Category Feeds Being Removed

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Maria Langer

As part of the site revision process, I’ve decided to do away with the category-specific feeds. These feeds, which cover Excel, Mac OS, Word, and WordPress content, are being utilized by less than 100 people. If you’re reading this message in your feed reader, YOU might be one of them.

Within a month or so, these feeds will simply not work. Delete them from your reader.

If you want to continue receiving content from this site via RSS, please subscribe to the main feed, using one of the following URLs:

Spelling Checkers Don’t Work if You Ignore Them

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Maria Langer

Reminding my brain not to block out the red underlines that indicate potential spelling problems.

Check Spelling as You Type has been a built-in feature of many word processors for years. It’s now in most applications I use — including my Web browsers, for Pete’s sake! — and the red squiggly or dotted underlines are an integral part of my writing life.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about — do you live in a cave? — I’m referring to the feature that indicates when a word you’ve typed may have been spelled wrong. This is supposed to flag the word so you can check and, if necessary, correct it.

A Blessing…

I vaguely remember when this feature first appeared in Microsoft Word years ago. It was a blessing — and a curse.

I initially loved the feature because it often identified my typos. I’m a touch typist and can get up to 80 words per minute when I’m tuned in. But those aren’t always error-free words. Check Spelling as You Type was a great feature for finding typos as I worked, eliminating the need to run a spell check periodically or at the end of document creation.

As you might expect, it also found spelling errors. My spelling was always pretty good, so it usually found more typos than actual spelling mistakes. But that’s okay. An error is an error and I want to remove all of them from my work, whenever I can.

…and a Curse

But over the years, I’ve found some problems with the Check Spelling as You Type feature — and spelling checkers in general.

The feature does not identify all typos or spelling errors as errors. For example, suppose you type bit but you really meant but. A spelling checker doesn’t see any problem with that, so it won’t flag it. That means you can’t depend on a spelling checker to proofread your work. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, a grammar checker would likely identify this as a problem. As well as the sentence you’re reading right now, because it isn’t really a proper sentence. And this one, too.)

So you’ve got a feature that makes you lazy by doing about 90% of the proofreading work for you, as you type. If you neglect to do the other 10% of the proofreading work, you could be very embarrassed — especially if you write professionally and editors expect your work to be error-free.

The unflagged error that zaps me most often? Typing it’s instead of its. At least I know what it’s supposed to be.

It’s worse, however, for people who don’t know the correct word. How many times have you seen people use then instead of than? There instead of they’re or their?

The feature has degraded my spelling skills. In the old days, before spelling checkers, I simply knew how to spell. If I wasn’t sure of the spelling of a word I needed, I looked it up in — can you imagine? — a dictionary. It made it worthwhile for me to actually learn how to spell words. Knowing the proper spelling saved me time in the long run.

But now, I simply type the word as I think it might be spelled and wait to see if it’s flagged. If it is, I use a context menu — Control-click or right click the word — to choose the word I meant to type. Yes, it’s convenient. But I seem to be doing it an awful lot more than I used to use a dictionary.

(Perhaps it’s also expanding my vocabulary by making it easier to use words I’m not as familiar with? There’s something there.)

The feature identifies any word it does not know as a potential spelling error. That means that if your document is filled with jargon, technical terms, place names, or other words that do not appear in a dictionary, those words will be flagged as possible errors. The word unflagged, which appeared earlier in this post, was also flagged. Is it an error? Or does my spelling checker simply not recognize it? Seems like a word to me, so I let it go.

And herein lies my biggest problem: I’m so accustomed to seeing words flagged in my documents that I’ve managed to tune out the red underline. (It’s kind of like the way we all tune out advertisements on Web pages these days.) This happened to me just the other day. I typed the word emmerse in a blog post. My offline editing tool flagged it with a red dotted underline — as it just did here. But for some reason, I didn’t see it. I published the post with the error in it. A friend of mine, who referred to himself as a “spelling Nazi,” e-mailed me to point out my error. I meant immerse, of course. He knew that. Readers likely knew that. But I got it wrong and I shouldn’t have. How embarrassing!

Here’s a look at the spelling check feature in ecto, my offline blog composition tool of choice. It works just like any other spelling checker. (And yes, I do compose in HTML mode.)

The correct way to go about this is to look for every single possible spelling error and resolve it so those red lines go away. That means learning or adding the unknown word so it’s never flagged again or ignoring it so it doesn’t bother you in this document. All of this should be done with the appropriate menu command. Simply telling your brain to ignore a problem just sets you up to be blind to it when it occurs. That’s not how the software was designed to work.

The Point

This post has a point — most of mine do — and here it is: spelling checkers, including any Check Spelling As You Type feature, are only as good as allow them to be. Use them, but don’t depend on them. Follow up on any flagged words and resolve them using the software so the red underlines go away.

Spelling checkers are just a tool. Like any other tool, it won’t help you if you don’t use it correctly.

Office 2008 Installer Needs Rosetta? Duh-oh!

Posted on October 7, 2009 by Maria Langer

Just something idiotic I wanted to share.

I rolled off a book project with a tight deadline right into a video project with an even tighter deadline, so I don’t really have time to blog, share new articles here, or even tweet. But I did run across this the other day while I was installing Microsoft Office 2008 on my 13-inch iMac running Snow Leopard:

Office Installer Needs Rosetta

Yes, the Office 2008 installer requires Rosetta to run. Office 2008 doesn’t need Rosetta. Just the installer does.

Hello? Microsoft? You want to make your installer compatible with current hardware and software?

Word 2004 Does Not Like Mac OS X 10.5.8

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Maria Langer

Comment

It may be time to update Office.

I just started work on a new book revision. The project requires me to take relatively lengthy, style-laden Word documents, turn on the Track Changes feature, and edit like crazy. It wasn’t long before I was pulling my hair out.

You see, the other day, I updated my iMac from 10.5.7 to 10.5.8. I suspect that something in that update just didn’t sit well with Word 2004, which I was still running on that computer. After all, the iMac has an Intel dual core processor. Office 2004 was written for the old PowerPC processor that came in older Macs. Whether the problem was Mac OS X’s inability to run the old PowerPC application or Word’s inability to run on the 10.5.8 update is a mystery to me. All I know is what I experienced: text editing so slow that I could type faster than Word could display the characters.

Revisions, Revisions At first I thought it might be the document itself. It’s 40 pages of text that utilizes about 20 styles and fields for automatically numbering figures and illustrations. The document was originally created about 10 years ago and has been revised and saved periodically for every edition of this book. It pops from my Mac to an editor’s PC and back at least five times during each revision process. I thought it might have some internal problems. So I used the Save As command to create a new version of the document. The new file was about 5% smaller in size, but had the same symptoms as the original.

Next I sent it over my network to my new 13-inch MacBook Pro. That computer’s processor isn’t as quick as my iMac’s and it has the same amount of RAM. The software on that computer was different, though. I had a developer preview version of Snow Leopard installed and, in preparation for a Microsoft Office 2008 project I’ll be starting in the fall, I’d installed Office 2008 with both major updates. I opened the file on that machine and it worked just fine. Great editing and scrolling speed. Exactly what I needed.

So I bit the bullet and installed Office 2008 on my iMac. And the two major updates. And two smaller updates that became available on August 5. It took hours — the updates totaled over 400 MB of downloads and I’m connected to the internet on a horrible 600-800 Kbps connection that likes to drop. (I’m living in a motel right now, traveling for my helicopter business.)

The result: All the performance issues are gone. Word is snappy yet again on my iMac.

You might ask why a person who writes about Microsoft Office applications had not yet upgraded to Office 2008. This all goes back to last year’s revision on this project. I actually did upgrade but then I downgraded. It was mostly because I needed the macro feature of Word, which wasn’t available on Word 2008. I’d upgraded my iMac last year, but when I decided to reformat my hard disk to ward off computer issues I was having (which were apparently caused by a bad logic board), I reinstalled Office 2004 instead of 2008. You see, I liked the old version better.

But it’s obvious to me now that I need to keep moving forward with the rest of my technology if I want it to perform as designed. Everything must be in sync. If I want to keep using Word 2004, I should use it on a computer that has the system software available during Word 2004′s lifespan. My old 12-inch PowerBook would be a good example. It has a G4 processor and runs Tiger. That’s as advanced as it will ever get. Office 2004 is a perfect match for it.

If there’s a moral to be taken away from this story, it’s simply that if you want your hardware and system software to be new or up-to-date, there will come a time when you’ll have to update the applications that run on it. Bite the bullet and do what you have to. It’ll be worth it.

In Defense of Microsoft Word

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Maria Langer

It does the whole job.

About a month ago, I was having trouble with my Mac and decided to head off any serious problems by reformatting my hard disk and reinstalling all my software from original program discs. In the old days, before we all had hard drives measured in gigabytes, I did this every single time there was a major system software update. Nowadays, it’s a lot of work and I avoid doing it if I can. My 24″ iMac is just over a year old and shouldn’t have been giving me problems, but I figured I’d try the reformat before bringing it to a genius. (Turns out, it was the swapping out of 2 GB of RAM for 4 GB of RAM that probably fixed the problem.)

For some reason, I didn’t do a typical install of Microsoft Office 2004. I thought I’d save disk space by omitting the proofing tools for the languages I don’t speak — which is every language except English. Word, which I use daily, worked fine — until I noticed that it wasn’t checking spelling as I type. Although my spelling is above average, I count on Word to put red squiggly underlines under my misspellings and typos. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get this feature to start working.

I sent an update to my Twitter account about this as I went about troubleshooting the problem. The result was an outpouring of suggestions from my Twitter friends for replacing Word or Office with other software, ranging from Open Source Word or Office replacements to Google Docs.

Whoa!

I fixed the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling Word. Life went on. But it got me thinking about Office and Word and why so many people go out of their way to avoid both.

Word and Me

I should probably start off by saying that I have been using Microsoft Word since 1989 or 1990. Although I got Microsoft Works with my first Mac, I soon learned Word and began teaching it in a classroom setting. It was Word 4 for the Mac in those days; I don’t know what the corresponding version in Windows was because I didn’t use it or teach it. I’m not even sure if Microsoft Windows was a player back then.

I’ve used every version of Word for the Mac since then.

My first book about Microsoft Word was The Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. Word 6 sucked. It was a processor hog. I remember working with it in beta as I wrote my book about it. I remember whining to my editor, asking if he thought they’d fix the performance issues before the software went out. They did, but not very well. I disliked Word 6 and the way it handled outlines and “master documents.” Everything seemed to be “embedded.” It seemed as if they’d prettied up Word to look more Mac-like and had done the job by pouring maple syrup all over the inside of my computer, bogging things down.

Word 98 was a vast improvement. From then on, each version of Word was an improvement. The interface remained basically the same but features were added and solidified. Some of the features worked with Microsoft server software, which I didn’t have, didn’t want, and certainly didn’t need. All I cared about was that Word did what I needed it to do, using the same interface I knew from years of experience as a user.

The End of the World as We Know It: Office 2007

Then Office 2007 for Windows came out with its ridiculous “ribbon” interface. What the hell was Microsoft thinking? Take a standardized interface that your existing user base knows by heart and throw it out the window. Force them to learn a whole new interface. Keep telling them that it’s easier and maybe a handful of morons will believe you.

I had to use Office 2007 for two Excel books. The only good thing I can say about it is that the complete, radical interface change — I’m talking menus vs. ribbon here, not spreadsheet basics — made a book about the software necessary. How else would users figure out how to get the job done? Fortunately (for users, not authors) Office 2007 adoption is slow.

Woe is Me: Office 2008

Word 2008 Splash Screen Of course, I’m a Mac user and use the Mac version of Office. I held my breath when Office 2008 came out. Thank heaven they didn’t get rid of the menu bar — although I don’t understand how they could. Office 2008 retains much of the Office 2004 interface. It just adds what Microsoft calls “Element Galleries” and the usual collection of features that 1% of the computing world cares about. Fortunately, you can ignore them and continue using Office applications with the same old menus and shortcut keys we all know.

I would have switched to Office 2008 — I even had it installed on my MacBook Pro — except for two things:

Its default document formats are not compatible with versions of office prior to Office 2007. That means someone using Word 2003 for Windows or Word 2004 for Mac can’t open my documents unless I save them in an Office 2004-compatible format. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is something I’d have to remember every single time I saved a document. I’d also have to remember not to use any Office feature that only worked with Office 2007 or 2008.
It does not support Visual Basic Macros. One of my publishers makes me use a manuscript template that’s chock-full of these macros. Can’t access the macros, can’t use the template. Can’t use the template, can’t use Office 2008.

(I wrote about these frustrations extensively in a Maria’s Guides article.)

So I’m apparently stuck with Office 2004 — at least for a while.

But do you know what? I’m perfectly happy with it.

Why I Like Word

I like Word. I really do. It does everything I need it to do and it does it well.

Sure, it has a bunch of default options that are set stupidly. I wrote about how to set them more intelligently in an article for Informit.com. (Read “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) It certainly includes far more features than the average writer needs or uses. And despite what Microsoft might tell you, it’s probably not the best tool for page layout (I prefer InDesign) or mail merge (I prefer FileMaker Pro). But it does these things if you need to.

I use all of the basic word processing features. I use the spelling checker — both as I type and to correct errors. I like smart cut and paste, although I have the ridiculous Paste Options button turned off. I like AutoComplete and love AutoCorrect (when set up properly). I use all kinds of formatting, including paragraph and character styles, tables, and bulleted lists. I rely on the outlining features when preparing to write a book or script for video training material. I use the thesaurus occasionally when I can’t get my mind around the exact word I’m looking for, although the word I want is usually not listed.

I’ve used some of the advanced features, such as table of contents generation, indexing, and cross-references. These are great document automation features. Trouble is, I don’t usually use Word to create documents that require these features. I use InDesign for laying out my books, which are usually illustrated. (And I admit that I’m looking forward to trying out the new cross-referencing feature in InDesign CS4 for my next book.)

I don’t jump on board with every new Word feature. I prefer the Formatting toolbar over the Formatting Palette. I write in Normal view rather than Page Layout view. I create my own templates but don’t use the ones that come with Word.

I don’t use the grammar checker; I think it’s a piece of crap designed for people who know neither grammar nor writing style. I don’t like URLs formatted as links. (Who the hell wants links underlined in printed documents?) I don’t use any of the Web publishing features; I’d rather code raw HTML than trust Word to do it for me. I very seldom insert images or objects or anything other than text in my documents. I have InDesign for serious layout work. I don’t use wizards. I think WordArt is ugly and amateurish. I keep the silly Office Assistant feature turned off.

I admit that I don’t use any of the project features that work with Entourage — although I’d like to. I decided a while back to switch to Apple’s e-mail, calendar, and contact management solutions (Mail, iCal, and Address Book respectively) because they’d synchronize with .Mac (now MobileMe) and my Treo. Entourage probably does this now, but I really don’t feel like switching again. Am still thinking about this.

The point is, I use a bunch of Word features and I completely ignore a bunch of others. The features are there if I need them but, in Word 2004, they’re not in your face, screaming for attention. (Wish I could say the same about Word 2008.)

iWork with Apple Computers

iWork '09 Lots of people think that just because I’m a Macintosh user — an enthusiast, in fact — I should be using Apple’s business productivity solution: iWork. For a while, I thought so, too.

I own iWork ’08. I just bought iWork ’09. I’ve tried Pages. I’ve really tried Pages. I wanted to use it. I wanted to break free of Microsoft Word.

But old habits are hard to break. No matter how much I tried to use Pages each time I needed to create a document, when I was rushed, I reached for Word. No learning curve — I already know it. After a while, I just stopped trying to use Pages.

Why Use a Bunch of One Trick Ponies?

I know a bunch of writers who swear by one software program or another for meeting their writing needs. They use special outliners to create outlines. They use special “writing software” that covers the entire screen with a blank writing surface so they’re not distracted by other things on their desktops. They use special software to brainstorm, footnote, and index.

I’ve tried these solutions and do you know what? They don’t make my life easier. Instead, they just give me another piece of software to learn and keep up to date and interface with other software. They make more work for me.

I’m not going to forget my Word skills and Word isn’t going to suddenly disappear off the face of the planet anytime soon. In fact, it’s far more likely for one of these one-trick ponies to disappear than a powerhouse with millions of users worldwide like Microsoft Office.

Thought Pattern I remember ThoughtPattern, a program by Bananafish Software. I saw it demoed at a Macworld Expo in the early 1990s and thought it was the greatest thing in the world for organizing my thoughts and ideas. I was sure it would make me a better writer. I was so convinced, I bought it — and it wasn’t cheap. I used it for a while and rather liked it. Evidently, I was one of very few people who’d joined the ThoughtPattern revolution. In April 1993, it was discontinued. I was left with software that wouldn’t work with subsequent versions of the Macintosh system software. Worst of all, the documents I created with ThoughtPattern were in their own proprietary format. When the software stopped working, the contents of those documents were lost. (Do you think it was easy to find a screenshot from software that was discontinued 16 years ago?)

So perhaps you can understand my aversion to one-trick ponies that promise a better writing experience.

Will the same thing happen with Microsoft Word? I don’t think so.

I Don’t Compute in the Cloud

Google Docs was one of the solutions suggested to me by my Twitter friends. I guess they think it’s better to avoid the evil Microsoft empire in favor of the “we’re not evil” Google empire. Along the way, I should give up the interface and features I know from almost 20 years of experience with the software and rely on an online application that could change its interface daily. Oh, yeah — and keep my documents on someone else’s computer.

Yeah. Right. Good idea.

Not.

Until I’m part of a multinational corporation that requires its employees and consultants to keep all their documents on some remote server for collaboration purposes, I will not be computing in the cloud.

One of the things I like about keeping my documents on my own computer — rather than a remote server accessible by the Internet — is that the Internet is not always available. What do I do then? Stop working?

Security is an issue, too. While I don’t usually write much of a confidential nature, I don’t like the idea of not having control over my documents. Servers get hacked. I don’t want my work suddenly accessible to people who I don’t want seeing it.

I will admit that I use MobileMe’s iDisk feature to keep some documents on an Apple server. This makes it a tiny bit easier to access them from my laptop when I’m away from home. But I’ve recently moved to a new strategy. I bought a pocket hard drive that’s bigger than my computer’s Home folder. Before I hit the road with my laptop on a trip for business or pleasure, I sync this portable drive with my Home folder. I then have every single document on my computer with me when I’m away. The added benefit: complete offsite backup.

That’s My Case

That’s my defense of Microsoft Word. I rest my case.

Please understand that I’m not trying to convince a non-Word user to switch to Word. If you’re happy with something else, stick with it! That’s the precise reason I’m sticking with Word. I’m happy with it.

I guess the reason I wrote this post was to assure other people like me that there’s no reason to be ashamed of being a Word user. You do what’s right for you. There’s nothing really wrong with Word. If it makes your life easier, why switch?

Why I Downgraded to Word 2004

Posted on July 10, 2008 by Maria Langer

I said I’d never upgrade to 2008 and I lied. Then I paid for it.

There’s nothing wrong with Office 2004 that’s fixed in Office 2008. It’s the same software with some Interface tweaks. After all, at this point, what can Microsoft do to change Office?

The answer, of course, is to create an abomination like Office 2007 for Windows. They said they made it more intuitive, but for who? People who have never seen a computer before? As a long-time Office user, the new “ribbon” interface drives me batty. I can’t find any of the commands I need.

I thank my lucky stars that they didn’t destroy the Mac version, too.

But although I didn’t need or want to update to Office 2008 for Macintosh, I soon realized that if I wanted to record videos about the software and write the occasional article or Maria’s Guides post about it, I should bite the bullet and put it on at least one of my computers. That lucky computer was my MacBook Pro, which I have with me in Washington State this summer.

The installer warned me that the sky would fall (or something equally horrible would happen) if I didn’t uninstall previous versions of Word. So, like a real sucker, I let the installer uninstall Office 2004. I’d learn Office 2008 with a thorough emersion.

Compatibility Woes

I began running into problems almost immediately. The first was compatibility. For some reason, the geniuses in Redmond decided that Office 2007 (Windows) and 2008 (Mac OS) should have a different file format. So when you save a document from Word 2008, by default, it saves in the .docx format. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my editors and other people I share files with did not upgrade to Office 2007 or 2008. These people couldn’t read the files without installing a special converter, which was not immediately available.

And if I happened to open a Word 2003 or 2004 file and save it, I got all kinds of worrisome warnings about document formatting possibly being lost.

Word 2008 Save Prefs The solution, of course, was to save in Word 97-2004 format. And so I didn’t have to deal with choosing a file type option every time I saved a document, I set that as the default file type. That would pretty much guarantee that my file could be read by anyone using any modern version of Word.

Macro Woes

Things got worse.

Word Macros I began work on a book I revise each year. (I’m not allowed to say what it is because I’m under nondisclosure, but you can probably figure it out if you consult my Books list.) That book is written in Word, which my editors use. We make extensive use of the Track Changes feature. All of my editors are on Word 2003 (Windows). While I assume that the Track Changes feature works the same in both versions, I know the macro feature does not.

Contains VB Macros You see, the geniuses in Redmond decided to disable Word’s Visual Basic macro feature in Word 2008 for Macintosh. Sure, there’s a dialog full of predefined macros that are probably preprogrammed into the software. I haven’t fiddled with the feature yet, so I can’t say much more about it.

But I can tell you that if you try to open a Word document or template that contains macros with Word 2008, Word wants to strip them out. Yes, you can open the file without stripping out the macros, but you can’t use the macros.

While for most folks, this might not be such a big deal, it’s a huge deal for this book project. Each book file has to be based on a template that includes these macros. The macros automate several tasks and really do make my life easier. I want to use the macros.

While I do have my old 12-in PowerBook handy and it has Word 2004 on it, it doesn’t have Photoshop on it. I need Photoshop, which is on my MacBook Pro, to process the screenshots. My MacBook Pro also has my e-mail software so I can send out the finished chapter files and art.

I was looking at a workflow nightmare. My options were as follows:

Run the software I’m writing about on my Dell PC (it’s a Windows software program), write the book on my PowerBook, and edit the screenshots on my MacBook Pro. That meant having three laptops open while I worked and shuffling the files among all three computers before putting them on the MacBook Pro to send them out.
Reinstall Word 2004 on my MacBook Pro. Then run the software I’m writing about on my Dell laptop and do all the text and image editing, as well as e-mailing final files, from my MacBook Pro.

Which option would you choose?

So that’s why I’m downgrading to Word 2004 on my MacBook Pro.

Removing Words from Word’s Custom Dictionary

Posted on December 15, 2007 by Maria Langer

It’s a bit involved, but doable.

Yesterday, I explained how you can “unlearn” a word that you mistakenly added to Mac OS X’s user dictionary. Of course, applications other than those developed by Apple probably don’t use Apple’s dictionary.

Microsoft Word is a good example. It stores the words you add to it in a Custom dictionary file. To remove a word you added by mistake, you have to manually edit this dictionary. Here’s how you can do this in Word 2004 for Mac OS; the technique is similar in Word 2003 for Windows.

In Word, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences. (Note that a document window must be open to choose this command.)
In the Preferences dialog that appears, choose Spelling and Grammar.
Click the Dictionaries button.
In the Custom Dictionaries dialog that appears, select the name of the dictionary you want to edit.
Click the Edit button.
A dialog like the one shown next appears. Click OK.
A Word window named Custom Dictionary opens. It contains all the words in your dictionary, in alphabetical order. Make changes as desired in this file, adding or removing words as you see fit.
Choose File > Save to save the modified file.
If a dialog like the one shown next appears, click Yes.
Click the Custom Dictionary’s close button to dismiss it.
If you had Check spelling as you type turned on before you started this process, go back into the Spelling and Grammar preferences and turn it back on.

From that point forward, Word will recognize only the words in its main dictionary and the custom dictionary as you edited it.

Page References

Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide offers additional information related to this topic:

Enabling Automatic Spelling Checking, page 143
Checking Spelling as You Type, page 144
Setting Spelling and Grammar Preferences, pages 380-382

One Way to Speed up Word’s Launch Time

Posted on December 3, 2007 by Maria Langer

Comment

It works but it’s not for everyone.

Tired of waiting for Word to optimize its font menu each time it launches? Tell it not to. This will speed up the launch process — especially if you have many fonts installed — but it will also stop Word from displaying font names in their typefaces.

Give it a try and see if it’s worthwhile for you:

With any Word document open, choose Microsoft Word > Preferences.
In the Preferences dialog that appears, click the General option in the list of categories on the left side of the window.
Turn off the WYSIWYG font and style menus option.
Click OK.

Try this for a while and see if missing out on the WYSIWYG menus bothers you. If it does, you can always turn this feature back on.

A Computer without Word?

Posted on November 13, 2007 by Maria Langer

I try an experiment to see if I can stay productive without Microsoft Word.

Last week, in an effort to get my old 12″ PowerBook to run more efficiently, I decided to wipe the hard disk clean and reinstall Tiger with a clean install. After installing it, I got a little crazy and decided to upgrade to Leopard. So far, the machine works fine.

The computer does have a problem, however. Its aged and well-used CD-R/DVD drive has decided to be a bit picky about which CDs and DVDs it recognizes. It liked the Tiger and Leopard install discs, which are both DVDs. But it didn’t seem to like the Office 2004 disc, which is a CD.

(A real Apple fangirl might point out here that the computer has taste. But I wouldn’t dream of making such a statement.)

It’s a Bother

I can get Microsoft Office on the computer by other means. I can insert the disc in another computer and have the PowerBook access the CD via my AirPort network. Or I can create a disk image of the CD, transfer that to the PowerBook over the network, and install from that. Or I can put a disk image of the CD on an 80GB Firewire drive I have sitting around and attach that drive to the PowerBook to install. Any of these methods should work.

Or, if I want to get really radical, I can install the beta of Office 2008 on the PowerBook and let it become my official testing machine.

But let’s face it: it’s a bother. And this morning I began asking myself if it was worth it.

The PowerBook is in semi-retirement these days. It spends much of its time in my kitchen, where I use it to create my morning blog entry. I sometimes use it to look up something on the Internet when I’m doing things around the house. And, of course, I take it traveling with me, primarily because it’s relatively small and lightweight and old enough that I don’t have to feel too bad if it breaks.

But the real question is: Do I need Microsoft Office on it?

An Alternative to Word

I definitely need a Word processor. I’m a writer and I use the computer to write. (I use most of my computers to write.)

But Mac OS X comes with a perfectly good word processor: TextEdit.

TextEdit Example Don’t laugh until you’ve tried it. The version of TextEdit that comes with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is a kick-butt little word processor. It supports all kinds of formatting, including basic text formatting, tabs, indentation, lists, and even named styles. It has built-in spelling check that can check spelling as you type and supports hyphenation. It can open and read all Word formats — including Word 2007 for Windows with its new file format (which Word 2004 for Mac can’t even do) — and can save to Word formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), and plain text format. That makes it possible to use TextEdit, even when the people you are sharing files with are using Word.

Clearly, this ain’t your father’s SimpleText.

Okay, so it doesn’t support cell tables and Word fields and its support for inserted graphics is rather limited. And there are some Word formatting options that TextEdit might simply choke on.

But do I really need all those Word features? Isn’t the ability to enter and edit text and apply simple text formatting what word processing is all about?

Do We Need All those Bells and Whistles?

And that brings up a point that’s been nagging at me for years — since Microsoft Office 6 for Macintosh came out, in fact.

My first Word book was the Macintosh Bible Guide to Word 6. The Macintosh Bible series of books was a short-lived seris of big fat books about specific software packages. I did one for Word, then did another for Excel.

I clearly remember installing and using the beta of Word 6. My first impression was: this sucks. Microsoft had decided to pack in a lot of new features. And, if I recall correctly, Microsoft had also decided not to use Apple’s built-in routines for drawing windows and dialogs. Instead, they decided to write their own routines to draw their own windows and dialogs. So not only did the computer have to deal with all the programming stuff for word processor operations, but it had to deal with all the extra Microsoft-brand programming for the interface — the same kind of programming that made early versions of Windows so sluggish to DOS fans.

The feature bloat and poor performance of Word 6 — at least in the beta stage; they managed to fix it up a bit for the release version — got me thinking about the features that should be in a word processor. Clearly, Microsoft had gone over the top. (And it continued to do so for most subsequent releases, although I do recall Office 2001 being a very good version.)

Today’s TextEdit is not too far off from Microsoft Word 4, which is the first version of Word I used (back in 1989). And frankly, it did everything I needed it to do to prepare my manuscripts.

And if you’re a Windows user reading this, you have WordPad (I think that’s what it’s called), don’t you? I’m pretty sure that these days that is Word 4.

Compatibility Issues

Today, things are different. Although I write all my Peachpit Press books in InDesign, Adobe’s page layout program, I still write each year’s edition of my Quicken for Windows book in Microsoft Word. My editors make extensive use of Word’s revisions feature, with each of them (and me) marking up the manuscript so it’s nearly impossible to read. I need to use Word to share files with these editors. There’s no way around it.

But that doesn’t mean that I need it on my little PowerBook. And it also doesn’t mean that you need it.

Other Alternatives for Mac Users

And then there’s the iWork suite of products. With the addition of Numbers, a good alternative to Excel, Mac users now have all the pieces they need to replace Office on their Macs. I have iWork around here somewhere, but I haven’t had time to experiment with it. I’d love to get feedback from users; use the Comments link or form below to share your thoughts.

Back to My Original Question

Do I need Microsoft Office on my semi-retired PowerBook?

At this point, I think the answer is no. Let’s see how long I can last without it.

Microsoft Releases a Word 2007 Conversion Tool for Mac Users

Posted on May 16, 2007 by Maria Langer

Oh. Gee. Thanks.

I got an e-mail message from my editor, Cliff, today. He wanted me to send him a Word 2007 file to test a converter on his Mac.

I don’t use Word 2007 regularly. That’s a Windows program. I’m primarily a Mac user. I still use Word 2004 on my Mac. But I do have Office 2007 installed on my Windows PC, which is running Vista. I needed it to write about Excel 2007 for Windows. Of course, Word is part of the Office 2007 package, so I had that, too. I guess no one else at Peachpit does. But that doesn’t surprise me, because Peachpit is a publisher and uses mostly Macs.

I fired up my PC, started Word, and created a short document with some formatted text. I saved it to my Public folder, which I then opened from my Mac. I called Cliff into iChat, I pasted the document’s icon into iChat, and sent it to Cliff.

The whole time I was wondering why I didn’t know that Word 2007 for Windows files couldn’t be opened from Word 2004 for Macintosh. Could it be because my Word for Windows books were not revised for Word 2007? (Too many other Word books out there.)

The Converter

Cliff sent me a link for more information about the converter. I followed it to an entry on the Mac Mojo blog, “Mac Mojo : Get converted“:

…We are developing the product [Office] for versions beyond 2008 with broad investment in native Mac OS X architecture as well as adoption of a new, next generation document format: Office Open XML.

We’ve made great progress, and as previously promised we’re releasing some of this new functionality in a form that you can start using right away: Beta release #1 of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac is now available for download.

So the converter is just a beta.

I followed the link and found myself on the Microsoft Macintosh Downloads page. A link marked Office File Format Converter Beta (Word) brought me to a page with details about the converter. The information around the Download link told me that the file was 24.9 MB in size and that it would take 2 hours and 10 minutes to download with a 56K modem. Since I only have a 512K connection to the Internet (remember, I live on the edge of nowhere), I started that download right away.

The resulting file is a disk image that, when opened, displays an installer. When I got the installer going, I was quick to notice that it was installing over 8,000 files on my hard disk. Can I repeat that? Eight thousand files.

What ever happened to plugin-like converters that hid as single files in a specific folder where you could find and delete them when you had to?

The application, which is only 3.9 MB in size, is installed in the Applications folder. I double-clicked it, saw a little information screen that told me what it did, and was presented with the Office Converter window. I dragged the Word 2007 file I’d created for Cliff into the window, and waited. About 3 seconds later, I was told that the conversion was successful. (The test file had 18 words in it and two kinds of formatting were applied to some of them.)

The Converted File in TextEdit The test file was not converted to a Word 2004 format file. That might make too much sense. Instead, it was converted to an RTF file. When I opened it, I found all formatting intact. There was also a blank area for a header and footer, which I didn’t even know RTF supported. Here’s what it looks like in TextEdit.

Why the Wait?

If you can read the sarcasm in this post — I really have tried to tone it down — it’s because I don’t understand why Microsoft had to change Word’s file format in the first place. I also can’t understand why they waited nearly five months from Office 2007′s initial release to come up with a converter for Mac users and the rest of the world. Remember, Word for Mac users aren’t the only ones who can’t read the new Word 2007 format; none of the existing Word converters for Mac and Windows work for Word 2007 files.

Perhaps Microsoft believes that its user base should take the extra effort to save files in previous Word formats when they need to share with non 2007 users. If so, Microsoft needs to understand that the average user doesn’t know the first thing about the type options available in the Save As dialog — no matter how many authors write about it. They save it in the default format and they’re done. What’s worse is that if they open a document created in an older format and attempt to save it with a different name, Word defaults to the new format, then displays a dialog that could easily confuse many users.

Warning Dialog

In case you can’t read that (I had to reduce its size to fit it in the text column here), it says:

You are about to save your document to one of the new file formats. This action will allow you to use all the new features in Word 2007, but may cause changes in the layout of the document.

Click OK to continue, or click Cancel and select the “Maintain compatibility with Word 97-2003″ checkbox to preserve the layout of your document.

So you do click OK and possibly have changes in the document’s layout? Or do you miss out on the new features? And what about Word 2004 for Macintosh?

Word 2004 isn’t even mentioned here. But if you use the Word 97-2003 format, Word 2004 on a Mac can open the file. (Why didn’t they just call it Word 97-2004 format?)

More Testing Needed

Obviously an 18-word file is not much of a test. But I don’t have any very complex files created with Word 2007 to run through the converter. If I do get some time to create and test a complex Word 2007 file with the converter, you can read about it here.

A Closer Look at Word 2004′s Status Bar

Posted on January 11, 2007 by Maria Langer

There’s a lot of information there.

Word 2004 (and other versions of Word, for that matter) packs a lot of information into the status bar at the bottom of the document window. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

Word's Status Bar

What appears depends on the view of the document, its contents, and the features you have enabled or disabled. Here’s a quick rundown of what to expect and how to take advantage of this information:

Page is the page number of the page currently displayed. If you’re viewing the document in Normal view or are viewing multiple pages at once, it’s the page where the insertion point is blinking or text is selected. The number that appears corresponds to the page numbering of the document. For example, if you indicated to Word that the first page is 17 and you’re looking at the second page of the document, Page will display 18.
Sec is the section number currently displayed. This will be 1 unless you inserted section breaks in your document. Like Page, if you’re looking at multiple sections, it displays section number for the blinking insertion point or beginning of selected text.
number/number is the current page number and the total number of pages in the document. This is based on the physical count of pages — not special page numbering you may have assigned.
At is the distance between the top of the page and the blinking insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
Ln is the insertion point’s line number, measured from the top of the page. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
Col is the number of characters from the left margin to the insertion point. If the insertion point is not in the window, no value is displayed.
number/number is the word count statistics for the document. The Live Word Count feature must be turned on for this to display. (Choose Word > Preferences, click View, turn on the check box for Live Word Count.) The first value is the position of the insertion point as measured in words from the beginning of the document. If multiple words are selected, that value is the number of words selected. The second value is the total number of words in the document. If you click these values, the Word Count dialog appears, displaying the number of pages, words, characters (no spaces), characters (with spaces), paragraphs, and lines in the document.
Spelling and Grammar Checking status is an icon that indicates the status of the spelling and grammar checker. During a check, the icon is animated. If no errors are found, a check mark appears. If an error is found, an X appears; you can click the icon to select the first unknown word with a contextual menu you can use to correct, ignore, or learn it.
REC is the macro recorder status. Click REC to display the Record Macro dialog and turn the macro recorder on or off. When the recorder is on, a green bullet appears next to REC.
TRK is the track changes feature status. Click TRK to display the Reviewing toolbar and turn the track changes feature on or off. When changes are being tracked, a green bullet appears next to REC.
EXT is the extend selection mode status. Click EXT to turn the mode on or off. When selection mode is on, a green bullet appears next to EXT and using various keyboard keys extends the selection of text in the document. (I don’t use this feature and would love to hear from people who do. Use the Comments link to share your insight on this feature.)
OVR is the overtype mode status. Click OVR to turn the mode on or off. When overtype mode is on, a green bullet appears next to OVR and the insertion cursor turns into an overtype cursor, automatically overwriting everything to the right as you type.
File version status is an icon that indicates the document includes more than one version. It only appears if the document has multiple versions. Clicking the icon displays the Versions dialog so you can choose the version you want to display onscreen. You can create multiple versions of a Word document by choosing File > Versions.

Other icons may appear at the far right end of the status bar when Word is saving a document with the background save feature or printing a document in the background.

As you can see, the status bar is more than just a collection of numbers and icons at the bottom of a Word document window. It can provide useful information and give you easy access to Word features.

Solutions for Failing Eyesight

Posted on September 29, 2006 by Maria Langer

Don’t make the font size larger — zoom it!

Yesterday, I reread a blog entry I wrote earlier this year about my failing eyesight (“The Eyes Had It“). My far vision has always been bad, but now I’m beginning to lose my close vision, too. Miraz, my co-author on the WordPress book, commented that she’s going through the same thing and now uses a larger font size when working with Word.

As a writer, I spend a good portion of my workday in front of word processing or page layout software. I have a 21″ Sony monitor at my office — you know, one of those enormous super VGA CRTs that weighs about 80 lbs. I have the screen resolution set so I see a lot on my screen. But that means that most of what I see is small.

I found that if I received a document from someone with a normal font size — say 12 points — I just wasn’t able to view it comfortably at 100% magnification. So I needed a workaround.

There were two options:

Change the screen resolution to a lower setting. On a Mac, you do this with the Displays preferences pane. On Windows, I think it’s also called Displays and its a control panel. I’m not sure what that big monitor at the office is set to, but my 12″ PowerBook is set all the way up to 1024 x 786. If I dropped that down to 800 x 600, everything on screen would look larger and I’d probably have a better time seeing it. But I’d also get less on my screen. And some Web sites — like Flying M Air, for example — actually require a high resolution setting of at least 1024 x 786. So that isn’t the optimum solution.
Zoom the contents of windows. Most applications have a zoom feature. For example, in Microsoft Word 2003 for Windows and 2004 for Mac OS, there’s a Zoom drop-down list right on the Standard toolbar. Choose an option from the menu or enter a new value in the text box there and press Return or Enter. I usually use 120%, unless the author of the document formatted it at some crazy font size like 9 points. Then I pop it up to 150%. I even had a document I worked on at 200% because between the small font size and the font design itself, I just couldn’t read it comfortably at any other magnification. Other programs, such as Excel, Adobe Reader (and Apple Preview, for that matter), Photoshop, and just about any other graphics or page layout program you can think of, have zoom features. I even have keystrokes remembered in some apps to toggle magnifications as necessary.

It’s odd because on one book I worked on, I’d submit Word files I’d been reading at 120% magnification and get them back from the copyeditor at 92% magnification. I’d have to pop them back up to read them. The benefit of using the magnification feature rather than simply changing font size is that layout isn’t affected. Document magnification settings can be set at anything and it’ll always have the same word wrap (except in Word’s Online Layout View perhaps) and it’ll always print the same. If you change the font size, however, you also change the word wrap and layout.

Of course, if you have trouble reading a printed version of the document, font size is just about the only solution.

But I’m not quite there. Yet.

On the Intelligence of Quotes

Posted on June 13, 2006 by Maria Langer

Maria Speaks Episode 27: On the Intelligence of Quotes.

This short podcast is a reading from a recent article I wrote on my book support site for Microsoft Word users. It explains the difference between smart and straight quotes and tells you how to work with them in Microsoft Word. You can read the transcript of this podcast and see the accompanying screenshots at www.aneclecticmind.com

Transcripts:

Curly or “smart” quotes are single and double quote marks that curve in toward what they surround. This blog, if viewed in the intended font, displays all quotes as smart quotes. Smart quotes are also often referred to as “typographers” quotes because they’re common in printed work like books, magazine articles, and other documents.

You may not realize it, but a smart quote character is actually a different character than its corresponding straight quote. Think about it: it has to be. After all, it looks different, doesn’t it? That means it has to be a different character.

These characters are easy to type on a Macintosh. For example, to get the “ character, type Option-[. to get the ’ character, type Shift-Option-]. (Although there must be some way to type these in on a Windows computer, I don’t know how to do it; perhaps a reader can use the Comments link to share the keystrokes?)

In Word, you can also use the Special Characters pane of the Symbols dialog. Choose Insert > Symbol to display the dialog and click the Special Characters tab or button. Scroll down to find the character you want (they’re listed at the bottom of the list) and double-click the one you want to insert it. This is a rather cumbersome way to get the job done, but it does work.

Fortunately, Word offers a better, automated way. You can set an option in the AutoFormat as you Type pane of the AutoCorrect dialog that will automatically convert every straight quote you type to the corresponding smart quote. Choose Tools > AutoCorrect and click the AutoFormat as You Type tab or button in the dialog that appears. Then turn on the “Straight quotes” with “Smart quotes” check box. (As you can see, that’s the only feature I have enabled in this pane on my copy of Word; I don’t like Word messing with the formatting of what I type, as I discuss in “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them.”) Click OK to save your setting.

From that point on, every time you type a single or double quote, Word will convert it to a smart quote. If your computer isn’t very fast, you might actually be able to see the conversion happen. And, if you use Word’s Undo feature, you can undo the conversion to revert the character back to the regular quote you typed.

I should mention here that this feature is enabled by default, so if you never changed this setting and you want smart quotes, you don’t have to do a thing to get them.

Now suppose you have a document that was typed without smart quotes. Perhaps a passage of text copied from a Web site or a document someone wrote with a plain old text editor. You want to dress up the document for printing and smart quotes are important to you. Do you have to retype all those quotes to “educate” them? Heck no! Just use Find and Replace.

First double check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” feature is enabled as discussed above. Then choose Edit > Replace to display the Find and Replace window. Type the same plain old double quote character in the Find What and Replace With boxes. Then click Replace All. Word will replace the dumb double quotes with the correct smart quotes and tell you how many it replaced. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog. Then type the same plain old single quote character in the Find What and Replace with boxes and click Replace All. Word replaces all the dumb single quotes with smart single quotes. Click OK to dismiss the confirmation dialog and close the Find and Replace window.

If you do this a lot, you might consider writing a macro that does the job for you. But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

What if you have a document with smart quotes and you need to turn them into straight quotes? Easy enough. Follow the same process, but before you use the Find and Replace window, check to make sure that the “Straight quotes” to “Smart quotes” option is turned off. Find and Replace should dumb up the quotes.

Now that you know the tricks, there’s no reason why your Word documents shouldn’t have the smartest quotes around.

Microsoft, Word, smart quotes

Word Books Q & A

Posted on January 1, 2006 by Maria Langer

Post your questions about my Word books here.

Have a question about something in one of my Word books? Here’s how to get the answer:

Browse through the comments at the end of this article to see if someone else has already asked your question. You might get the answer without even asking!
If your question is not asked (or answered), use the Leave a Comment form at the bottom of this post to enter your question. (If the form does not appear, click the Comment link below to display it.)
Check in once in a while to see if your question is answered. I usually answer questions within 48 hours, unless I’m out of town. To have responses to your question delivered to you automatically by e-mail, along with other Q & A comments submitted for this book, turn on the Notify Me check box at the bottom of the form when submitting your question (step 2). You can unsubscribe to the notification feature at any time.

Please do not use the Contact form to ask me questions. I won’t answer them. I want the questions and answers here, where everyone can see them, so I don’t have to answer the same questions over and over again.

Remember, I can only answer questions that clarify or correct information in my books. If the answer to your question is in my book, I will provide a page number reference to help you find it.

October 27, 2011 Update: Due to the age of these titles, they are no longer supported. Comments have been closed but remain in case you have a question that has already been answered here. Support for my Lynda.com titles can be found on the course page on Lynda.com.

Word Can Drive You Crazy

Posted on October 9, 2005 by Maria Langer

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Maria Speaks Episode 5: Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy…And What You Can Do About Them

This episode is the first audio recording of one of the many articles I’ve written for the Informit.com Web site. Informit is the Web publishing arm of Pearson Education, which is the company that owns Peachpit Press. Most of the books I’ve written since 1995 have been for Peachpit. This makes me one of Informit’s favorite authors.

The folks at Informit publish my articles with screen shots as I write them. They’ve asked me not to republish them on my site. To make these articles easy to find, I’ve linked to them on the Articles page of my Web site. So if you want to read the transcript for this article and see the screenshots that go with it, just visit the Articles page on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com.

And if you’re a Word user looking for a book to help you get more out of the software, I hope you’ll pick up one of my Word Visual QuickStart Guides. I’ve been writing them for a while for Mac OS and Windows versions of Word. You can learn more about them and read other Word articles on my Web site, www.aneclecticmind.com.

Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them

Posted on October 29, 2004 by Maria Langer

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Informit.com Article

Does autoformatting make you nuts? We computer users have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft Word. Some of us see Microsoft as the Evil Empire of Computing and refuse to use its software at all. The rest of us are more realistic; we understand the benefits of using some of the world’s most popular software for everyday chores. But even fans know that Word has a few features that can drive anyone absolutely bonkers. In this article, I present the top three ways Word can drive you crazy and tell you how to fix it to maintain your sanity while you work.

Read here: “Three Ways Word Can Drive You Crazy[er] and What You Can Do About Them”.