Where have all the icons gone?

Q. I recently installed a larger hard drive on my PC, and when I booted it, everything worked perfectly, except for the Microsoft icons. Before I changed the hard drive, MS Word docs had a MS Word icon, MS Excel had the correct icon. After changing the hard drive, all my icons are a generic white box with a blue outline. Any ideas?

A. It sounds as if your Microsoft Office file associations may have been changed or lost during the hard drive swap, said Paul Tucker, a technical consultant for CMIT Solutions of North Raleigh.

You can remedy this by right-clicking on the icon for one of your documents (MS Word doc), and choosing "properties" from the menu.

Make sure the file type is correct ("Microsoft Word Document"), and that the "Opens with:" program is correct (iMicrosoft Word). If this is not correct, choose the "change" button and select the proper program from the resulting list. If this doesn't correct the problem, Tucker suggests trying the same procedure and selecting a different program. Click on "properties" again and switch it back to the correct program. This will make it refresh.

Doing this for one icon of each type should force the others to correct themselves. You might need to uninstall and reinstall Office to correct the problem. You will not lose your documents.

Q. I have a 20-year accumulation of text destined for family archiving. It was made with Microsoft Works Database (.wdb) and is still accessible on a Hewlett-Packard computer. I have managed to transfer it all via discs to my new Mac, but I can get only one file to open. This one exception exists in two versions: .wdb and .txt, and only the .txt version is accessible for editing on the Mac. I would like to save .wdb files as .txt files — can you please tell me how to do it?

A. Microsoft Works lets you save files in different formats by using the "save as" option, said Priscilla Alden of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Information Technology Services. Just go to the "file" menu, click "save as" and choose the type of file you want. The two formats you would normally choose to give you access to the data with other software programs and platforms would be .txt (text and tabs) or .csv (text and commas). If you have Excel on your Mac, it should read the .txt or .csv files you have imported from your Windows computer.

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