I am afraid I am in full agreement with Gordon Strachan over the outcome of this week’s round of Champions’ League games. God knows I am not a Manchester United fan by any stretch of the imagination, but the perspective of Milan AC winning yet another boring final is just too much to bear. Like […]
Yesterday, I posted an item about the apparent lack of a keyboard shorcut for the en dash in Pages when using the Canadian CSA keyboard layout. Well, I was wrong. For many years, the application in which I have used the en dash most often has been Microsoft Word. (It was just too risky to […]
Microsoft has recently released the Office 2004 11.1.1 Update – an 18 MB download. If you only use Word 2004, though, don’t bother: The updater doesn’t fix anything in Word itself, which stays untouched at version 11.1.0. Here’s the list of updated files: Camera & Scanner Plug-in Microsoft Component Plug-in Microsoft Excel Microsoft Office Microsoft […]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the lack of easy shortcuts for selecting lines or paragraphs in Pages. It turns out that Apple has posted a web page about keyboard shortcuts in Pages (which is also supposed to be available through Pages’ “Help” menu, although that doesn’t work for me). And here’s the […]
When typing text in Pages, as far as I know, there is no keyboard shortcut for the en dash. This is unforgivable. I realize that the en dash can be accessed through the Character Palette that’s available system-wide (when it’s made visible in the IM menu), but that’s not a solution. Who wants to have […]
Each time I am forced to use Microsoft PowerPoint (thankfully it’s not that often), I am reminded of how awful its user interface actually is. It is really quite astounding. Yesterday I had to translate a couple of PowerPoint presentations and, of course, the client wanted the translation to be done in PowerPoint. I have […]
A few weeks ago, I noted that finally, with Pages, we have a word processor whose default body text style includes space after. I think it’s a good idea. It’s the way most people want their text (with spacing between paragraphs), and in other word processors they create such spacing artificially by using double return […]
Pages’ text wrapping algorithm appears to be suffering from some kind of flaw. In certain situations, if you use an “s” between parentheses to indicate an optional plural form for a word, as in “the flaw(s)“, Pages will not hesitate to break the line between the word and the “(s)“. Here’s an example in French […]
Pages is very much a Mac OS X-only application in that it uses a file extension to identify the files that it creates as Pages documents. The extension is “.pages“. If you remove that extension from the name of a file created by Pages, Pages becomes unable to open the file. By contrast, a file […]
Finally something to cheer about for Arsenal fans… including — gasp! — goal keeping exploits by Manuel Almunia. It was not a classic by any stretch of the imagination. But considering how depleted the Arsenal side currently is, it was a surprisingly good performance. Sheffield United fans must have thought that they could not have […]
There are days when you feel that Microsoft has made things totally unpredictable in Word just in order to irritate Word users worldwide. Yesterday, I got a call from my mother-in-law who, like millions of Word users out there, had just encountered the dreaded “AutoFormat As You Type” set of features in Word and was […]
Others have already noted that the available options in Pages when it comes to creating new documents are severely limited. There is just one option in the application’s “Preferences” dialog that lets you choose, for new documents, either to “Show Template Chooser dialog” or to automatically use a specific template by default. There is nothing […]