Betalogue

I have received more feedback about the issue with character-level formatting in the header of a Word document that I was working on the other day. Yesterday, I indicated that the problem had to do with the fact that the text in the header, even though it didn’t look any different from regular text, was [...]

I now have a partial explanation for the mad behaviour of the header text in a Word document that I described in a post yesterday. A reader has written to indicate that he believes the text in the header in that document is not actually regular text typed by the user, but a reference to [...]

Here’s the situation. I have an existing Microsoft Word document with a header that contains some text: I want to edit that header and replace the existing text with some text that contains a portion in superscript, like “July 4th” with the “th” in superscript. So I type the text and select the “th” portion: [...]

While I have a lot of respect for Brent Simmons as the developer behind NetNewsWire (although he sold it several years ago, and things have ground down to an ominous standstill since), I am afraid his latest column for Macworld is directly in line with everything that has ever been written in Macworld about Microsoft [...]

What is wrong with this picture? Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display. Fortunately, resizing the [...]

Long-time Betalogue readers know that I could write about how crappy Microsoft Word is all day long. However, there is only so much you can say before the sheer inanity of the thing makes you want to do unspeakable things to a Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer voodoo doll. At that stage, I guess you [...]

There are two things in Word 2011 (admittedly, among numerous other ones) that are a constant source of irritation for me and that are so basic that it’s quite clear that Microsoft’s engineers have absolutely no clue about how people use their software in the real world, so much so that there is no hope of [...]

As a professional translator in Canada, I am constantly referring to the TERMIUM database, which became accessible free-of-charge a couple of years ago as part of the Language Portal of Canada. One thing I do not like when using on-line databases, however, is having to retype things. Whenever I have to look up a term, [...]

As far as I can tell from the way Word 2011 runs on my machine, Microsoft’s Mac Office developers have once again demonstrated their crass ignorance of foreign language issues. Since 1990, there are two alternate spellings in French, the “traditional” one and the “rectified” or “new” spelling. The changes introduced in the new spelling affect [...]

Editing PowerPoint slides with PowerPoint 2011 is absolutely maddening. As a professional translator, I sometimes have no choice but to work directly in PowerPoint, and each time I end up exceeding my frustration quota because of PowerPoint 2011’s sheer crappiness. I’ve already written about PowerPoint flaws in the past. Each time I use the application, [...]

Yesterday I was revising a long report and want to change the format used for date ranges by replacing the regular dash with an en dash. In other words, I wanted to replace all occurrences of a date range like “2010-2011” to “2010–2011.” And of course I wanted to do the exact same thing for [...]

Here is another one of the thousands of ways that Microsoft Word manages to annoy the user by not doing what is expected and what makes sense based on the user’s actions. Take this following situation: I am in the middle of a sentence that is in italics and I want to insert some plain [...]

Here’s a quick experiment. Open a multi-page Word document in page layout view (what is now called the “Print Layout” view mode) and scroll down to the end of the document. Then locate this control at the top of the scroll bar on the right-hand side: This is the control that you can use to [...]

Microsoft Word’s user interface for paragraph and character styles (as opposed to manual formatting) has become so bad over the years that you cannot help but feel that everyone at Microsoft would be happier if no one used styles at all and everyone did what most Word users already do and used manual formatting exclusively [...]

Microsoft recently released an update called Service Pack 2 for its Office 2011 suite of Mac OS X applications. And here’s what the icon of the updater looks like: Is there a better illustration of how little Microsoft cares about the quality and polish of their Mac OS X software? They cannot even be bothered [...]