Articles posted in March, 2011

Customizing Pages ’09: How to work around the AppleScript bug with documents containing an automatic table of contents (Part 2)

Thursday, March 31st, 2011 • 9:22 am

Last year, I wrote a series of articles on customizing Pages ’09 with a combination of AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro. At the time, I noted that AppleScript support in Pages ’09 suffered from a bug causing it to fail to compute the offset of the current selection in a document if that selection comes after a section […]

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Keynote ’09: Default font for Notes section

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 • 1:42 pm

For the first time in my life, I have to design a presentation to be shown to an audience as part of a conference, using an LCD projector. Given my long and painful experience of having to translate PowerPoint presentations for various clients using the various flavours of Microsoft PowerPoint that I unfortunately have been […]

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Mac OS X’s Mail: Replying to coloured messages

Friday, March 25th, 2011 • 10:03 am

The other day, I finally got tired of having to deal on a daily basis with a bug that I reported to Apple back in… 2004 (!) and is still not fixed in the latest version of Mac OS X’s Mail available, i.e. version 4.5. In its “Preferences” dialog, Mail has a feature called “Rules” […]

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Word 2011: Can’t beat that polish

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 • 9:44 am

With all the bugs and glitches that I am highlighting in Word 2011, I should probably strive to be a bit more fair and balanced and give Microsoft props when props are due. And I must say that, in Word 2011, they have outdone themselves in the aesthetic department, especially with controls that really look like they […]

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Word 2011: Blank menus

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011 • 9:27 am

Here’s another new fun thing that Word 2011 throws at you from time to time just to spice up your attempts to use it for what it is intended for, i.e., you know, word processing: Gives new meaning to the phrase “drawing a blank,” does it not? Right here, it’s happening to me with the Ribbon […]

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Word 2011: Disappearing cursor

Monday, March 7th, 2011 • 10:07 am

When you are forced to use Microsoft Word 2011’s in your line of work, as I am, here’s the type of crap that you have to contend with on a daily basis: What is this, you say? It’s simple. It’s a Word document open in Word 2011 with the blinking cursor (insertion point) located before the word […]

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Word 2011: Word selection with mouse vs. keyboard shortcuts

Friday, March 4th, 2011 • 5:33 pm

For a word processor that is supposed to be keyboard-friendly, i.e. eminently usable by power users who like keyboard shortcuts and other keyboard-based features, Microsoft Word sure is eminently stupid. I am a big fan of word-by-word selection. I know that many Mac users are not even aware of its existence, but when you want to […]

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Spotlight: Search string in Finder and Search field in Preview

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 • 10:53 am

Mac OS X’s Spotlight has a fairly handy feature when your list of search results includes PDF files. If you double-click on a PDF file in the list of search results in the Finder, Mac OS X opens it in Preview as it would open any PDF file, but in addition, Mac OS X automatically includes the search […]

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Customizing Pages ’09: Real Page Up/Down with Keyboard Maestro

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 • 2:09 pm

The default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys in Pages ’09 has one rather irritating aspect. Say you have a multiple-page document open in Pages ’09. You scroll back to the very beginning of the document and then you select the “Fit Page” option in the zoom menu in the bottom-left corner of the […]

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