More irritants. These are not necessarily Mac problems though. I’d been using OpenOffice mostly because it’s free and actually quite good. It has its problems though, mostly involving compatibility with Word which is what I have to share with. And it does weird things with images in text documents, only letting you use “anchors” which I have only vaguely figured out, but the Word people hate them. And it’s difficult to manage different Sections in OO. Hence, I’ve been doing most of the work in OO and then moving it over to Word on my old PC to finish up the images and such.
I finally discovered that I can get Office for Mac from the UW for like $10, as long as I’m affiliated. So I downloaded it and have been using it.
First of all, Word and Excel are tremendous pigs. Huge things and take a long time to load. Today, they became highly irritating as I finally did some serious work in them. First, you can’t use F2 to edit a cell’s contents in Excel; you have to use ctrl-U. F2 copies instead. WTF? What’s wrong with using the same frickin’ keys??? Worse, in Word you can’t just hit the Insert key to switch between Insert and Typeover mode; you have to go through menus to do it: Word|Preferences|Edit|Overtype. Yeah, that’s reeeeeeeal efficient. Idiots. OO doesn’t let you Insert-key switch either, but at least they put a little button at the bottom you can click to switch.
Why not use Pages and Numbers? I switched years ago and have never looked back. There is also Libre Office. http://www.libreoffice.org/download
Comment by Vincent — August 29, 2012 @ 1:29 pm
From what I’ve seen, Pages isn’t all that compatible with Word, and I’m always having to prepare documents to share with people using Word; even OpenOffice (which LibreOffice forked from) isn’t all that great, although it mostly works decently well.
Comment by acagle — August 29, 2012 @ 6:58 pm
Pages is a lot better for images, but unfortunately, as you say, the conversion to formats Word can deal with really messes with the layout. Plus, overtype doesn’t exist in Pages, so if you use it, you probably wouldn’t like Pages much.
Also, Mac keyboards don’t have Insert keys. In older versions of Word for Mac you could also switch to overtype with a little button at the bottom. I guess they’re trying to phase it out altogether?
Comment by Ian — August 29, 2012 @ 7:27 pm
Buggers. I admit, however, that I haven’t specifically remapped my PC keyboard that I’m using on the iMac yet. . .
Comment by acagle — August 30, 2012 @ 1:02 pm