Articles posted in December, 2010

Word 2011: Working with the new Find/Replace feature

Monday, December 20th, 2010 • 7:56 pm

I have already had the opportunity to report on various new problems in Word 2011 linked to the introduction of the new default user interface for finding and replacing text. Today, I’d like to try and describe the new feature as a whole and its impact on my workflow in real-world situations involving real-world Word […]

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Word 2011 Tip: Assigning command-shift-Z to ‘Redo’

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 7:07 pm

One of the very first things you’ll want to do after you’ve installed Word 2011 on your machine is to go and use the “Customize Keyboard…” command (in the “Tools” menu) to assign the command-shift-Z shortcut to the “EditRedoOrRepeat” command (under the “Edit” category). Why? Because if you don’t and you are used to using command-shift-Z […]

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Word 2011: Scope of ‘Replace All’ all wrong

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:51 pm

Here’s a simple Word document with some text and a table containing figures: In the process of translating documents from English to French, I often have to convert the English number format to a French number format. This involves, among other things, replacing the decimal period with a comma, which is the standard decimal separator […]

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Word 2011: Resizing text boxes with dark edges

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:25 pm

Working with text boxes in Word 2011 is an endless source of fun. Let’s take a text box formatted with one of Word 2011’s own “quick styles,” i.e. with a black background and a light-coloured edge: As you can see, resizing the text box works reasonably well. You don’t get “live” resizing. Instead, you can […]

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Word 2011: I-beam cursor over dark background

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:17 pm

Here’s a little movie that really says it all: Do you see an I-beam cursor anywhere in there? I sure don’t. In this movie, I am simply typing (with the extra space between “This” and “is,” of course, since I cannot see my cursor and therefore cannot see that I already typed a space) and […]

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Word 2011: Flickering madness in tables

Monday, December 13th, 2010 • 5:27 pm

Here’s a quick little movie for you: What on earth is going on here? Guess what? Absolutely nothing. The only thing that I did during the recording of this video clip was to move the mouse pointer slightly. I didn’t click on anything, I didn’t select anything until the very end. Apparently, even ensuring that […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Clicking on that ‘Send’ button

Friday, December 10th, 2010 • 12:17 pm

Am I really the only one who’s regularly affected/annoyed by this? When I compose a message in Mac OS X’s Mail and then go to the toolbar to click on the “Send” button to send it, I regularly manage to hit a “dead” spot when clicking does nothing, even though my mouse is clearly—as far […]

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Word 2011: Find/Replace is broken

Thursday, December 9th, 2010 • 11:41 pm

The “new and improved” text search fonction in Word 2011 is completely broken, and it’s absolutely maddening. Of course, the problems are not reliably reproducible, so all I can do is describe what is happening to me while I am working on various documents in Word 2011. But it’s so bad that I simply cannot […]

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Pages ’09 Tip: Fixing table row heights

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 • 3:59 pm

I have no idea why, but quite often when I am in the process of creating a table in Pages ’09, the application decides to have its own ideas about what the desirable row height is for each row in the table. For example, I start by creating a table that looks like this: The table […]

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