Betalogue

Here’s another, more serious problem that I uncovered this morning on our office’s iMacs. We have a laser printer (HP 2100) which, for a number of reasons, needs to be visible from the outside world with a permanent public IP address. So I’ve set up the iMacs so that they can print to it via […]

This morning, I was called to look at an iMac running Panther on which the “Find” command in the Finder no longer worked properly. I tried it myself, and when I typed a simple request to find files whose name contained a specific string, I saw the Finder open a window for the results, but […]

This is a small, but significant flaw in Word 2004 (and possibly previous versions of Word as well). Let’s say you have a paragraph in Word with a tab stop at 1 cm. Type a few letters at the beginning of the paragraph (before the tab stop) and then press Tab once. You get something […]

I don’t know if it is something particular to my situation, but Excel 2004 is the one Office 2004 application that crashes all the time on my machine. I am not a heavy Excel user. (I don’t do anything overly complex with it.) But I frequently open spreadsheet files to update them (work logs, expense […]

Regular Betalogue readers know that, for the past few months, I have been experiencing unexplained system-wide freezes in Panther. I went through all kinds of trouble-shooting procedures, and was unable to isolate the source of the problem. Multiple reports on such freezes on various other forums, including MacFixIt.com and MacInTouch.com, also led me to think […]

The Finder in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) has an undocumented keyboard shortcut to access Bluetooth-related features, which are of absolutely no use to someone (like me) who doesn’t have any Bluetooth devices. The shortcut in question is command-shift-B. The trouble with this shortcut is that it’s dangerously similar to the very important shortcut for […]

This is one of these behaviours in Mac OS X and Apple’s applications that make you wonder what the developers were smoking when they developed the program. If you use Mail’s “Organize by Thread” feature (only available in Panther) and if you highlight a thread of messages in its “collapsed” form (i.e. a single line […]

This one is for the Betalogue reader formerly employed by Microsoft who argued, the other day, that Microsoft did have a devoted group of staff members testing Word to make sure it worked properly with different languages and not just in English. As I’ve indicated on several occasions, the non-breaking space character (option-Space in Word) […]

Here’s another buggy behaviour in Word 2004 that is caused by the use of manual page breaks. I’ve already described problems with selecting text after a manual page break. Now, if you have selected the first paragraph after a manual page break (without having selected the manual page break itself, that is), including the paragraph […]

This is another behaviour in Word that doesn’t quite make sense. In Word, you can open several windows displaying the same document at the same time. It’s convenient, because it lets you easily view two different sections of the same document in two separate windows at the same time. Quite handy when you are working […]

Apple’s on-line store for Canada is the only Canadian on-line store I use that’s not even able to display the total cost of your purchase with the Canadian sales tax. Sure, the sales tax system is a bit complicated in Canada, because we have both federal sales tax and provincial sales tax — but still, […]

I find it somewhat ironic that Apple’s forms in the Apple Store are not compatible with Apple’s own auto-fill feature in Safari. Most web sites ask for phone numbers in a single field, where you enter the area code followed by your phone number (if you are in North America): XXX-XXX-XXXX. The Apple Store, on […]

I’ve already described the problem with apostrophes in French and Word X’s text drag-and-drop feature. This is just to note, first of all, that the problem is not fixed in Word 2004, and also that it also affects the “Paste” command, because the “Smart cut and paste” option (in “Preferences…“, under “Edit“) actually applies to both […]

Mac OS X lets you customize the number of recent items that appear in the lists of recent applications and recent documents that appear in the “Recent Items” submenu in the Apple menu. You can change the number for each category (Applications and Documents), from “None” to “50“. If you want “25“, however, you’re out […]

I have an iMac G4 that won’t start. I suspect a problem with the Power Management Unit (PMU) that might be fixed by resetting it. I know that Apple has the instructions to do that somewhere in their Knowledge Base. But do you think I can find it? I go to the Support page and […]