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Last week I wrote about Office XP's Smart Tags, a new feature that links text in Word and Excel documents to Office XP tasks like sending an e-mail message or scheduling an appointment in your Outlook calendar. The Smart Tags technology is loaded with potential--and controversy--because one of its capabilities is to link to external Web sites.

While the jury is still out on how pernicious this technology is (or might become), several companies have created Smart Tags that work with Office XP. You can take third-party Smart Tags for a test drive right now. For instance, Lexis-Nexis has created a Smart Tag designed to streamline legal research by enabling Word to recognize case names. If Roe v. Wade appears in your document, you can click it to link to Lexis-Nexis information about that case. Other Smart Tags link you to weather information when you click a Zip code and airline flight information when you click a flight number. An ESPN Smart Tag recognizes Major League Baseball teams and player names and links you to their stats.

If you're interested in checking out what's available, open Word or Excel, choose Tools, AutoCorrect Options, and click the Smart Tags tab. In the Smart Tags dialog box, click the More Smart Tags button, which links you to a page on Microsoft's site where you can browse for Smart Tags in the following categories: Learning, Communication Services, Reference, and News and Travel.

Managing Multiple E-Mail Accounts in Outlook 2002

Outlook 2002 does a bang-up job of e-mail account management. Like most Internet service providers, mine lets me have up to five e-mail addresses along with my regular Internet connection. This is extremely handy for keeping my messages organized. I set up one address for personal use, one for work correspondence, and another for e-mail newsletters. Using Outlook, I can choose to send or receive e-mail from any of these accounts (or all of them) at any given time. To add an e-mail account in Outlook, choose Tools, E-Mail Accounts, and click "Add a new e-mail account" in the ensuing dialog box. When you click Next, Outlook will prompt you for the server and other information you need to complete the task. Of course, you'll have to sign up with your ISP for the extra account or accounts.

If you have multiple accounts set up, you can download messages from all of them by simply clicking the Send/Receive button as usual. But if you want to download e-mail from any one of them individually, choose Tools, Send/Receive, and choose the account from the submenu that appears. When sending a message, you can choose which account you use as your return address by clicking New to start a new message, then choosing the account from the Accounts drop-down list next to the Send button.

My only complaint is that the default name for these accounts is your ISP's e-mail server name. In my case the account names were identical because they all use the same server. So my list read servername 1, servername 2, and servername 3, which is not exactly intuitive. Here's how to change the names to something more descriptive: Choose Tools, E-Mail Accounts, then click "View or change existing e-mail accounts" and click Next. In the next dialog box, click the first account name and click Change. In the next dialog box, click More Settings. Still with me? We're almost done. In the Internet E-Mail Settings dialog box, click the General tab. Beneath Mail Account, you'll see a field labeled "Type the name by which you would like to refer to this account." Type the new name in that field and click OK. You'll need to repeat this procedure for your other accounts, but when you're done, you'll have sensible account names and a warm glow in your heart, knowing you've once again bent Microsoft Office to your will.

Word 2002 and Adobe Acrobat PDFMaker Conflict

Kind-hearted reader Jason Feinman of Silver Spring, Maryland, took the time to write me about a conflict between Word 2002 and Adobe Acrobat. If you upgraded to Word 2002 on a machine with Adobe Acrobat 5.0 with PDFMaker installed, you might run into several problems. Word 2002 and Acrobat don't play nice. Symptoms include missing buttons and an error (with accompanying crash) when exiting Word. Please note that these conflicts are between Word and the full-blown version of Acrobat, not the Acrobat Reader. Unfortunately, Adobe has not yet released a fix. The only solution is to uninstall the PDFMaker component of Acrobat. Microsoft has also posted some solutions and workarounds: To solve the crash on Word exit problem, go to OAER: Error Message When You Quit Word with Adobe PDFMaker.dot Add-in. To fix buttons missing or not working, go to WD2002: Buttons Missing, Errors After Upgrading Word 97/2000 with Adobe Acrobat Add-in.

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