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 [...]
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 [...]
It is truly extraordinary. I sincerely believe that Microsoft are the only software company on the face of this earth that is capable of producing software that cannot tell the difference between left and right. No wonder they blamed PowerPoint for the last space shuttle disaster. Here’s the situation. I have a block of text [...]
I hate PowerPoint. I only use it because I have no choice, when my clients ask me to translate PowerPoint presentations. I have tried using Keynote, in the same way that I use Pages for translating most of my clients’ Word documents. But unfortunately, the compatibility levels are not good enough. There are just too [...]
I am sorry, but there are no other words (or only words that are even worse). It is absolutely unbelievable. Frequent Betalogue readers know that, these days, I use Apple’s Pages for most of my word processing needs. If I get Word documents that I need to work on and resubmit as Word documents, I [...]
There are so many ways in which Microsoft Word is a failure as a word processor. But in particular there are numerous ways in which it is a failure as a text editor. And as a professional translator (among other things), I am particularly aware of this, because a lot of my time in word [...]
It’s taken forever, but finally someone at Microsoft has condescended to modifying Word’s behaviour so that it responds correctly to scroll wheel/ball input—albeit only for separate panes within the same document window. Everywhere else in Mac OS X, when you use your mouse’s scroll wheel/ball, the operating system scrolls whatever is currently under the mouse [...]
I am not an Excel specialist, but I do know my way around (although I use Apple’s Numbers most of the time for my own needs). The other day, an employee at one of my tech support services’ clients called me because she was trying to fill out an Excel table and whenever she typed [...]
Take the following situation: This Word 2008 document window contains a couple of paragraphs with some shading, followed by a paragraph without shading. The paragraph marks are visible. The cursor is positioned at the beginning of the empty second paragraph, just before that paragraph’s mark. The paragraphs also have 12 points of vertical “space after,” [...]
The genius of Microsoft’s Mac engineers at work.
Ghost track changes that are still there even though they are no longer there. Only in Microsoftland.
Yet another fundamental rule of Mac OS X computing broken by Microsoft.
When deleting does not delete.