Outlook Express users read this before upgrading to Office 2007.

If you use Outlook Express and require spellchecking to work, then you may wish to think twice about upgrading to Office 2007.

Outlook Express works with the spellchecker built into earlier versions of Office/Word. But once you install Office 2007, your ability to spellcheck your email in Outlook Express is lost. To my knowledge there is no official fix from Microsoft to this problem.

One person contacting me for a solution (who was put onto me by Microsoft Australia support) was irate to lose their Outlook Express spellchecker after having spent hundreds of dollars upgrading to Office 2007.

There is a patch available from my site which adds spellchecking to Outlook Express and is suitable for most English speaking countries. It should be noted however the spellcheck dictionary is not as comprehensive as the Australian English spellcheck dictionary I provide. I would estimate it includes about a third of the words. However to get around the Office 2007/Outlook Express spellchecking issue, it is a good short term measure.

The spellchecking program and patch are provided by a third party and according to the developer won't be upgraded. It is an end-of-life program.

I would suggest after obtaining the spelling program (and patch if required) from my site, to think about the email clients available. Using web mail and the spellchecking dictionaries I provide with your browser, may be a good option for the future.

- Kelvin Eldridge

Have you Googled lately?

Who hasn't. But the question is how did you Google and do you know these neat Google tricks?

On many computers I see, the Google toolbar installed taking up valuable screen space and causing issues. Get rid of it. Internet Explorer 7 has a great search facility built in.

We've put together some of our favourite Google tips and search techniques on our Fun With Search page. If you:

• Want to know the weather
• Need a handy calculator
• Want to know the meaning of a word
• Want to do a Google search with pages from your country as the default
• Want to know what other people in others countries see when they search Google
• and much more

then check out the JustLocal Fun With Search page.

One tip our clients love is the ability to set Google Australia as the default search in Internet Explorer 7. Most people think they are stuck of Microsoft's Live Search which is the default. Now they can click on a link on the Fun With Search page and set Google Australia, or Google Australia with pages from Australia as their default search engine. It couldn't be easier.

Happy searching.

- Kelvin Eldridge

PS. Have you ever wondered why when you sometimes search using Google it gives you the option to show only pages from the country, and other times this option isn't available. Try the search engines for the different countries and check the results. Can you work out why?