hendrikch.com - Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life

Finally.

http://home.singtel.com/iphone/

Downloading a 420MB update. I love it when I have a fast broadband connection.

I proud myself to be an advanced Windows user (and a dummy in Mac still ), but time and again I found new features in Windows or Office that I never knew. This time round is a feature in PowerPoint called Slide Master. All the years, when I wanted to adjust positions of a textbox in ALL the slides, be it the header or the body, I would have done it manually, dragging the box to the desired place. It’ll be easy if I hadn’t started typing away texts into those boxes and creating many slides. But more of than not, textbox alignment are desired only after you have lots of texts, and manually adjusting the position and alignments of textboxes in ALL the slides is simply a mundane task, depending on how many slides you have.

How to access Slide Master feature in PowerPoint 2007

To access this feature in PowerPoint 2007, go to View and then click on Slide Master. A new Ribbon tab will be displayed on the left of Home tab, appropriately called Slide Master. Here you can adjust the slide master as you wish, and when you close the Master View, the adjustment you’ve made will be applied to all the slides using that Master. You can have multiple Master in one PowerPoint slide (caveat: Only PowerPoint 2002 and above). Consider that as having multiple templates in a slide.

Now, let me bring you can a few days back in time on how I found out this “new” feature. I needed to create a PowerPoint slide a couple of days back, and since I was using my Mac at that time, I decided to try out Apple’s latest iWork ‘08. You can download their 30-days trial for free. It came with Pages (similar to Word), Numbers (you guess it, similar to Excel), and Keynote (similar to PowerPoint). The download was blazing over 600KB/sec, so it took me less than 15 minutes for that 470 MB package. After I installed them, I nose dived into Keynote to create my presentation. Now the fun begins. As I was still figuring out how to use Keynote, I had no choice but to randomly click on anything that looks like a button that I can click that has a label resembles what I am trying to do. Hey, that’s what you do when you have no idea of a new piece of software, no? This is when I was introduced to this new concept of Masters.

Masters in Keynote

Obviously, when I am back to Windows to refine my presentation (after all, this presentation will be run using a Windows machine, so I have to make sure that it runs fine in Windows. Luckily I did, as many of the fonts I used in Mac was not available in Windows, and my presentation looks awful at best), I looked out for a button that has the word “Master” in it. It was easy to guess, it’s a view, so I headed to View tab, and there you go, big button called Slide Master. If only I had known this feature long time ago, it would have saved me countless hours refining my presentation manually, and I hope that you don’t have to suffer similar fate if you need to create some presentation in the future

Last night was my full night using Mac OS X Tiger (10.4. without touching Windows Vista at all. So far, my impression of this OS is quite good. It’s solid, lots of niceties being built-in, things which I hoped would be built-into Vista. As much advanced I am in using Windows, I am a total n00b when using Mac. After I boot it up (oh yeah, the boot up to Mac OS X is super duper fast), I was left sitting there, don’t know how to use this new OS facing me. The first thing I installed was Microsoft Messenger for Mac, followed by Firefox 2 for Mac. After that, I don’t know what else will run in Mac. Frankly speaking, I didn’t know how to do basic things that I can do with “my eyes closed” in Windows, like taking screenshots, safely remove hardware, so embarassing.

So, I read a couple of “switching-to-Mac” guide on the Internet, 10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know, From Windows to OS X, Useful Keyboard Shortcuts in OS X, A Guide to OS X Software for Switchers, and The Tao of Mac. As there are many software I usually use in Windows are Windows-only, I have to find its Mac OS X-equivalent that can do the same tasks. The software guide to OS X really helps me going, from there I knew about Flip4Mac (to play WMV files in QuickTime), Adium (a wonderful and cute instant messaging application, supports popular MSN, Yahoo, GTalk until never-heard-before of Gadu-Gadu and QQ), and some other applications that I have installed.

Speaking about installation, it’s a no-brainer in OS X. A guide I read said Windows users like to complicate things, searching for installers and uninstallers, kinda true. There’s no such thing per-se in OS X. Just drag the downloaded application into Applications folder, and good you go. To remove the application, just drag the application into Trash, and it’s gone. It’s so simple I was skeptical at first, hehe…. Maybe the guide was right, Windows users like to complicate things :p How to take screenshots? I clicked on Print-Screen, then looked for Microsoft Paint equivalent. It’s not available. Now what? Later on I found out, by Cmd+Shift+3, it’ll take whole-screen-shot, and automatically save the resulting PNG onto desktop. Weird combination, but much less steps than in Windows for sure.

My Mac OS X desktop now, still quite bare.

Keyboard shortcuts are different and takes time to get used to. Instead of Ctrl, Alt, and Shift, it has , , , and Shift. Home and End are Ctrl+left-arrow and Ctrl+right-arrow respectively. To move files, instead of Shift+drag files, it’s Command+drag files. Instead of Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+V for Copy, Cut, and Paste, it’s Cmd+C, Cmd+X, and Cmd+V respectively. Different, but not that hard to get used to.

Mac OS X System Preferences Search. Note how it tries to “spotlight” the potential icon you are looking for based on your search terms

Also note how wonderful application like Adium uses the Dock to its maximum potential, showing you who messaged, how many unread messages, and that duck icon is quite animated, depending on your status, very cute indeed. Download manager shows the current download speed (200+KB/sec in the screenshot considered quite slow. At one point, I managed to hit 670KB/sec :-D) All in all, it has been a positive experience the last few days with Mac OS X, and am looking forward to using it more for my computing usage. I know I’ll still need to boot to Windows Vista once in a while to use applications that are not available for Mac OS X, notably Microsoft Money 2007 Deluxe. We’ll see how it goes