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 [...]
Working with text boxes in Word 2011 is an endless source of fun. Let’s take a text box formatted with one of Word 2011′s own “quick styles,” i.e. with a black background and a light-coloured edge: As you can see, resizing the text box works reasonably well. You don’t get “live” resizing. Instead, you can [...]
Here’s a little movie that really says it all: Do you see an I-beam cursor anywhere in there? I sure don’t. In this movie, I am simply typing (with the extra space between “This” and “is,” of course, since I cannot see my cursor and therefore cannot see that I already typed a space) and [...]
Here’s a quick little movie for you: What on earth is going on here? Guess what? Absolutely nothing. The only thing that I did during the recording of this video clip was to move the mouse pointer slightly. I didn’t click on anything, I didn’t select anything until the very end. Apparently, even ensuring that [...]
The “new and improved” text search fonction in Word 2011 is completely broken, and it’s absolutely maddening. Of course, the problems are not reliably reproducible, so all I can do is describe what is happening to me while I am working on various documents in Word 2011. But it’s so bad that I simply cannot [...]
Microsoft’s MacBU engineers are so sloppy that it is embarrassing (at least it should be for them). I have already written on how the new search sidebar hijacks the “Find Next” command, which can no longer be used to jump to the next occurrence of the search string entered in the Find/Replace dialog box. And [...]
On Friday I wrote that I was completely pissed off with Word 2011, which, after an application crash and relaunch, had reverted to its default settings and was refusing to let any preference setting changes or customizations stick. Further investigation on my part revealed that Word 2011 was working fine in another user environment, so [...]
You know what that new application icon for Word 2011 makes me think of? A two-finger salute. Only in this case I cannot help but feel that the hand sign is actually meant to be a double middle-finger salute—in other words, a double f***-you. See, less than three weeks after having spent nearly $200CDN on [...]
One of Microsoft’s specialties is to introduce new features without making sure that they don’t interfere with existing features. I am afraid that, in Word 2011, they’ve done it again, this time with the search feature. Before Word 2011, Word’s search feature consisted of the Find/Replace dialog box that was brought up with command-F. You [...]
Last week, for once, I wrote something positive about Microsoft and about Word 2011, regarding the addition of the long overdue “Paste and Match Formatting” command to the “Edit” menu. Unfortunately, I have to report that, while the command works well overall, it fails in at least one major area. If you copy some formatted [...]
I keep writing all kinds of nasty things about Microsoft’s products for Mac OS X, so I guess it is only fair that I should write something (a little something) when Microsoft does finally do something right and includes something that is actually a significant improvement over previous versions. For years, I have been complaining [...]
Compare and contrast: The first one is the control for turning Time Machine on/off in System Preferences. The second in the control for turning Track Changes on/off in Word 2011′s Ribbon. Am I really the only person in the world who has a problem with the Word 2011 control? If I click on it, will [...]
If you are preparing to upgrade from Word 2008 to Word 2011, be warned: While the upgrading process will preserve some user environment customizations (toolbar customizations, for instance), it will fail to preserve the most basic application-wide preference settings, such as the ones found under “Edit” and “View” in the “Preferences” dialog box: If you [...]
If, like me, you are a word processor user who likes to compose “smart” documents and use the proper text formatting options instead of ugly workarounds like double returns and multiple tabs (we are admittedly a small minority, but we do exist), I am sure that you will be delighted to hear that, in the [...]
And the final chapter in the on-going “Oh my God, I can’t believe I paid $150 for this crap” saga for this week… Here’s a template that was sent to me today for me to fill out some sections with my own text: As you can see, I am in Page Layout view mode, and [...]