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Staff association leader Steve Breen of the information systems and technology department will be president-elect of the staff association in the coming year, and president in 2002-03, the association told its members this week. He was acclaimed to office as the only candidate put forward in the recent nomination period. Breen will serve as president following Ed Chrzanowski of the math faculty computing facility, who's been president-elect during 2000-01. New members of the staff association executive will take office at the group's annual general meeting at noontime on June 1.

Progress on the research park

The Regional Municipality of Waterloo was asked to lend its support, and make a $5.7 million contribution, along with other sponsors including the City of Waterloo, Communitech and Canada's Technology Triangle, as well as UW. Official approval by Waterloo city council was given May 8.

"The Region of Waterloo is pleased to be a part of the partnership developing the University of Waterloo Research and Technology Park," said a statement from regional chair Ken Seiling. "This Region has a long tradition of business, education and government sectors working together to build our community and enhance our quality of life."

With the city and region in support, the focus now shifts to the provincial and federal governments, which are being asked for $27 million through the SuperBuild "infrastructure" program. Government money is to be used for such facilities as roads and sewers on the north campus site and nearby, while private sector money will put up buildings that are eventually expected to house companies with some 6,000 jobs.

The "business case" calls for the creation of 1.2 million square feet of total space in three phases. The first phase of the development would involve 400,000 square feet of building space, and officials say a number of local high technology firms have expressed interest in establishing facilities in this phase.

UW president David Johnston called the research and technology park proposal "a remarkable symbol of the new economy". It's a "powerful idea and an important initiative for the people of this region and the province," he added.

The business plan lists these objectives for the research park, which has been one of UW's ambitions for more than a decade:

• Encouraging the creation or relocation of research-based companies whose research and development interests are compatible with research and development activities in the university.
• Providing suitable employment for co-op students and graduates.
• Producing long-term financial benefit that will help the university to enhance the quality and relevance of its programs of teaching, research and service.
• Assisting in the economic and social enhancement of the surrounding community by facilitating the creation or relocation of companies or agencies employing highly skilled people.

Before we get to the long weekend

• UW police: on duty 24 hours, 888-4911.
• Student Life Centre: open 24 hours, turnkey desk 888-4434.
• Maintenance emergencies: phone ext. 3793, 24 hours a day.

The Dana Porter and Davis Centre libraries will be open their usual hours on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday, they'll be open from noon to 6 p.m., and self-charge will be available but no other services.

Briefly, a few other things that are happening today and over the weekend:

• A cognitive science forum is scheduled for 2:30 today in Humanities room 373: Chris Eliasmith of the philosophy department will speak on "How Brains Represent: Sensing Motion".
• Over the weekend, the philosophy department presents a conference on the interrelations between knowledge and the world, under the title "The Limits of Warrant". The opening lecture, which was scheduled for 5:00 this evening, has been cancelled, I'm told, so the conference will now begin at 7:30 with a talk by Bernard Linsky ("Logical Types and Knowability") in Needles Hall room 3001. The conference runs through Sunday afternoon and is expected to attract about 100 participants.
• Another 100 visitors will be on campus over the weekend -- staying in the Ron Eydt Village conference centre -- to attend this year's Ontario Folk Dance Camp.
• The Christian rock band Critical Mass, which involves a number of UW people, will be playing over the weekend at the Catholic Association of Musicians conference in Arkansas. "We'll be on for a short 10-minute set," says David Wang of the electrical and computer engineering department, one of the band members. "For those in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, we will be playing on May 26, 7:30 p.m. at St. Joseph's Church. Tickets are $5 and are available by calling 745-9302."

Library will be open more this year

"During the upcoming fiscal year," says a memo from Mary Stanley in the library office, "both Porter and Davis will be open 353 days and be closed just 12 days. Both sites will be open approximately 155 hours more this year than last year.

"Since fiscal year 1998-99, the Library has increased the hours that both the Davis and Porter buildings are open by more than 300 hours."

Specific changes to the building hours:

• Regular weekend hours begin the first weekend of term (instead of second weekend).
• Open on statutory holidays during term.
• Open longer hours on holiday weekends.
• Open weekends during extended hours at 9 a.m. (instead of 11 a.m.).
• Open weekend afternoons between terms.

The best place in North America to live, work, invest and raise a family: Mom and Pop Goose have chosen a nesting site at the edge of UW's parking lot A.

URLs and e-mail addresses in Microsoft Word -- by Carol Vogt

It would seem that it should be straightforward to change this behaviour. Most people select Options from the Tools menu, and expect to find a setting there, but there isn't one. So how can you stop Word from behaving in this way?

This formatting Word carries out on URLs and email addresses is part of a collection of sometimes helpful (but frequently not) automatic formatting operations which Word calls Autoformatting. There are functions you probably appreciate, such as Word's superscripting the "st" and "rd" of ordinals such as 1st and 3rd. You may appreciate that if you start a paragraph with something like a 1. followed by a space Word will assume you are starting a numbered list. But most people don't appreciate having their URLs print underlined in blue.

The good news is that you can control Word's autoformatting operations. From the Tools menu, you can select AutoCorrect, and four panels of settings will appear. There are two panels of settings that affect autoformatting. One is labeled "Autoformat" and the other "Autoformat as you type". There are pretty much identical settings in each, and the one that controls the appearance of URLs is "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks". Uncheck this option.

But on which panel? If you uncheck it on the "Autoformat as you type" panel, it will be turned off for all URLs and email addresses that you will type in the future. However it is not exactly intuitive how to turn it off for existing documents. Word's Help will tell you that to remove a single hyperlink, you right click on the hyperlink, and from the context menu that appears, choose Hyperlink, Remove. That may be okay if you only have one or two, but to find out how to remove all hyperlinks from a document, we must go to Microsoft's web site and search their Knowledge Base. After searching for keywords "Word", "hyperlink" and "remove", we will be presented with an article which informs us that:

To remove all hyperlinks in a document:
On the Edit menu, click Select All.
Press CTRL+SHIFT+F9 on your keyboard

However, there is some good news. In Office XP, the newest version of Microsoft Office, to be released later this month, Microsoft has recognized that people want more control over automatic formatting functions. Whenever Word applies any automatic formatting, such as the creation of a hyperlink, a little symbol called a "smart tag" will appear when you move your mouse over the hyperlink. There is a drop-down menu on the smart tag, that lets you choose to undo the current hyperlink for this occurrence, or to stop the automatic creation of hyperlinks.

There is more good news in Office XP. Clippy the annoying paper clip has gone! Yay! There are several other welcome additions:

• Watermarks are very easy to create; just choose Format, Background, Text Watermark, type the text of your watermark, and you're done.
• This newest version of Word now lets you print your document as a booklet.
• Speech recognition is included; you can dictate your document and format via voice commands.
• You can select multiple non-contiguous chunks of your document.
• A subset of Visio is included, which enables the creation of more complex organization charts.

CAR

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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