Is there a way to create some sort of print generator where this module would know exactly where a file is and print out however many copies you need after someone has loaded the specific file locations into it?

Bryen Yates, Chicago

A. Your office is an excellent candidate for the expensive ($450) but elegantly simple Adobe Acrobat Professional 6.0 software that has become the gold standard for Internet and office file-sharing. No matter what kind of documents or forms your receptionist creates, they all can be stored as easily found files in Adobe's universal PDF (portable document format) and then printed as needed by anyone on the network.

For that matter, it would be very quick work to either load PDF copies of all your forms and documents on everybody's workstation or burn them on a CD that office mates could open and print out as needed.

The idea is that the PDF format can contain files that were made in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect or any text editor, and as any format of spreadsheet you can imagine, as well as reports generated by Access or other database programs. When printed out from a PDF, these documents and forms look exactly as they do when created on the costly software that creates them.

The beauty of Acrobat is that you can buy a single version of the PDF file-creation software and then install free copies of the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 software on all workstations to let everybody open and print them. This saves worry about licenses for folks other than the receptionist for expensive business software and delivers a very easy system for making all of one's company documents a mouse click away for everybody.

Q. Thanks for the past tips on how to have one's Microsoft PowerPoint presentation play music during a slide. But how the heck do you get it to play one complete song all the way through the whole presentation without the song starting over again on each slide?

I am losing my hair on this one.

Andy Drajus, Schaumburg, Ill.

A. Of all the claims this column ever dared make, preventing hair loss had never been considered until your note arrived, Mr. D.

I, too, nearly grew a shiny spot in place of my cowlick as I checked out your question. The trick, I found after making a few phone calls and several false starts, lies in a "Custom Animation" command under the PowerPoint Slideshow toolbar. You didn't find it on your own because it is poorly named, in my humble opinion.

In PowerPoint, you see, music is considered just another animation, like making headlines sweep in from off screen, flashing type in changing colors or making typewriter sounds or other noises when you click to change slides. And to get a piece of music to play as background throughout a presentation you must set it up as an animation rather than attaching it to the first slide, which would make sense.

Here's the drill: Open the first slide in your presentation, click on View and then Slide Master. This creates a template where elements that will go on every slide are entered - things like page numbers, headings, copyrights and background music. With the master slide open, go to the Slideshow tool and scroll down to Custom Animation. Click on Insert and seek out your music file to play throughout the show.

Click Multimedia Settings in the Custom Animation display, then click the radio buttons to order the file played and then use the arrow box to specify how many slides should use the tune. Next, click the More Options box you will see in the same display. Check the command to loop the playing in case the music runs out before your wind does while talking.

After this, every slide you start will open with an icon for the music and ready for taking on data. Believe it or not, I had often wondered why I never saw a PowerPoint show with full-time background music. Now we know why. It's too well hidden even for Bill Gates' speechwriters. What a shame. If I were writing his speeches, the PowerPoints would have the theme from "Jaws."

Q. I hope you can help me with this problem. I use Hotmail for all of my e-mail, and a few weeks ago I started having this problem when I downloaded an attachment from an e-mail. It would always download the attachment before, but now Outlook Express 6 comes on and tells me "OE removed access to the following unsafe attachment in your mail."

I receive this message for all my attachments. I never use Outlook Express, so I don't know how this happened. Can you tell me how to turn this program off so I can download attachments?

Mark Raab, Brick, N.J.

A. One of the great features of Microsoft's Hotmail, a Web-based e-mail service, is that users can configure the seriously businesslike Outlook and Outlook Express programs to handle messages instead of accessing them on the Hotmail.com site. This makes handling e-mail far easier than working on the Web, where you must wait for the screen to refresh every time you take an action.

Though you don't use this feature, it is available on your machine, and your attachment problem comes because the Security settings in Outlook Express on your machine have been cranked to liquefy, I fear.

The fix is simple. Click on Tools in Outlook Express, select Options and click the Security tab. There will be a check box that permits Outlook users to deep-six all potentially virus-laden attachments. One click there and you'll be back in business.

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