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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
Yesterday I wrote about a new bug in Word 2011 that causes it to fail to open a perfectly fine Word document with the following error message: At the time, I wrote: I was able to open the same document just fine with both Word 2008 and Pages ’09. After some investigating, I was able […]
Here are two separate incidents that happened to me today while trying to open Word documents with Word 2011. In the first case, I had a 9-page PDF file that I opened in Acrobat Pro 9. I then used Acrobat Pro to export the PDF file as a Word document, in order to extract the […]
As a long-time hater of all things Microsoft, I had very little hope that Word 2011 would be an improvement over the previous version. So now that I have obtained the software and been able to use it for a few moments, I find myself unsurprised, which of course, in the case of Microsoft, is […]
As Betalogue readers know, I have been writing about Microsoft’s products for the Mac and especially about Microsoft Word for many years now. And generally speaking I have had nothing but bad things to say about the software: it’s slow, it’s full of bugs, it’s unreliable, and it’s a pain to use. One of the […]
As regular Betalogue readers know, I am a very reluctant PowerPoint user. I generally think that Microsoft’s products for Mac OS X are complete and utter crap, but PowerPoint really takes the cake, so to speak. If other Microsoft software titles for the Mac are bad, PowerPoint is positively atrocious. (I would extend my comments […]