Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Word 2011: Still too slow

Thursday, February 10th, 2011 • 4:37 pm

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, […]

More »

Microsoft Office for Mac web site: uses a Windows-only font

Thursday, February 10th, 2011 • 4:14 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Autonumbering madness

Thursday, January 27th, 2011 • 1:49 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Useless word count display

Thursday, January 27th, 2011 • 12:53 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Bug with zoom button

Thursday, January 6th, 2011 • 4:38 pm

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 […]

More »

More about Word 2011 and search GUIs

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 • 5:45 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Working with the new Find/Replace feature

Monday, December 20th, 2010 • 7:56 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011 Tip: Assigning command-shift-Z to ‘Redo’

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 7:07 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Scope of ‘Replace All’ all wrong

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:51 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Resizing text boxes with dark edges

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:25 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: I-beam cursor over dark background

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 • 6:17 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Flickering madness in tables

Monday, December 13th, 2010 • 5:27 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Find/Replace is broken

Thursday, December 9th, 2010 • 11:41 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Search sidebar also hijacks shortcut for ‘Replace’

Sunday, November 21st, 2010 • 6:12 pm

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 […]

More »

Word 2011: Computer restart fixes problem with Normal template

Sunday, November 21st, 2010 • 6:09 pm

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 […]

More »