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ie8 fix

The fast, free way to clean up text in MS Word

There's nothing easy about reformatting text in a Microsoft Word document. You can use the Format Painter to apply the formatting of one paragraph to others with a single click, and Word's Find and Replace features let you remove unwanted characters (or strings of characters), but these tools make their changes one at a time and often require additional cleanup.

I wish I had discovered Greg Maxey's free Clean Up Text add-on for Word years ago. The retired U.S. Navy submarine ordnance officer and former Microsoft Word MVP has created a Word DOT template that removes … Read more

Report: RIM unveiling BlackBerry tablet next week

The much-discussed BlackBerry tablet may finally come to fruition as soon as next week.

It's been talked about for months, but Research In Motion has yet to acknowledge that such a device exists. But today The Wall Street Journal reported that the Canadian smartphone maker may reveal its own iPad-like tablet at its developer conference in San Francisco, which starts Monday.

The Journal's unnamed sources say the device is not ready for shipping to customers, but will by sometime during the fourth quarter of this year.

The BlackBerry tablet--sometimes referred to as the "BlackPad" since RIM … Read more

Transferring MS Word AutoCorrect entries

Back in May 2008, I described a macro that made it easy to copy custom AutoCorrect entries from a version of Microsoft Word on one PC to a Word installation on another machine. Unfortunately, the macro, written by Microsoft MVP Dave Rado, is no longer available.

I take no pleasure in criticizing Microsoft's inability to meet the needs of its customers, but some of us have been using Word for close to 20 years. Shouldn't we be able to transfer our handcrafted AutoCorrect entries and other customizations between PCs without having to drag system files between folders that … Read more

Secrets of Apple's customer success

Hardware manufacturers liberally take cues from Apple products, so why not its approach to customers?

For the seventh straight year, Apple has topped its competitors in the PC industry in the University of Michigan's American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), achieving a score of 86 out of 100. Its Apple's highest ranking since the annual survey began in 1995.

But the real story is how much further ahead of its peers Apple is in this area: most of the rest of the field (Acer, Dell, HP, and others) is tied with a score of 77, while HP's Compaq … Read more

Best Buy retreats from iPad cannibalization claim

It turns out that Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn may have been exaggerating a bit when he said the iPad was cutting into notebook sales at Best Buy by "as much as 50 percent."

That one quote was buried in a Wall Street Journal article from earlier this week, but it has received a lot of attention because, well, if true, that's astounding. Now Best Buy has been forced to put out a kinda-sorta correction saying he might have been overstating things. He comes short of saying he was misquoted, but he certainly implies that in a … Read more

Report: Hewlett-Packard close to picking CEO

Sometime in the next week we could know who the next chief executive of Hewlett-Packard will be.

Since parting ways with Mark Hurd a little over a month ago, HP's board of directors is said to have narrowed the field of candidates, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported Friday citing "a person familiar with the matter."

The list is reportedly at five, and each runs one of HP's major business divisions: Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of the printing business; Todd Bradley, executive vice president of the PC and mobile device business; Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the … Read more

Hurd makes debut on Oracle's earnings call

Mark Hurd made his debut on Oracle's fiscal first-quarter earnings call today. And though he didn't directly address his former employer or the drama surrounding his departure, he delicately danced around the topic.

After Oracle CEO Larry Ellison introduced his new co-president, Hurd took what can be seen as some pointed swipes at Hewlett-Packard, the company that dismissed him as CEO following an expense-reporting and sexual-harassment-claim scandal.

"Over the past 25 years I've competed against and partnered with Oracle," Hurd said. "Oracle has amassed an enviable portfolio of technology...I don't believe there … Read more

Return 'print on one page' to Word 2010

A reader named Teresa C. contacted me yesterday to ask what happened to the "shrink to fit on one page" option in Microsoft Word 2010's Print Preview window. This useful feature is one of several that Microsoft chose to hide in an attempt to "simplify" the Word 2010 interface.

You can get fast access to Word 2010's option to fit a document on a single printed page (or at least attempt to) by adding this function to the Quick Access Toolbar. Click File > Options > Quick Access Toolbar to open the Customize the … Read more