John Gruber has just posted a link to my recent post about styles in Pages ’09 and in Word 2008. This has inevitably caused a spike in traffic and linkage activity, for which I am grateful. (I should note that I am using WordPress for this site, and so far I have been fortunate enough not […]
Early in 2009, I wrote a post about my attempts to fix the stupid default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys in Microsoft Word 2008, which don’t just scroll the document up or down, but also move the cursor (insertion point) at the same time. At the time, I wrote that, since […]
When you have a fairly long document in Pages in which the text formatting is done using a variety of paragraph and character styles, and you do “Select All” to select the entire contents of the document, here’s what the styles drawer looks like: When you open the exact same document in Word 2008, with […]
For a long time, Office applications have had a feature where you can view the same document in two different windows at the same time, which enables you to view and edit two different sections of the same document or view the same document in two different view modes at the same time. It’s a […]
Take the following excerpt from a simple word processor document: Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph). Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point? More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not? Well, here […]
Most of the time, when I have to work on a Word document sent to me by a client, I open it in Apple’s Pages, save it as a Pages document, work on it, and, in the end, I export the Pages document back in Word format and send that to my client (after checking […]
Apple’s word processor Pages takes a resolutely WYSIWYG approach. Gone are the multiple view modes afforded by Microsoft Word. On the whole, it is a welcome simplification. After all, the paradox at the heart of the very existence of Microsoft Word’s “Normal” view mode (now called “Draft” in Word 2008) is that it’s supposed to […]
I did not notice this bug fix right away, because, while I do download and apply incremental updates as diligently as possible, I don’t have time to check each and every known bug (there are thousands of them) to see if it has been fixed or not in the update. I also don’t use Word […]
Do you ever get the impression that Microsoft Word 2008 is a flaky, unreliable Mac OS X application? Do you ever feel that the reason for this impression is something seemingly minor yet obvious that affects your interaction with the application at all times? Well, if so, I invite you to try the following experiment: […]
Apple’s Pages application has very limited keyboard shortcut customization abilities. The only shortcuts that you can assign within the application’s user interface are the F1 to F8 keys, and they can only be used for styles: Fortunately, Pages ’09, like most other well-behaved Mac OS X applications, also supports the system-wide keyboard shortcut customization feature provided […]
I positively hate Microsoft Word’s automatic numbering features. They have never worked as expected, they are a pain to edit and work with, and they tend to have a mind of their own. Consider the following situation: This is a section of a long document, where I have a heading with an automatic number (or […]
The last time I wrote about this long-standing bug in Microsoft Word for Mac OS X, I simply mentioned that it was still there in Word 2008, just like it was in Word 2004, and in Word X before it. (My blog does not go that far back!) I am pretty sure that one of […]
Like I wrote in a blog post about InDesign earlier this year, pictures and Microsoft Word go together like oil and water, especially on the Mac. More often than not, when you get a Word document with an embedded picture on the Mac, it’s pretty much impossible to edit the picture, even though the same […]
Is there any other Mac OS X application on this planet where you can be in the process of typing text in a table: and all of a sudden you get this: ? It truly is remarkable. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Microsoft Word 2008 is pure, unadulterated crap. It’s […]
Some day, developers at Apple and Microsoft (and probably in a few other places) are going to have to wake up to the fact that, in the real world, table cells are not used just for numbers or other types of numerical data, but also as containers for blocks of text of varying length. And […]