Ever since I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2016 on my Mac, I have been experiencing this recurring bug. Word 2016 works OK for many days. (I say “OK” and not “great” because Word never works great, even at the best of times.) Then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it becomes unable to open […]
I haven’t written on this blog since last year and my very traumatic experience with upgrading my 2014 Mac Pro to OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). It’s not that I don’t have anything more to say about OS X or other topics. It’s just that I find it less time-consuming and more immediate to post things on Twitter, […]
If you’ve ever felt like confusing the heck out of Word 2011 for OS X just for fun (and who wouldn’t, really?), try this: In the Finder, create a folder called “Confused Word” on your desktop. In Word 2011, create a new document and save it as “Test1.docx” in the “Confused Word” folder. Leave the document open […]
Yesterday, Jason Snell’s Six Colors web site posted a tip about using OS X’s built-in keyboard customization features to create a universal shortcut for a command for pasting as plain text. While the tip is not useless, it neglected to mention the fact that the menu command labelled “Paste and Match Style” is not nearly as […]
For years, I have been complaining about the I-beam cursor disappearing in Microsoft Word during text navigation: “Word 2004: New bug with blinking I-beam cursor” (June 19, 2004) “Word 2004: More on disappearing I-beam cursor” (June 28, 2004) “Word 2008: The case of the disappearing cursor” (July 13, 2009) “Word 2011: Disappearing cursor” (March 7, […]
I have finally had enough. Word 2011 might be highly customizable (compared to Pages ’09, for example), but there are still behaviours that are completely non-sensical and cannot be altered. One of my pet peeves is the non-standard use of the command-G shortcut. In most OS X applications, it means “Find Next”. In MS Word, it […]
In Word 2011, if you have a table with cells where the text alignment setting is “Align Text Left”, and if your cell in empty, when the cell is selected, the selection highlighting and the mouse pointer look like this: If you then click once anywhere in the cell, Word 2011 deselects the empty cell […]
Ever got this error when you tried to open a Word document in Pages ’09? I just did, and I now know why. See, Microsoft Word users in general and Windows users in particular are so confused about file extensions, and Microsoft’s user interface for dealing with file extensions is so confusing, that sometimes they do […]
In Microsoft Word, there is a myriad of inconsistencies, behaviours that don’t make sense and are simply the way they are because they have always been that way and nobody at Microsoft bothers to use his or her brains to think about whether these things still make sense today. Take, for example, what happens when […]
I have received more feedback about the issue with character-level formatting in the header of a Word document that I was working on the other day. Yesterday, I indicated that the problem had to do with the fact that the text in the header, even though it didn’t look any different from regular text, was […]
I now have a partial explanation for the mad behaviour of the header text in a Word document that I described in a post yesterday. A reader has written to indicate that he believes the text in the header in that document is not actually regular text typed by the user, but a reference to […]
Here’s the situation. I have an existing Microsoft Word document with a header that contains some text: I want to edit that header and replace the existing text with some text that contains a portion in superscript, like “July 4th” with the “th” in superscript. So I type the text and select the “th” portion: […]
While I have a lot of respect for Brent Simmons as the developer behind NetNewsWire (although he sold it several years ago, and things have ground down to an ominous standstill since), I am afraid his latest column for Macworld is directly in line with everything that has ever been written in Macworld about Microsoft […]
What is wrong with this picture? Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display. Fortunately, resizing the […]
Long-time Betalogue readers know that I could write about how crappy Microsoft Word is all day long. However, there is only so much you can say before the sheer inanity of the thing makes you want to do unspeakable things to a Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer voodoo doll. At that stage, I guess you […]