Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Never Trust Microsoft Products On Mac OS X

Monday, August 26th, 2013

In Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac OS X, if you open a “Find” dialog, and if it has focus, it will capture cmd-S (the universal “Save” command) and cause it to toggle the “sounds like” option in advanced find options. It will sort of capture cmd-W (the universal “close Window,” which will close the Find dialog). It will not capture cmd-Q (the universal “Quit”), which will quit the program and close all its windows, assuming your document has been saved.

Which you thought you’d been doing by hitting cmd-S. And then you wonder why your search results were so weird.

Thanks again, Mac BU!

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Don’t bother with symlinks in Windows 7

Sunday, November 14th, 2010

Yes, in theory, Windows has rocketed into the 21st century with symbolic links. However, you can’t make them in Windows 7 unless you’re an Administrator, or unless you manage to give yourself “SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege.”

Giving yourself this privilege is possible with Professional/Ultimate versions of Windows, but not Home Premium, via secpol.msc, which just doesn’t exist (and can’t be downloaded). (Funny, I don’t recall the comparison chart having a checkbox for “can actually use computer” that was missing from Home Premium.)

If you try to set this for yourself, don’t bother trying to use C# or PowerShell. You’ll need to manually wrap the unmanaged C++ advapi32 APIs, and pass all kinds of structs and pointers back and forth.

In the end, just give up on whatever it was you wanted to use symlinks for.

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