fencepost in the far east

Sometimes, the keyboard is right where you want to be.

For all versions of Excel for Windows up through 2007, keyboard shortcuts have been available for just about everything—including some very handy acrobatics around the worksheet—that have saved users time and frustration. However, for users who are relatively new to the Mac and to Excel for Mac, it’s not always clear what key to press to emulate the handy little routines they were so used to back with Windows. The most unfortunate part of all of this is that the help contents in Excel for Mac aren’t much… well, help, when it comes to keyboard shortcuts. Some are explained, some are not.

For instance:

F2: Edit Cell Contents (Edit Active Cell)

It may sound ridiculous, but although this keyboard shortcut is explained in the help contents for Excel 2008, the keyboard shortcut cannot be modified. The good news is that you can use CONTROL+U on the Mac to do the same thing. Why Microsoft chose to change this keyboard shortcut from F2 on Windows to Control+U on the Mac in unclear.

ALT+ENTER: Add line break to cell contents

This is extremely handy for formatting text in Excel for Windows. It doesn’t work at all on Excel for Mac. It also is not explained in the Excel help contents. Use Option+Cmd+Return instead on the Mac.

CTRL+Left/right arrow key Move the cursor one word back/forwards

Nothing on this one in the Excel 2008 help contents either. Use Option+Left/Right arrow key on the Mac.

SHIFT+Cmd+< or > Shrink/Grow (Increase/Decrease) Font Size

This one isn’t even a Excel for Windows shortcut, but it can come in handy, so I’ll throw it in for good measure. It’s also not covered in the help contents.

Icons courtesy of Trazo (Excel for Windows icon) and Jojo Mendoza (Excel for Mac icon).

When you drag and drop a URL from a browser onto the desktop or a Finder window on the Mac, you’ll likely get a .webloc file. The fact is, this is really nothing more than a glorified text file.

Doing a cursory Google search, I found that there are a lot of people who are mystified as to how to open these URL bookmarks—these .webloc files—in Windows.

This evening, however, I ran across a fairly simple solution. Associate .webloc files with Windows Notepad or your favorite text editor, or drag and drop the .webloc file to an open Notepad window. You should see some code similar to the window above, including the URL of the bookmark. Now all you need to do is copy and paste the URL within the <string> </string> tags to your browser’s address bar.

This solution should work well for a small number of .webloc files, but if you want to convert a large number of .webloc files to bookmarks to use in Firefox or IE, that’s a different story…

Microsoft,Word,Adobe,Dreamweaver,application,paste,functionality,bug,workaround,issue

Adobe is keeping secrets from users of Dreamweaver CS3 who are having troubles making Dreamweaver play well with Word 2008 for Mac.

It’s sad to say, but Adobe is not immune to trying to upsell the latest version of their top-selling Creative Suite products to "fix" annoying issues with functionality, rather than come out and give you a simple workaround that might keep you happy for quite some time without plunking your hard-earned cash into yet another upgrade.

Take for instance the drag and drop functionality of text from Word 2008 to Dreamweaver CS3. Even an action as benign as selecting a word in Word, dragging it to Design view in DW CS3 and dropping it to copy it results in… well, nothing. In other words, it’s broken technology. Why? A cursory Google search to find clues on how to deal with the problem results in an Adobe knowledgebase article, "Unable to paste text from Word 2008 into Dreamweaver CS3 (Mac OS X)". Here is the reason Adobe gives for the problem:

We’ve already established that we cannot drag and drop (or copy and paste) text from Dreamweaver CS3 to Word 2008—this is not helpful. But without skipping a beat, here’s the number one "solution" that Adobe recommends to "solve" this problem:

Solution 1: Upgrade to Dreamweaver CS4.

Uh huh. Throw money at the problem. Of course.

To be fair, Adobe provides solution #2, which is somewhat more helpful. Adobe tells us to "paste the text into Dreamweaver without any formatting applied". This is fine if you don’t mind following their three-click process each and every time you want to copy and paste text from Word 2008 to Dreamweaver.

But alas, there is a better way… and Adobe is not telling you. (Care to speculate as to why?) Here it is:

Go to Dreamweaver Preferences, click on the Copy/Paste category, and then select the "Text only" radio button and click OK. Once you have done this, you should be able to drag and drop from Word to Dreamweaver CS3’s Design pane to your heart’s content. Yes, it will be pasted as plain text… but I don’t think you’re going to care about that minutia right now.

…So don’t disassemble your sports car (or your three-speed bike) just yet for parts to sell, in order to scrape up enough money to upgrade to Dreamweaver CS4. Truth is, you’ve already been given the keys to the kingdom… it’s just that Adobe didn’t want you to get there.

I’ve written quite a few articles on the benefits and pitfalls of using Microsoft Entourage 2008 to transfer appointments and tasks between applications on the Mac. However, you may have noticed that I’ve still been dancing around the burning question: is Entourage really any good as a full-fledged personal information manager? Can I really use Entourage to effectively plan and keep track of time spent, progress made on various projects, overall goals, and upcoming or completed tasks?

…Or, why Entourage, and not iCal, Google Calendar, or Outlook (if you have access to a Windows installation via Parallels or VMWare Fusion, or have it installed via Crossover for Mac)? What combination of applications and technology can a full-fledged Mac user marshal to his/her immediate aid, in order to handle the onslaught of information and incursions on our valuable time that we face on a daily basis?

In short, how are we ever going to sort out this mess that we got ourselves into?

The answer up front.

I’m going to give you my ultimate answer right here, right now. Take a deep breath. Here it comes.

Yes!—it’s the humble but deceptively powerful appointment minder, aka Very Portable Personal Information Manager™.

This marvel of information technology requires no batteries, no software upgrades, and about a ten-second learning curve. It weighs all of, oh, say 200 grams, give or take a hundred or so. It doesn’t require a carrying case, and it can probably survive a fall from a seven-story building without a lengthy and costly trip to the repair shop. Likewise, spilled coffee might make it look (and smell) a little unseemly, but its functionality will be intact. It can store any information in any visible format. It can even be used to store those photos and phone numbers obtained at the company party that you prefer your husband not to see but just can’t bear to part with. Best of all, your ever-so-tolerant manager or classroom instructor won’t even bat an eye when you pull it out in the midst of a morbidly serious conference or an utterly involved lecture.

So… what are we doing, standing around here squinting with bleary eyes at 1:20 AM at the roughly credit-card-sized screens of our iPod Touches to sync our Google Calendars to our iCal data via Spanning Sync in order to update our Entourage calendars (while in the process losing our category and project data and cursing Apple and Microsoft simultaneously; and in not knowing which party is to blame henceforth set off and curse ourselves for allowing ourselves to dive into this mess in the first place!), when we could be actually getting something done?

Back to the future, fast-forward to the past.

Okay, okay… I’m not the low-tech advocate you might be thinking I sound like. I actually use Outlook quite extensively on Windows XP at my webmaster/contents developer day job to organize and schedule all of the tasks and projects that need to be completed during any given day, week, or month. Dragging and dropping nicely categorized and prioritized to-dos to the calendar gives me a tiny thrill each time, as if I am really getting something done by filling up that virtual time slot that has yet to exist in reality. It used to be a pain in the you-know-where, but now I really find it easy.

What’s more, I find that as a desktop personal information manager, it works well for me. As I’ve completed tasks during the day, I rearrange the calendar to show what I actually accomplished on that day. (I could create a “planned” and “actual” calendar side-by-side for that matter, which is fully possible in Outlook or in most any other calendar management software worth its salt these days.)

So, what’s my rant all about?—Quite simply, it’s about the real lack of practical choices that Mac users have now in regard to integrated PIM applications to straighten out their time, projects and lives. But it’s also about the serious lack of foresight on the part of Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless other PIM application developers to seriously consider what the average user requires from a digital personal information management app to actually offer that user dividends in the form of added productivity, rather than lost time spent in recovering and backing up monolithic databases, or in syncing data between two or more disparate services (and sometimes involving two or three conversions in data format between radically different OS platforms). It’s also about the lame-brained, 20th-century inefficiencies we users still have to put up with in order to create a new appointment or maintain our to-do list on a mobile device barely designed for human hands. Although desktop applications have been with us for decades now, the process of creating, sharing and managing a calendar—let alone linking items in the calendar with to-dos and subtasks in an overall project, or categorizing and prioritizing the project according to the needs of everyone involved—is one fraught with wild twists and turns that can be impossible or impractical to navigate—and doubly so for Entourage users.

Entourage be good, Entourage be bad…

When it comes to Entourage for the Mac, the 2008 version was released last year as Microsoft’s answer to the personal information manager for the Mac, and there are a lot of things to cheer about. I’ve enjoyed being able to assign not only categories but also projects to my tasks or e-mails, and then switching to project view to see a wrap-up at a glance of everything that pertains to that project. That’s powerful stuff, if you’ve got several things going at once and need a way to summarize each without having to do the summarizing yourself. Bread-and-butter calendaring apps like iCal or Mozilla Sunbird don’t even come close to this.

On the other hand, Entourage 2008 offers absolutely no support for online calendar sharing with services such as Google Calendar, questionable sync functionality with iCal at best, and highly limited import/export functionality compared to its more mature and generally more flexible Windows sibling, Outlook. Put together, these limitations are so serious that they practically relegate Entourage to little more than a well-meaning application that belongs in essentially one place: on a standalone home computer.

The Mac BU have been exceptionally quiet about what is to come in the next version of Entourage, or what it will mean to users who want cloud computing functionality to round out the already powerful project and object linking functionality that Entourage offers. I can tell you that I am eagerly waiting for some serious improvements. I wouldn’t even mind putting my Windows Live account to better use, if it meant that I could easily sync up and share my Entourage calendar and to-do list with Outlook on Windows. Yet right now as of March 2009, that is still a near-impossibility, requiring third-party extensions, shareware scripts and several compromises in the form of lost metadata to even come close to a satisfactory result.

… But if we find later on this year or early next year that the Mac BU at Microsoft has no plans to implement any of these things worth a damn in the next version of Entourage anyway, I can always take solace in the fact that I spent a mere ¥1,700 (about USD$17.38) on a functional but compact little “personal information manager” of my own today… and it’s not going to leave me in the lurch.

Indeed, the ultimate in cloud computing is… the humble desktop minder.

Adobe,Contribute,CS3,source code,XHTML,blog,editor

Ever wanted to give up on using Adobe Contribute CS3 for editing and posting to your favorite blog site, because you couldn’t get the fine control over the source code… or get the article layout to look quite the way you wanted it to?

It’s not easy to find, but rest assured, Contribute CS3 actually does offer the user a choice to edit the X/HTML source code of the blog entry. (Never mind the fact that Contribute won’t actually show you the source code itself. Read on.)

Once you’ve got the blog entry open that you’d like to edit, try File - Actions - Edit Page Source in External Application. You’ll need to assign an external X/HTML editing application such as Dreamweaver or TextEdit (Mac)/Notepad (Windows) beforehand. (You can access this from the Contribute Preferences – File Editors option.) This at least gives you the freedom of adding or editing the X/HTML markup while working on the article, rather than being limited to Contribute’s rather rudimentary editing features.

Contribute CS3 is still a sluggish application for connecting to and editing blogs (I’ve had better luck with Windows Live Writer on the Windows platform, actually), but it does the job—and it does provide a one-stop shop for adminstering all of your blog content, both offline and online.

FW,CS3,Fireworks,brush,performance,problem,Mac,cursor,trouble,preferences

It’s great to be able to solve niggling issues with software and have a smooth user experience from start to finish… but with most apps, that is rarely the case.

I’ve noticed a display performance issue with the Brush tool in Fireworks CS3, documented by many other users on various forums. The problem occurs when selecting the Brush tool and trying to draw on the canvas. The cursor flashes incessantly, and always seems to be a step behind the pen or mouse when drawing. Obviously, this results in a very awkward digital drawing/painting experience, to say the least!

I’ve been able to solve the problem (?) on the Windows version of FW CS3, by turning off Aero (which seems to get turned off anyway while Fireworks is running). However, the solution is different for Mac users, who don’t have an "Aero" to turn off :-p

I did file a support request with Adobe, but thanks to a kind user on the DreamForum, I found a quick and painless fix for the Mac version of Fireworks CS3.

The solution is to turn off the "Brush-size painting cursors" option in Fireworks preferences.

Ahhhhh… much better.

graphics,design,necessity,visual communication,ideas

It’s easy to think that at a time like this, with the economic situation going bad and people around us losing their jobs, the last thing on earth that we need is graphics and designers. After all, when you’re scrounging around and scraping out an existence without gainful employment—not to mention wondering how long the shoes on your feet and the roof over your head are going to last —the last thing on your mind is aesthetics.

Yet, graphics and design means so much more than mere aesthetics.

The look of things, the design inherent in everything around us that we see and even hear and touch, permeates the fabric of our society. As books such as "The Information Design Handbook" (Jenn and Ken Visocky O’Grady, HOW Books) relate in various ways, good design and the clear visual representation of information is indispensable for us to understand and learn from the knowledge of the past, to create new knowledge and ideas, to stimulate the growth of our economies, and finally to understand one another as human beings.

It sometimes seems that we can separate "practical" design and visual communication from "aesthetic" design and graphic communication. After all, the unmistakeable design of the street signs on public roads make it safer and easier for us to drive. Signs pointing us to the ticket counter in the subway or the cash reigster in the supermarket eliminate confusion, and serve a practical use in making our lives easier. On the other hand, a artistic rendering of a lone horse in a grassy field against a mountain-filled blue summer sky may remind us of a family outing in our childhood, or perhaps of a scene in a movie we had seen… but it could be argued that the image has no practical value in making our lives any better than they are.

Now, it would seem that this is an old argument, and perhaps a red herring at that. Actually, design and visual communication in every shape and form is not without effect.

Design is such a commodity now that it surrounds us everywhere we go, in the form of posters, billboards, illustrations in magazine articles, and even in the layout and presentation of guidebooks, manuals and the forms we fill out to report our taxes every year to the government. In fact, there is not a day that goes by when our thinking and behavior are not influenced by the design of things around us. And the more information that society produces, the more the necessity for design grows.

In order for businesses, governments and institutions of all sorts to overcome economic turmoil and to improve the condition of our society, there is a dire need to not only assemble raw facts and collect information of all sorts, but to assemble and arrange that information in ways that will inspire people to change. Whatever one thinks of Al Gore’s opinions on the environment, it’s impossible to deny the impact that the graph of "Great Weather and Flood Catastrophes: Losses In Billions of U.S. Dollars" makes, arranged directly next to a photo of the wreckage of the aftermath of hurricane Rita in 2005. (An Incovenient Truth by Al Gore, Rodale) There was a designer behind this, someone who knew that just showing the reader some numbers and a few lines would have far less of an effect than the graph and photo combined. So-called "practical design" in this sense is used to make a statement, to show relationships and correlations, to connect people, figures and phenomenon in order to evoke change or an emotional response.

Having said this, doesn’t "aesthetic design", or in other words the type of artistic design that would not seem to serve an immediate practical purpose, share the same? After all, "aesthetic design" makes a statement; it expresses or says something; it shows relationships and correlations; it connects people, figures and phenomenon; and it certainly can be a catalyst in evoking change or emotional responses.

The book chapter design I did below for a fictional art compilation of the works of René Magritte shows a few of Magritte’s works, expressing the variety and openness of his paintings.

As a practical work of design, we might argue that this piece serves no purpose. But on the other hand, when placed in context (within the pages of a book or portfolio), the work says a great deal. We might even argue that it has cultural value, in showing various sides of a Belgian artist who has had a profound impact on the world of art as we know it today. But not every piece of design really needs to be evaluated. In fact, there is no way for us to measure the impact of design, both "practical" and "aesthetic" today on us, as individuals and as a society.

Design creates connections in the minds and hearts of people, sometimes even to one another, that cannot be readily measured by a survey, a research paper or any other evaluative yardstick. To stop the ebb and flow of design in all of its incarnations would mean turning back the sands of time, reverting to a prehistoric state. And no matter how desperate the situation in our world today becomes, design is the key element upon which the growth of our society hinges. More importantly, however, without the physical and psychological prosperity of individuals, there is no growth in society, and it collapses under its own weight.

For this reason, we need design now—more than ever.

When your primary computer has got a serious identity crisis and you need to make room for Hyde while squeezing Jekyll out just a wee bit more, it may just be time to repartition your hard disk.

Okay, okay, I know… it sounds geeky. But when it comes down to getting more out of your Mac mini or MacBook, and you want to use Windows in conjunction with Mac OS X Leopard on the very same computer, you might want to try iPartition, a disk space management application from Coriolis Systems, made available to users in Japan through NetJapan, Inc.

My dilemma was this:

1. I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for Mac for the past year now, to access Windows programs that aren’t available for the Mac. The main problem is speed. On my primary computer at home, a Mac mini with a 2.0GHz Intel Dual Core processor and 2.0GB of RAM, Windows Vista generally takes several minutes to finally boot up and get running… not to mention the fact that Windows Aero effects are unavailable in this virtual configuration (even under the latest Parallels Desktop version 4.0), and everything seems to run at a slow crawl.
2. After biting the bullet to purchase a brand-new copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (fortunately with a ¥10,000 manufacturer rebate offer!), upgrading my Mac mini to Mac OS X Leopard, and installing Windows Vista via Boot Camp, it began to dawn on me that it was crunch time for the Vista partition… I was rapidly running out of disk space…

How did I handle this problem? Well, I could have gone out and bought a new computer entirely, or had the hard disk replaced on my Mac mini for a slightly larger one. But instead, I decided to take a cheaper route by doing the following (is there no end to penny pinching and tweaking?):

• Purchased and installed iPartition 3 on both my Mac mini and on my MacBook.
• Connected the Mac mini to the MacBook via FireWire, and booted up the Mac mini in Target Disk mode (holding down the “T” key booting up the system)
• Started iPartition 3 on the MacBook, and allocated an extra 15 GB to my Vista partition.
• Moved my iTunes library (about 9 GB) and movie files to an external hard disk.
• Moved all of my iPhoto data out of the iPhoto library (a proprietary package format that is difficult to use with other applications), sorted and put it all into the Pictures folder.
• Created a mirror copy of the Documents and Pictures folder in my User account on the OS X Leopard partition

The iPartition step seemed to go without a hitch. However, when I rebooted the Vista partition on the Mac mini, Windows’ CHKDSK utility did inform me that the disk needed to be “checked for consistency”, and ran a full file verification.

One of the great things I’ve been able to do now that I’ve moved all of my iPhoto data out into the Pictures folder and onto an external USB 2.0-compatible hard disk, is that I can now share my photo library across the Mac OS X and Vista partitions. The same goes with my Music (iTunes) library—the Vista partition (NTFS format) cannot read Mac OS X-Journaled format, so the music library needs to be somewhere that both partitions can get to. So far, it seems that iTunes and Windows Media Player/Center seem to be happily coexisting with the same library, which is a very good thing.

This is a little trick I stumbled upon in Entourage 2008 this evening.

1. In the Inbox (or any other mail folder), select some text belonging to a message from the preview pane.
2. Type Command-R (reply to message).
3. A new message should open to reply to the original… but with only the text you selected in step 1 as “quoted” text.

Make sure that you have the “Include entire message in reply” option unchecked.

This feature is useful for only replying to the part of the message that you really want to reply to, while leaving the rest of the original text out. An interesting little trick, indeed!

Entourage,task,to do,convert,AppleScript,tool,calendar

If you’ve spent any amount of time with Outlook and then switched to Entourage as I have, you may have noticed that with Entourage 2008 out-of-the-box, it’s impossible to just drag and drop a task in the to-do list to the calendar. For people who like organizing their tasks and then creating their calendar based on that, this can be a major source of irritation, not to mention a serious obstacle to productivity.

Fortunately, there is good news! Thanks to Adam Sneller, a programmer in Santa Barbara, California, there are now four simple AppleScripts available, to let you turn any selected e-mail, calendar event, task or note in Entourage into a new e-mail, calendar event, task or note—take your pick. Gone are the days of retyping task information into the calendar!

Adam’s blog and scripts are available here:

http://www.earth2adam.com/entourage-gtd-action-scripts-4-d/

These scripts are easy to add to the Entourage menu, and keyboard shortcuts round out the package. The Macscripter site is another location to check for these kinds of useful scripts.

It’s little inventions like this that make life worthwhile. Kudos to Adam for a terrific job!