Hands on - Question time - Advice from our experts. If you have a question, PCW can help find the soution.

Publication: Personal Computer World

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DIGITAL IMAGING

Seeking input

Q: My son-in-law bought a Sony Handycam DCR-DVD91E from Comet a year ago to film our first grandchild. Subsequently, nobody has been able to help him find a video-editing program that will handle files from the mini DVD disc it uses. I believe the problem format is called vro. He bought a new computer specifically to do this editing. While it reads the mini DVDs and displays the unedited footage perfectly well, Adobe Elements could not input the files at all. Could you please tell us whether there are any video-editing programs that will input these files straight from the mini DVD placed in the PC's drive so we can work on them? James AR Willis

A: The vro files are a DVD-Ram flavour of the mpeg-2 video format which can be edited in many applications, including Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0. Try copying the vro files to the hard drive and renaming the.vro extension to.mpg. If you're lucky, this may work.

If not, you'll need to convert the files, either to mpeg-2 or, better still, to DV-avi files which any video editor, Premiere Elements included, will handle more smoothly than mpeg-2. For this you'll need a converter application. Try Virtualdub (www.virtualdub.org) with fccHandler's mpeg-2 upgrade (http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/stable/index.html) or Pegasys' TMPGenc DVD Author 1.6 (www.pegasys-inc.com/en/download/tda16.html).

SPREADSHEETS

Formula won

Q: Is there a formula in Excel using functions such as left(), right(), mid() that looks for a particular character or space in a cell and will only extract everything up to, or beyond, that character or space? Patrick Russell

A Certainly. Here's an example. If you have a list of surnames and first names in single cells down column A, starting in cell A2, you can separate them into different columns. You can put the first names into column B with the formula =MID(A2,(FIND(" ",A2,1)-1)+2,LEN(A2)) in cell B2 and the surnames into column C with the formula =LEFT(A2,(FIND(",",A2,1)-1)) in cell C2. Drag these formulas down columns B and C. Look up the functions MID, FIND, LEN and LEFT in the Help files to understand what is happening.

SPREADSHEETS

Excel, with a bit of previous

Q: I have a workbook in Excel 2003 for managing my finances. I have one sheet for each month and some formulas to reference figures from the last month's sheet. Is there a way to tell Excel to reference a cell in the previous sheet...

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