The Last Word

In the early eighties, there was a lot of controversy about how many buttons a mouse should have. Unix computers often used three button mice. The Xerox PARC computers, which most consider to be the ur-GUI for both Microsoft and Apple, used three button mice. The first version of Microsoft Word shipped in 1983 with [...]

The Droid X appears to be a worthy competitor to the iPhone. It is a less mature product, with releases to the OS coming thick and fast, and it is a bit less polished.
The philosophical difference between the two OSs appears to be similar to the philosophies of the two companies: Apple’s approach sacrifices control [...]

I wasn’t getting anywhere with the Exchange client that came with the Droid X, so I downloaded one called Touchdown. Not only did Touchdown work better for me, it provided logs of its interaction with the server which helped me to figure out what was going wrong.
With the Exchange client working, I downloaded and set [...]

I found another list of names and fought with Word Mail Merge for an hour trying to get them printed. I first brought up the old Mail Merge document, and attempted to link it to the spreadsheet containing the new names. It seemed to link OK, but now I only had one printed label per [...]

(If you don’t know what an OOBE is, look here.)
I’ve been sick for the past few days, and have had to spend most of my time in bed, so I was pleased yesterday when the FedEx truck rolled up with my Verizon Droid X. Making friends with it was something that I could do while [...]

After I installed Office 2010, I noticed that the Acrobat ribbon was missing. I went to the Adobe website and learned the story. It seems that in versions of Acrobat 9 before 9.3, the Acrobat ribbon didn’t work right with Office 2010. Adobe came up with a fix in the 9.3 release: they removed the [...]

I told you all in a previous post that my experience with Microsoft support on what turned out to be a font problem with Office 2010 was abysmal. I promised to spare you details then, and I won’t rehash that call now. However, yesterday I received a signoff e-mail from the support tech. The critical [...]

In previous posts, I reported that upon upgrading from Office 2007 to Office 2010, corrupted some fonts caused Outlook and Word to crash. There are a couple of possibilities here. Maybe the fonts were fine before the upgrade, and somehow the upgrade corrected them. Maybe the fonts have been corrupted for a long time, and [...]

Just when I thought the Office 2010 font wars were over, a new battle broke out. I got an e-mail with a Word attachment that crashed Word 2010. I brought it up in Word on a computer that had only the standard Windows 7 fonts installed, and saw that the predominant font was Times. I [...]

Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I’m a heat seeker: somebody who gets involved in technology before it is well tested and debugged. I don’t do beta tests, but I’m usually near the front of the line for new versions of operating systems and applications. I try to do most of [...]