Articles posted in November, 2010

The MacBook Pro 17″ bulging battery swindle

Monday, November 29th, 2010 • 7:40 pm

My personal experience with Mac laptops is as follows. My first laptop was a Titanium PowerBook G4, bought in 2001. We went through three different ones before we decided that there was no point in trying to get Apple to acknowledge that the machine’s AirPort signal reception was atrocious. We just learned to live with […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Word 2011: Already officially disgusted with it

Friday, November 19th, 2010 • 6:13 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: New ‘Search’ feature hijacks ‘Find Next’ command

Thursday, November 18th, 2010 • 6:38 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: ‘Paste and Match Formatting’ does not work with clipboard text from Pages ’09

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 • 5:35 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: Now includes a proper ‘Paste Without Formatting’ command

Friday, November 12th, 2010 • 6:10 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: Interface for tracking changes

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 • 5:10 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: Fails to preserve preferences

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 • 2:48 pm

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 […]

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Word 2011: Interface for adjusting space before and after paragraphs

Monday, November 8th, 2010 • 6:50 pm

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 […]

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Search performance in Preview: Trashing ‘PDFIndex4.sk’ file solved the problem

Sunday, November 7th, 2010 • 1:35 pm

On Friday, I wrote about problems I was having with the performance of text-based searches on my system and in particular with searching for long exact phrases in PDF documents in Mac OS X’s Preview. In my view, searching for an exact phrase should be a pretty fast process, especially when the phrase is fairly […]

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Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard): Spotlight performance issues

Friday, November 5th, 2010 • 4:35 pm

Lately, I have noticed that the performance of Spotlight searches on my system has become rather poor. Global Spotlight searches in the Finder generate a lot of hard drive activity and the results take quite a while to show up. And the same can be said of searches in PDF files using the “Search” field […]

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Word 2011: Still major page redrawing problems

Friday, November 5th, 2010 • 4:33 pm

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 […]

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PowerPoint 2011: Still no easy way to space paragraphs

Thursday, November 4th, 2010 • 12:09 pm

Here’s a pretty good example of Microsoft’s chronic inability to fix real world problems with real, workable solutions. I cannot count the number of times I have to work on PowerPoint presentations that contain slides with bullet lists where, in order to create vertical space between each bullet, the author has used a double return: […]

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PowerPoint 2011: Yet more visual glitches

Thursday, November 4th, 2010 • 11:32 am

Here’s the situation. I am in a text box and I have selected a paragraph that I need to replace with some other text that I have copied in the Clipboard from another application: I then press command-V to paste my text: Then I see that, of course, PowerPoint is not smart enough to paste […]

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