keyboard shortcuts

Who still uses Wordperfect?

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , ,
Who still uses Wordperfect?

I had an odd question come up the other day: Who still uses Wordperfect? It’s a fair question. Wordperfect, as you may know, is still very much in production. Corel releases new versions every year or two. It’s the #2 word processor in the market, still. Someone is still using it, then.

Wordperfect is a software classic, especially the old version 5.1 that ran under DOS. For a time, Wordperfect 5.1 was one of the two most famous programs for IBM compatible PCs. The other was Lotus 1-2-3.

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Gary Kildall’s death investigation

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , ,
Gary Kildall’s death investigation

Gary Kildall’s death investigation, or the seeming lack thereof, has taken on mythical proportions. Gary Kildall’s story seems to have that effect on people.

While Gary Kildall died under unclear circumstances, his death was less unusual than early accounts made it seem. That’s why the investigation seemed to fizzle out with less fanfare than it deserved.

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Lenovo and Best Buy team up for a $149 laptop for 2015

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cheap laptops are nothing new this time of year–they’ve been practically a holiday tradition since 2002 when Sotec released a decent laptop for $900, which was jaw-droppingly low for the time–but this year, Best Buy is selling a Lenovo Ideapad 100s for $149.99, which, while not jaw-droppingly low given the number of $199 laptops that were available last year, is still the cheapest name-brand laptop I’ve seen. Note: Best Buy has since raised the price to $199, but Ebay has limited stock of the same item for $129.

I’ve seen some reviews, but there is one thing I haven’t seen anyone bring up yet: This is a netbook in every way, except I think we’re supposed to call them cloudbooks now. So keep that in mind. The machine is probably worth $149.99, but it made some compromises to reach that price point.

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How to justify text in Publisher 2013

Dave Farquhar Office, Software , ,

I couldn’t figure out how to justify text in Publisher 2013, but I finally found the way. Here’s how.

I did some layout in Publisher 2013 after having not done page layout in a decade or more, and Publisher 2013’s interface confused me a bit. I finally found two ways to justify text.

The fast, easy way: Highlight the paragraph you want and press CTRL-J. Done. I love keyboard shortcuts. Justify starts with “j,” so that makes the keyboard shortcut pretty easy to remember.

The harder, slower way: In the paragraph tab, click the down arrow in the lower right corner. In the “Indents and Spacing” tab, there’s a dropdown box called “Alignment.” Select “Justified,” then click “OK.” Scout’s honor, I looked past that option at least 17 times.

Oddly enough, once I used full justification, then I got a little icon in the paragraph section of the ribbon for that, but I’m 100% certain that option wasn’t there before.

Pro tip: If you’re going to justify text, make sure you enable hyphenation. Click inside the text box, then click “Format” under “Text Box Tools” under the ribbon. Justified text looks much better when hyphenation is on. Hyphens reduce the number of spaces the computer has to insert. Fewer spaces mean fewer “rivers” in the text, and that makes for a better-looking page. Here’s more on hyphenation if you’re curious.

The missing Lenovo Thinkpad scroll lock key

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,
The missing Lenovo Thinkpad scroll lock key

One of my coworkers accidentally enabled scroll lock on a Lenovo Thinkpad L440 the other day, which is bad news when you do it accidentally and can’t find the missing Thinkpad scroll lock key. Read more

So I’m not the only one ditching Microsoft Office

Dave Farquhar Software , , , ,

Rick Broida wrote a fairly harsh piece on Cnet about why he’s ditching Microsoft Office. Our reasons differ, and while I agree with all of his reasons he may not agree with all of mine. That’s OK.

I stuck with Office 2003 because its user interface is familiar and makes sense. By using the program, you learn the keyboard shortcuts from the menu and can graduate from casual user to power user relatively quickly. That went away in Office 2007, so I never moved on. Office 2003 was the best version Microsoft ever made, but it loses security updates next month, so it’s the end of the road.

Fortunately, Libre Office has a traditional user interface and most of the same keyboard shortcuts. If you don’t use mail merge, it’s a capable replacement, and it’s free and actively maintained. It’s not as fast as Office 2003 was, but neither is anything Microsoft has made since.

Now, in corporate environments, with a recent version of Office and Sharepoint you can do some really nifty things, like automatically building Powerpoint presentations from Excel spreadsheets created by different people. You could probably approximate the same thing with other software, but what I saw a Sharepoint-literate colleague build this week with MS Office was very impressive.

But I don’t need that at home, and I don’t want to pay $100 per year for the rest of my life to use a program that I tolerate at best, so I’ll save my money and move to Libre Office.

A tool for learning Windows and Office keyboard shortcuts

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Sometimes my coworkers will watch me write, because they like a freak show. I guess they’ve never seen someone who uses the mouse as little as I do. If I know a keyboard shortcut, I use it. It’s faster, I say, and they agree I have a point.

This morning I found a tool called Keyrocket, via the Raymond.cc blog, for learning Windows and Office keyboard shortcuts. Think of it as a helpful, non-annoying, non-evil Office Assistant. Read more

An easy way to change your power plans in Vista and Windows 7

Dave Farquhar Saving money, Windows , , , ,

If you need to change power plans to manage your computer’s power usage, here’s the easiest way to do it without fumbling around in control panel. This works in either Windows 7 or Vista.
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More help is on the way for high Firefox memory usage

Dave Farquhar Software , , ,

After years of workarounds, and even sometimes denying there was a problem, Mozilla has identified a fix for Firefox’s sometimes out-of-control memory usage.

The culprit appears to be the Javascript engine, which probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
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A better, faster Firefox for Windows

Dave Farquhar Software , , , , , ,

Compiling Firefox for modern-ish (Pentium 4 and newer) CPUs is relatively common on Linux, and presumably on Mac OS X also, but not for Windows. On Windows, Firefox assumes you have a first-generation Pentium CPU, since that’s the slowest CPU that will boot Windows XP.

Enter Pale Moon.Pale Moon is compiled to use the instruction set in newer Pentium and Athlon 64 CPUs. In layman’s terms, this results in about a 25% increase in performance, which is significant.

Also significant is that the current version is based on 3.6.3 of Firefox, before Firefox broke Farmville, people started laying eggs, and they started breaking Firefox to keep Farmville working.

I couldn’t care less about Farmville and other stupid Facebook games; I just want Google Maps to be fast.

And in my quick tests, Pale Moon is fast. It loads faster than the standard Firefox build. It renders complex pages like Google Maps faster.

I’m not ready to make it my default browser yet, but so far I like what I see. It at least narrows the performance gap with Chrome, while retaining the user interface and keyboard shortcuts I’ve been using since those pre-release versions of Netscape I was using in 1994.

Experimental, optimized Firefox builds have come and gone over the years. Hopefully this one sticks around a while.