To Excel

Almost a year ago, yrs trly purchased a new laptop to upgrade from his old tower.
It was an Apple MacBook Pro, refurbished from the Apple-Store.
I bought it at the suggestion of an old friend, who said my old tower would never swallow a video for processing.
I was planning to upgrade anyway, and wanted portability more than anything. I couldn’t take my tower with me on trips, plus it needed 120-volt AC current.
A laptop could be battery-operated, and be portable.
‘Pyooter-technology had advanced far beyond my old tower; which was state-of-the-art when I bought it. My tower was approaching 10 years old.
Most significant was the amount of hard-drive capacity current technology was capable of. —My old tower was 60-gig; now 500-gig was considered average. One terabyte was also available; that’s 1,000 gigs.
I figured there was no way I’d ever fill a terabyte, but my 60 gigs was 60% full.
So I got 500 gigs. —It’s now almost 7% full, only 34.86 gigs.
My old machine had 2 gigs of RAM, overkill when I bought it.
Recent technology was 4 gigs of RAM.
It was suggested I’d need all that to process video.
In my humble opinion, the amount of RAM was what mattered most.
When I worked at the Mighty Mezz, I had an old Apple IMAC, purloined from a departed reporter.
The first IMACs had only 4 megs of RAM; it started shoveling into “virtual-memory” (on the hard-drive) if RAM was maxxed.
I had two applications that required lots of RAM. And I’d have to run both at the same time.
The ‘pyooter-guru upgraded my old IMAC to 60 megs of RAM. (We added 56 megs.)
With it, I could do the newspaper’s web-site, even with the ancient IMAC processor.
So now I’d upgrade to an Apple MacBook Pro, 500-gig hard-drive, with 4 gigs of RAM.
Overkill for most of what I’m doing, but able to swallow and process a video.
Shortly after my new laptop came, my friend’s husband came over to set it up; i.e. be the friendly old ‘pyooter my tower had been.
My friend’s husband is also the young techno-maven at Mac Shack, near Rochester. He’s the guy who sold me my tower.
I upgraded a while ago to OS-X, Apple’s glitzy operating-system.
I had been a holdout — using Apple’s old 9.2 operating-system, since it was much like that at the Mighty Mezz when I was there.
My tower, a G4 double-processor Motorola, had both; I could use either.
So I had been booting up in 9.2.
Until I discovered OS-X was much like 9.2.
So I started booting up in OS-X.
OS-X was not only glitzier, it was much more stable than 9.2, which occasionally crashed on me.
With OS-X I could “force-quit” a hung app, and still have a running machine. With 9.2 that hung app might require pulling the plug.
I went through various upgrades of OS-X, starting with the original preloaded on my tower.
The original OS-X seemed rather bare-bones; later versions weren’t so rudimentary.
The last version I had was 10.4, “Tiger.” I upgraded to “Leopard” (10.5), but it didn’t have “Classic-Mode.” I had to go back to “Tiger,” which did.
I still had old computer-applications I used; e.g. AppleWorks-5.0, Quark 4.1, and Word- and Excel-98.
All those applications wouldn’t work under OS-X; for that I needed “Classic-Mode,” a 9.2 resident in OS-X.
The most recent versions of OS-X, “Leopard” and on, no longer have “Classic-Mode.”
My new laptop wouldn’t either — it was preloaded with “Snow-Leopard,” 10.6.
So the idea was for my friend’s husband to make my new laptop pretty much what my old tower was.
He’s an Apple-guy, so the idea was to avoid Microsoft.
Which was okay with me, e.g. AppleWorks instead of Microsoft Word.
“Word” has too many magic keys, that punish the sloppy keyboarding of a stroke-survivor (I had a stroke October 26, 1993).
Mistypes in “Word” send you off into the netherworld, and often delete all you just typed.
AppleWorks didn’t do that. It’s just a basic word-processor.
It isn’t overloaded with useless bells and whistles that send you into the ozone.
But AppleWorks was defunct. I had upgraded some time ago to AppleWorks-6.0, which was OS-X compliant.
But 6.0 was the last version.
Apple had replaced it with new software, “Pages” as a word-processor, and “Numbers” as spreadsheet software.
My friend’s husband loaded a free “open” word-processor, “Neo-Office,” the MAC version of PC “Open-Office.”
“Pages” and “Numbers” were 30-day trial.
I used “Neo-Office” for a while, but gave up.
Its spellcheck was flaky, and with sloppy keyboarding I depend on it.
I paid the fee to make “Pages” and “Numbers” permanent, and I switched to “Pages;” this document is in “Pages.”
“Pages” is my default word-processor.
There are minor things I don’t like about it, but they can be easily dealt with.
It also flags mistypes as I go along; even AppleWorks didn’t do that.
I still have AppleWorks 6.0; there are too many files in it.
Now I had the spreadsheet problem.
I had a couple basic spreadsheets in my old Excel-98, which “Numbers” translated.
No manual, of course. The old waazoo. Try this and see what happens.......
Meanwhile I purchased Word and Excel for MAC, along with PowerPoint (all parts of a Microsoft package).
Okay, that solves the problem of people always e-mailing me PowerPoint attachments.
I never got around to a PowerPoint reader.
But “Numbers” seemed drivable, so I stuck with it.
I didn’t switch back to Excel.
“Word” is not default, but it would do tricks other word-processors won’t, like change letter-case, and sort.
The other day I decided to print my “Numbers” spreadsheets for my income-taxes — that’s what they are.
With Excel you can reduce the size of the entire spreadsheet so it can fit on a couple pages; i.e. reduce the spreadsheet-width to be less than 11 inches “landscape.”
I can’t do that with “Numbers” that I can see.
Maybe I can reduce the print-size at my printer, but not in the “Numbers” software.
I end up with massive spreadsheets that hafta be taped together; four pages deep by three pages wide for my tax-deductions, and three by two for income.
What a pain!
So back to Excel; which I more-or-less know already.
But Excel wouldn’t translate my already-established “Numbers” spreadsheets for 2011.
“You might hafta ‘export,’” my wife said.
Numbers would export for Excel, so that’s what I did.
A 2011 income-tax deductions spreadsheet was thereby set up in Excel, and now it’s back to playing-by-ear with Excel — no manual there either. (Excel-for-MAC 2008 is is different than Excel-98.)

• “‘Pyooter” is computer.
• The “Mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired five years ago. Best job I ever had. (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.)
• The “‘pyooter-guru” was the technical administrator at the Messenger newspaper. I called him “‘pyooter-guru.”
• “App” is computer software application.
• I guess “open” means free.
• A “PC” is a personal-computer, using the Microsoft Windows operating-system. “MAC” is the Apple Macintosh computer, the competition. (MAC users are always saying a PC is inferior. —Well, maybe.)
• RE: “Change letter-case and sort........” —Word can change the letters of text to all lower-case, or all capitals, etc. “Sorting” might be alphabetically. So far, Word is the only word-processor I’ve came across that can do these.
• “Landscape” is just that; greatest length side-to-side, not top-to-bottom. A document printed “landscape” is oriented so the text goes across the 11-inch measurement of a standard 8&1/2 by 11-inch piece of typing paper.
• My wife of 43 years is “Linda.” She retired as a computer-programer.