Take the following excerpt from a simple word processor document:
Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph).
Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point?
More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not?
Well, here is what happens:
The text [...]
Most of the time, when I have to work on a Word document sent to me by a client, I open it in Apple’s Pages, save it as a Pages document, work on it, and, in the end, I export the Pages document back in Word format and send that to my client (after checking [...]
Apple’s word processor Pages takes a resolutely WYSIWYG approach. Gone are the multiple view modes afforded by Microsoft Word.
On the whole, it is a welcome simplification. After all, the paradox at the heart of the very existence of Microsoft Word’s “Normal” view mode (now called “Draft” in Word 2008) is that it’s supposed to be [...]
I did not notice this bug fix right away, because, while I do download and apply incremental updates as diligently as possible, I don’t have time to check each and every known bug (there are thousands of them) to see if it has been fixed or not in the update. I also don’t use Word [...]
Do you ever get the impression that Microsoft Word 2008 is a flaky, unreliable Mac OS X application? Do you ever feel that the reason for this impression is something seemingly minor yet obvious that affects your interaction with the application at all times?
Well, if so, I invite you to try the following experiment: open [...]
Apple’s Pages application has very limited keyboard shortcut customization abilities. The only shortcuts that you can assign within the application’s user interface are the F1 to F8 keys, and they can only be used for styles:
Fortunately, Pages ’09, like most other well-behaved Mac OS X applications, also supports the system-wide keyboard shortcut customization feature provided through [...]
I positively hate Microsoft Word’s automatic numbering features. They have never worked as expected, they are a pain to edit and work with, and they tend to have a mind of their own.
Consider the following situation:
This is a section of a long document, where I have a heading with an automatic number (or letter, to [...]
The last time I wrote about this long-standing bug in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, I simply mentioned that it was still there in Word 2008, just like it was in Word 2004, and in Word X before it. (My blog does not go that far back!)
I am pretty sure that one of the [...]
Like I wrote in a blog post about InDesign earlier this year, pictures and Microsoft Word go together like oil and water, especially on the Mac.
More often than not, when you get a Word document with an embedded picture on the Mac, it’s pretty much impossible to edit the picture, even though the same picture [...]
Is there any other Mac OS X application on this planet where you can be in the process of typing text in a table:
and all of a sudden you get this:
?
It truly is remarkable. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Microsoft Word 2008 is pure, unadulterated crap. It’s not worth the [...]
Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length.
And because [...]
Microsoft Word for Mac OS X (especially Word 2008) is such an atrocious pile of crap that using it for professional work on large documents requires a leap of faith that I am simply no longer willing to take. One can only endure so many application crashes and corrupted documents (with the associated data loss [...]
For years, Word has had this stupid “feature” where the default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys is not just to go up or down by one “page” (more accurately, by one “screen,” where a screen is defined by the size of the visible portion of the document in the document window), [...]
I am looking forward to being able to use Rainer Brockerhoff’s new utility called Klicko. It promises to get rid of Mac OS X’s click-through behaviour, which has been, over the years, a source of both convenience and frustration.
Since Klicko can be customized to only apply to some applications, I am thinking that I might [...]
I am forced to spend a lot of time in PowerPoint these days, and I am having so much fun. (Can you tell?)
Here’s further evidence (if needed) that Microsoft’s engineers could not design a proper text editor to save their own lives.
When it comes to text editing, some things are supposed to be universal, i.e. [...]