word

Some people still snicker when they see a coworker toting an iPad. After all, who can get any real work done on that Etch-a-Sketch on steroids?

Lots of people, actually. And as the quality and quantity of iPad apps increase, the devices inch closer to becoming workplace essentials.

Case in point: the free CloudOn program whose mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint give you the Office 2007/2010 interface when working on files stored on the Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box online storage services.

Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot Speculation continues as to … Read more

In the annals of computer history, no two keystroke combinations have done more to boost worker productivity than Ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard whatever you've selected on the screen, and Ctrl-V to paste the contents of the clipboard to wherever you've placed the cursor.

What often follows the paste is the laborious process of reformatting the pasted material to match the look of the destination document. Microsoft Word lets you apply the formatting of the destination document when you paste, but by default Ctrl-V retains the original formatting of the pasted text.

Back in 2007 I described … Read more

All those Bree Serif, Kaushan Script, and Lovers Quarrel font fans will now be able to bring into play these different scripts while working in Google Docs. The Web giant announced today that it is adding 450 new fonts and 60 new templates to its word processing program.

"Often the best way to get your point across is to present your idea in a creative, captivating way," Google software engineer Isabella Ip wrote in a company blog post. "Today, we added over 450 new fonts to Google documents to make it easier for you to add a … Read more

We love Facebook pranks as much as the next guys, but not when it's coming from an anonymous source at Best Buy. As if we needed another reason not to step foot in the big blue retailer, we read this story about a Best Buy employee that posted a phony Facebook status update on a customer's phone. The message declared, "I am gay, I'm coming out," but there's one problem: the customer is straight.… Read more

As its name suggests, Quickoffice Pro HD is a mobile office and productivity suite for use on the go. It lets you create and edit office files, and even sync them to your favorite cloud storage service.

If you're a fan of Google Docs like I am, then you've probably noticed that editing files from your mobile device can be a bit of a pain. The Google Drive (download) app (which recently slurped up Google Docs) doesn't offer a very robust menu of formatting tools, which makes workflow more complicated than it should be (especially when dealing … Read more

Bean is a free, compact, easy-to-use text editor that occupies the middle ground between bare-bones apps like TextEdit and more full-featured (and more expensive) word processors.

Bean launches quickly and uses minimal resources, while giving you access to rich features such as live word count, tabbed documents, templates for boilerplate and automatic dates, page layout settings and in-line graphics, dictionary integration, word completion, plenty of import and export options, a search panel that can handle regular expressions, and an Inspector panel for making tweaks to text, format, and spacing.

Bean can't handle some specialized tasks, like footnotes and predefined … Read more

The Flashback outbreak has been one of the largest to hit the Mac platform to date, and while some estimates claim the number of Flashback-infected OS X systems has been swiftly dropping since its peak of 600,000 systems on around April 9, others suggest this may not be the case and the infection rate remains relatively high.

This development along with several other recent malware scams in the past few years has been a wake-up call for Mac users to mind their security; however, the security of the Mac platform and even others extends beyond the computer itself.

When … Read more

Pages for iOS may not be as sophisticated as other desktop word-processing apps, but it packs plenty of punch when you just want a way to produce nice-looking documents on the go. After only a few minutes playing around with the controls, we were able to create documents with stylized text, imported images, tables, and graphs, and make formatting changes on-the-fly, all using the touch-screen keyboard. The program comes with 16 Apple-designed templates to start from, including standard letters, letters with photos, resume layouts, project reports, and many more. With Apple's keyboard dock connected, Pages performed much like a … Read more

Microsoft announced on its Office for Mac Blog today that it has made its Service Pack 2 for Office for Mac 2011 available for download. This update addresses a number of problems users have been having with Outlook, but also fixes some aspects of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The update is available via Microsoft's included Autoupdate utility, but can also be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site. The update is about 110MB in size, and after installing the version of your Office installation will be 14.2.0.

With the release of Office 2011 Microsoft replaced its old Entourage … Read more