Articles posted in October, 2008

Word 2008: Pathetic, totally unreliable piece of crap

Friday, October 31st, 2008 • 2:50 pm

I am sorry, but there are no other words (or only words that are even worse). It is absolutely unbelievable. Frequent Betalogue readers know that, these days, I use Apple’s Pages for most of my word processing needs. If I get Word documents that I need to work on and resubmit as Word documents, I […]

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Word 2008: Buggy copy-and-paste behaviour with styles

Thursday, October 30th, 2008 • 3:10 pm

There are so many ways in which Microsoft Word is a failure as a word processor. But in particular there are numerous ways in which it is a failure as a text editor. And as a professional translator (among other things), I am particularly aware of this, because a lot of my time in word […]

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Word 2008: Split bar changes

Monday, October 27th, 2008 • 2:16 pm

It’s taken forever, but finally someone at Microsoft has condescended to modifying Word’s behaviour so that it responds correctly to scroll wheel/ball input—albeit only for separate panes within the same document window. Everywhere else in Mac OS X, when you use your mouse’s scroll wheel/ball, the operating system scrolls whatever is currently under the mouse […]

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Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard): Focus problem with iCal alarm window

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 • 4:22 pm

In Mac OS X, when you use iCal to display an alarm for a particular event in one of your calendars, at the appropriate time Mac OS X displays a special alarm window that looks like this: This window is special in that it does not have a visible parent application: clicking on it does […]

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Pages 3.0: Could be more stable

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 • 10:47 am

Compared to the recurring nightmare known as Microsoft Word 2008, Apple’s own Pages 3.0 is a joy to use. It’s fast, it does not corrupt documents, and, for the most part, it’s reliable. That said, I cannot help but notice that, in recent months, the application has not been as stable as it used to […]

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Excel 2008: Can’t change cell format while editing cell contents

Friday, October 10th, 2008 • 9:29 am

I am not an Excel specialist, but I do know my way around (although I use Apple’s Numbers most of the time for my own needs). The other day, an employee at one of my tech support services’ clients called me because she was trying to fill out an Excel table and whenever she typed […]

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iTunes 8: Now lets you edit sort fields for multiple tracks

Friday, October 10th, 2008 • 9:00 am

Phew. Finally someone at Apple has come to his/her senses. In iTunes 7.1 back in March 2007, Apple introduced a new promising feature that enabled you to apply new tags to your music tracks called “Sort Artist,” “Sort Album Artist,” etc. But for some reason they made it incredibly cumbersome to actually edit these fields. […]

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