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 [...]
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 [...]
If, like me, you regularly use Pages ’09 to edit Word documents and then export your work back in Word format before sharing it with other people, you need to aware of a number of issues, including what happens to automatic tables of contents. Both Word 2011 and Pages ’09 have a feature that inserts an automatic [...]
By default, if you use the blank template in Pages ’09 to create a new document, you get a document in which the default paragraph style has zero space after and zero space before. (That was not the case with the first version of Pages back in 2005. Back then, the default body style has a [...]
If, like me, you quite often use Pages ’09 instead of the Holy Crappiness known as Microsoft Word, and just export your Pages documents as Word documents before sharing them with other people, there are a number of problems that you need to be aware of and that require that you edit your exported Word documents [...]
Here’s yet another example of the pathetic level of attention to detail in Microsoft products for Mac OS X. (This level is close to zero.) Say you have a list of items formatted as bullets: I don’t need to tell you how common this type of thing is in PowerPoint presentations. As expected, a single click on [...]
When Word 2011 came out, one of its big selling points was, as usual, a claim that it was faster than its predecessor, particularly for launch times. And I can confirm that, generally speaking, Word 2011 does launch significantly faster than Word 2008, although it still happens far too often that, for no apparent reason, [...]
I don’t know about other Mac users, but when I go to the Microsoft web pages for Office for Mac, I get headings that look like this: And it does not get any better when I make things bigger: Or even bigger: For the record, this is in Safari, but it looks just as bad [...]
Here’s yet another example of the multitude of little “glitches” that make Microsoft Word so infuriating to use as a word processor. I have the following excerpt from a document that I have to translate: Nothing extraordinarily complicated: a couple of lists with automatic numbering, preceded by introductory phrases. So I translate the first occurrence [...]
As a professional translator, I have to refer to document word counts all the time. So I need a word processor with a strong, reliable word count feature. Unfortunately, as in most other areas, Microsoft Word fails to meet this requirement and is a constant source of frustration. Here are a couple of examples. First [...]
Here’s a rather unique bug in Microsoft Word 2011 that a Betalogue reader pointed out to me in an e-mail. It’s fairly easy to reproduce, but comes with a word of warning: Make sure you have saved all your current work in Word 2011 before trying it, because it will make Word inoperable and you’ll [...]
My December 20th blog post about the revamped Find/Replace feature in Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac OS X was mentioned on John Gruber’s Daring Fireball on December 22nd, with the consequence that I got a fair amount of feedback on the piece over the holiday season. I took some time off during that period, which is why [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]