A handy Microsoft Word trick
How to use view two parts of a document at once
I don’t use MS Word very much these days for writing. Generally I use WriteRoom, which offers the advantage of an uncluttered full-screen interface that cuts down on distraction. But my publisher’s bringing out a new edition of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism, and using Word became a necessity. In fact I had the unpleasant task of taking a text file they sent me and turning it back into a fully-fledged Word doc. The unpleasant part was the the document had about 90 plain text endnotes, which I had to manually convert into Word endnotes. I had to copy text from the end of the document, create footnote markers in the relevant places, and then paste in the text. This required a lot of scrolling up and down the document.
Fortunately I remembered the “split window” trick, where you …
Cool tool for simplifying
One problem with using a Mac is that often the desktop can end up looking very cluttered. Especially when using programs like Dreamweaver and Fireworks, which have many small panes, the experience of using a Mac can be rather like reading a newspaper where someone’s cut out many of the articles: it gets distracting because of all the “show-through” from other programs.
One solution is to use Command+Option+H, which hides all programs except the one that’s in the foreground. It’s a nice way of simplifying the view, and you can use the dock or Command+Tab to cycle through the programs you’re using. That doesn’t work in all applications, however.
Another solution that I found today is a free application called Isolator, which masks out what’s in the background, but allow you to click on it when needed, bringing that application into focus.
It’s very customizable so …
Ctrl Alt Del Shift Caps lock Enter — Power Off
It’s only when you have a curious toddler that you start to realize the fatal significance of all the really important keys on a computer keyboard being closest to the edge — when she grabs the computer with her inquisitive little fingers all kinds of interesting things happen, from windows suddenly vanishing, text changing size, and (sometimes) the whole computer shutting down.
A laptop designed for parents would have all those functional keys right in the middle of the keyboard! Or maybe they should be hidden safely away under some kind of locked cover. Not very practical of course! I guess toddlers and laptops just don’t really mix.