There are two things in Word 2011 (admittedly, among numerous other ones) that are a constant source of irritation for me and that are so basic that it’s quite clear that Microsoft’s engineers have absolutely no clue about how people use their software in the real world, so much so that there is no hope of […]
As a professional translator in Canada, I am constantly referring to the TERMIUM database, which became accessible free-of-charge a couple of years ago as part of the Language Portal of Canada. One thing I do not like when using on-line databases, however, is having to retype things. Whenever I have to look up a term, […]
As far as I can tell from the way Word 2011 runs on my machine, Microsoft’s Mac Office developers have once again demonstrated their crass ignorance of foreign language issues. Since 1990, there are two alternate spellings in French, the “traditional” one and the “rectified” or “new” spelling. The changes introduced in the new spelling affect […]
Editing PowerPoint slides with PowerPoint 2011 is absolutely maddening. As a professional translator, I sometimes have no choice but to work directly in PowerPoint, and each time I end up exceeding my frustration quota because of PowerPoint 2011’s sheer crappiness. I’ve already written about PowerPoint flaws in the past. Each time I use the application, […]
Yesterday I was revising a long report and want to change the format used for date ranges by replacing the regular dash with an en dash. In other words, I wanted to replace all occurrences of a date range like “2010-2011” to “2010–2011.” And of course I wanted to do the exact same thing for […]
Here is another one of the thousands of ways that Microsoft Word manages to annoy the user by not doing what is expected and what makes sense based on the user’s actions. Take this following situation: I am in the middle of a sentence that is in italics and I want to insert some plain […]
Here’s a quick experiment. Open a multi-page Word document in page layout view (what is now called the “Print Layout” view mode) and scroll down to the end of the document. Then locate this control at the top of the scroll bar on the right-hand side: This is the control that you can use to […]
Microsoft Word’s user interface for paragraph and character styles (as opposed to manual formatting) has become so bad over the years that you cannot help but feel that everyone at Microsoft would be happier if no one used styles at all and everyone did what most Word users already do and used manual formatting exclusively […]
Microsoft recently released an update called Service Pack 2 for its Office 2011 suite of Mac OS X applications. And here’s what the icon of the updater looks like: Is there a better illustration of how little Microsoft cares about the quality and polish of their Mac OS X software? They cannot even be bothered […]
I have already had the opportunity to report on multiple bugs in PowerPoint for Mac OS X involving text selection over the years. Just do a search for “PowerPoint” in this blog to get an idea. Here’s another one to add to the list. Let’s say you have a typical PowerPoint slide that looks like this: And […]
Word’s behaviour when it comes to deciding what format to apply to pasted text has always been a complete, impenetrable mess that no ordinary user can ever be expected to fathom, which is why, whenever I can, I use the “Paste Without Formatting” command, even though — this is Microsoft Word we are talking about […]
As regular Betalogue readers know, Microsoft’s Mac software is full not just of bugs, but also of behaviours that do not make sense and fail to comply with the conventions that rule the Mac OS X user interface. The problems even affect things as basic as window management. I’ve already written about the fact that […]
When you launch Word 2011, the first thing you see is this: Notice anything? Allow me to make it clearer for you: Or: Unless Word 2011 is lucky and its splash screen happens to appear on top of a fairly uniform background, you inevitably get ugly see-through effects that make it look as if the […]
In my experience, speed and noise are the two trickiest, most subjective aspects of personal computing, especially for power users. Some people can’t hear fan noises, or they don’t notice them, or they don’t care. Others can be driven mad by hums and whines, even if they are not loud at all. As for speed, […]
How is one supposed to do reliable, professional-quality work in a piece of software crap such as Word 2011? Even with the best intentions, even with the best level of personal discipline and work ethics, it is simply impossible. Why? Because Word’s features are simply completely unreliable. Try the following. Create a blank new document […]