Repro, Man Written communication is amazingly difficult. Even when you’re aware of some of the pitfalls, as I was when I wrote my last post about the disk full save error in Word, it’s still all too easy say something that...

Mac Office 2004 Launched Since Mac Office 2004 is available in stores, we've announced that it's available. For those of you who follow Mac news sources, you already know this. But, Joe Wilcox, over at Jupiter Research, posted a nice article about Using...

Anatomy of a Software Bug Chris Mason is the person who hired me to work at Microsoft. By the time he hired me, he’d already spent a great deal of time looking into the issue of general software quality, and had written a memo...

More on Line Breaks Pierre Igot took my little text-wrapping gaffe from the other day, and proceeded to turn it into what he ostensibly called “ constructive criticism ” as to why people might want to use manual line breaks...

Do You Remember So, I blogged about life in Mac BU, and Scoble picked up on it. It’s always interesting when this happens, because some of the comments from Scoble’s readers can be a bit amusing. For example, Robert noted...

Life in Whoville There are some questions that I just hate being asked. About six months after our first child was born, people would ask me if my life had returned to normal. How on earth am I supposed to know? “Normal”...

Word, Styles and Structure In a couple of posts, I’ve talked about thinking in terms of document structure vs. thinking in terms of document formatting when using Word’s styles. It occurs to me that it may not be clear...

Text-Wrapping Breaks in Mac Word Update: You can follow the steps in this post, or, as a reader pointed out, you can simply use <shift>-<return>. I’ll leave this post here, though, as an example of how to define an...

Doing it with Styles I blogged earlier about one of the more subtle problems we created when we decided to allow paragraph styles to take on character formatting—a decision made very early in Word’s history. In that post...

Word and Pre-Printed Letterhead Well, comments to my recent posts are generating more topics for me to discuss. Paul Berkowitz is one of our Mac Word MVPs, and he has a couple of items he’d like me to talk about. Before I do, though...

Unintended Consequences In the comments to my last post, AC takes me to task for what is arguably some strange behavior in Word compared to the way other word processors behave. Rather than just reply to AC in the comments to my previous...