wrong?

A. Scanned documents become image files, not text files, and text/word processing packages cannot open image files: they see the file content as the gibberish that you describe. You can see the scanned document properly when you open it from the original file because your computer opens it in your default image processing program such as Paint. You must use an image processing program to open an image file. You would have the reverse problem if you tried to open a text file in an image processing program. If you want to insert images into a text document, then you must follow this sort of approach, which applies to Microsoft Word 2010. First select the Insert tab on the ribbon at the top, then click the Picture button and choose Insert Picture from File.

Q. I have been using Microsoft Office Starter 2010, which came installed on my Dell PC. However, now when I try to open an Office file, I see a message saying that it "cannot be opened". I don't have a disk to re-install the software and I can't find a download site. What can I do?

A. I would expect that Dell provided a disk of the pre-installed software. Presumably you have mislaid it. I can't help diagnose the fault in the software because they are so many different possible causes, but I can suggest a solution. Go to openoffice.org, and download and install the OpenOffice Suite for Windows. This is free - known as "open source" - software that is fully compatible with Microsoft file formats, and so handles all Microsoft Office files with no problem. I use it myself, rather than pay the hefty upgrade costs of staying with the latest Microsoft Office releases.

Q. My PC crashed recently, and now Word has a problem. When I start it, I receive the error message “Word cannot open this document template”. How do I get things back to normal?

A. I suspect that the crash corrupted one of the files that Word needs to create or open documents.The corrupted file is probably in Word's Startup folder. To find it, close Word and navigate to the Program Files folder on your computer. Open the Microsoft Office folder, then the one called Office (followed by the version number of the Word that you have installed: 10, 11, 12, etc.), and then open the Startup folder. You will see some files that end .dot. Move them out of the folder, but do not delete them at this point. Now restart Word, and hopefully the problem will have been fixed. If it has, you will find that Word has reverted to its default document and font settings. If that is a nuisance, then move the .dot files back into the Startup folder one at a time, restarting Word after each one, to identify the corrupt one(s) which will have to be deleted. If none of this has worked, then uninstall Word, and then reinstall it, but you will need a copy of Microsoft Office to do this, of course.

Q. I used to be able to print text boxes in my Word documents, but now there are just blank spaces where they should be when I print these documents. The same problem applies to drawings if I insert them using the drawing icons at the bottom of the document. What have I done to cause this?

A. Text boxes are treated by Word as graphics. I suspect that what has happened is that the preferences for Word have been accidentally changed to print documents faster by omitting inserted graphics. The solution is simple. Launch Word, go to Tools, then Options, then select the Print tab. Where it shows the "Include with document" option, tick the box that says "Drawing objects". This will save the preference for all future printing.

Q. I downloaded a trial version of Microsoft Office 2010, and used it a few times before the trial expired. Now the files that I worked on with the trial version will not open in my old version of Microsoft Office. Is it possible to change them back to the old version?

A. There are a couple of things that you could do. The first is to download the free Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack from http://www.tinyurl.com/3sf7tpj, which will let you read new Office documents using the older software. Then you can save them via the Save As dialogue in the older format. The other option is to install a very good free alternative to Microsoft Office called OpenOffice, which can be downloaded from http://www.openoffice.org. Whilst it uses its own file formats, it will also open all Office file formats, and can save in Office formats via the Save As dialogue.