Hi Carolie,
The letter writer has ALWAYS been the part of the program that needs fixing the most. I absolutely deplore it, mainly because letters are saved in HTML. Plus, you have no options as to how you want it to print as far as by itself or with demographics, etc. You can, but I mean I never want those, so I wish it could default to whatever you wanted.
I always get the X as well, all part of HTML code. There are two workarounds, one has a number of steps, is boring, and takes around 45 to 60 seconds. The other is around two steps or so, is cool, and takes about 30 seconds.
In the first method, you select the letter, choose Save Selected Item As from the File drop down menu, and save as a text file. You then copy and paste into Word, and edit from there. The good news is you can drag the Word document you made into the Imported Items, and you have a good letter forever. You can delete the other, but remember there is always that beautiful HTML copy in the Imported Items folder taking up space.
The second method will cost you $34.95. I use it. I admit I didn't look long for this program, but it works and is rather cool, but of course cannot place the terribly formatted HTML document directly onto Word in a nice way, but that can be fixed.
Download the following software:
http://www.brothersoft.com/windows-html-to-word-2009-download-56150.htmlNow, you can keep this on your desktop and simply browse to the letter you want in the actual Imported Items folder. You can always map that folder as a network drive or make a shortcut to make it easier.
Once you find the document, you simply click on Convert, and it turns it into a Word document. Clean it up a little, and there you are. I would say that the longer your letters, the more this tool is useful.
You can even enter URLs and convert them to Word, although I have never seen the use for it. The Word documents are still live, though. You can click on links, and it will open web pages.
