I doubt that there are many Arsenal fans who, at the beginning of the season, wouldn’t have settled for 5 wins and 1 draw in 6 games. And yet, many are surely disappointed that the Gunners didn’t make it 6 on the trot — not so much because they didn’t manage to break another record, […]
Today, I just finished proof-reading a very long French translation (80,000 words) on which I had been working for quite a while. I had re-read the document several times, so I was pretty confident that there were very few errors left. Still, just for fun, I thought I’d give Word 2004’s French grammar checker a […]
Things are not looking too good for the Democrats’ candidate in the 2004 US presidential election at this point. Poll results show that Bush is leading by 7 to 10 percentage points. The low blows about Kerry’s involvement in the Vietnam War appear to have done their job, regardless of how shameful and unfounded they […]
This is a perfect example of how Microsoft doesn’t even get the basics of a decent user interface right. Normally, the “Save” command in the “File” menu should only be active (enabled) when the current document is in an unsaved state. If the document in its current state has already been saved, then the user […]
I have already written about this recurring problem I am having when mounting optical media on my G4. Essentially, what happens is that, 20 seconds or so after I’ve inserted the CD (or DVD) — i.e. the time it takes for the drive to spin up and start reading the CD — my entire Mac […]
The latest update for Default Folder X is out and, as usual, it’s an indispensable update. It includes several significant improvements, including the ability in Open/Save dialogs to switch between folders currently open in the Finder with the keyboard. (I am glad to report that this was one of my feature requests, which was immediately […]
Now here’s a bug to savour, because only Microsoft could come up with such insanity. Take a look at the following paragraph of text: There are two things to note about it. One is that it contains a spelling mistake, with rix that should actually read riz. (I’m only human.) The other one is that […]
I realize that Microsoft probably licenses its spell checking software from a third-party — but that’s not really relevant to me as an end user. To me, when Word’s spell checker fails to recognize correct words, it’s a problem with Word. It’s up to Microsoft to deal with the problem by pressuring the third-party in […]
A long time ago (in software development time), Microsoft Word became a multilingual word processor, meaning that it started supporting the use of more than one language in word documents. (Prior to that, Microsoft would sell localized versions of Word in French, Spanish, etc. — but switching languages was a pain. If you had an […]
Say you have more two document windows open in Word, Document A and Document B. You are in Document A and select a paragraph of text, with the intention of copying it to Document B. Before you actually copy it, you first want to locate the exact destination in Document B. So, while the paragraph […]
Yet another example of glaring inconsistency between Office applications. In Word, as long as a document window stays open, you can always use command-Z to undo your most recent actions (or command-Y to redo them), even if you pressed command-S at some point during the process in order to save your document. In other words, […]
I cannot quite believe this. I have a database that I converted from FileMaker 6 (i.e. 5) to FileMaker 7 format a few months ago. I’ve been adding records to it, with no problems. Today, I wanted to print a list of the records, using a layout that I had created that lists each record […]
In this blog, I frequently mention that I have to work with existing Word documents created by other people. This gives me a lot of good examples of how people in the real world use Word and how far we are from getting a critical mass of Word users to use Word’s features properly. Here’s […]
command-WSay you have a Finder window in “View as Columns” view mode. You select a file in the right-most column and make its name editable. You type a new name or make a change to the existing file name. Then, without pressing the Enter or Return key, you hit command-W to close the Finder window […]
Take the following situation: In a Word document, you have a paragraph of text, followed by a table. Say you have a new version of the paragraph before the table in the Clipboard, and you want to replace the existing paragraph with the new paragraph. What you’d intuitively do is select the existing paragraph and […]