Wrastling with Microsoft

Yrs Trly is an Apple guy.
I’m told Apple Computers are the Devil incarnate; that Jesus uses a Windoze PC.
At first I was told Apple is the superior platform. Now it’s because Apple doesn’t snow me like Microsoft. I can drive Apple stuff. Microsoft lobs tons of gibberish at me that make doing anything just about impossible.
Microsoft also seems to punish my being a stroke-survivor. I had a stroke 24 years ago. It was caused by an undiagnosed heart-defect since repaired. I recovered fairly well, but lost some, like my ability to play piano and hold a tune. (Nine years of classical piano-training out the window.)
Quite a few marbles were left. I can still sling words (write), and figger out ‘pyooter hairballs. And now my wife is gone; she died over five years ago, and was my cheering-section. Some unfathomable ‘pyooter hairball would surface, and she’d make suggestions. Together we figgered things out.
I miss that, but so-far-so-good. Various hairballs have arisen, but I’ve been able to keep driving this rig.
But I avoid Microsoft. I have MS-Word and Excel, both for MAC. But only because Word has tricks my Apple word-processor won’t do. Plus I had an Excel class long ago, so got proficient in it.
Apple has similar computer applications: its word-processor is “Pages,” and its spreadsheet app is “Numbers.” Perhaps either could do the tricks I do with Word and Excel, but I’m not interested in learning either when I already do what I need with Word and Excel.
The word-processor I usually use (I’m using it now) is Apple’s “Pages.” It’s what replaced “AppleWorks,” which I guess started long ago as “ClarisWorks.”
Word is a pain! Hit a mistaken key, and you’re punished. You’re looped off to Never-Never Land — like what you spent hours typing flat disappears. And who knows where it went? Thank you Bill! (“Bill” is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.)
Microsoft seems to think sloppy keyboarding, a stroke-effect, is reason for committal to assisted living; i.e. handicaps mean yer stupid. Apple seems to think otherwise; it encourages the handicapped, and I’m only slightly handicapped. Were it not for that, marbles would be wasted.
I can still write; so some help Microsoft is. Here I am, muse boppin’ along, and ZAP! Into the ozone! Apple doesn’t do that; it’s my friend. I keep telling my Apple guru this laptop is my favorite toy.
One of the fancy-dan “tools” Word has is making labels. You can also address envelopes, but my printer won’t feed envelopes.
My mailing addresses are all “Pages” files, so what I do is copy/paste into Word’s label tool. At least my printer will feed Avery’s label-sheet, so my envelopes get labels.
What I was doing for Christmas-cards was individual labels for each address. Should I “save-as” each label?
I while ago I tried Word’s vaunted “mail-merge.” Perhaps I could get multiple labels onto a single sheet I could “save-as.”
I tried it; found I could “save-as” a single label-sheet with maybe 10 or more addresses.
Printing that reduces my time making labels to about 1/10th of what it was. That was a year ago. I cranked a few, then put everything aside until this year.
I fired up “mail-merge,” and there they were, what I did last year. One problem though. They weren’t my “Charcoal-CY” font, an Apple font I guess.
Word apparently has its own fonts, and won’t use fonts already in this machine. I wrastled some; apparently Word labels can use “Charcoal-CY” at first, but won’t reopen with Charcoal-CY. A Word default font takes over.
So fire up Word’s gigantic font-selection. Charcoal-CY isn’t in there. Anything similar? I poke around changing label fonts, and every time I do I hafta scroll Word’s gigantic font-selection from the beginning.
I don’t have all day. And every time I try a font, it gets added to my “favored fonts,” or whatever it’s called. Bigger-and-bigger it gets.
And ya gotta get your spee-glass to see the tiny font samples. Maybe some 23-year-old Microsoft techie can see that, but I can’t. (“Nursing-home for you, baby!”)
And atop that gigantic one-column font-selection, way too big for a single screen, are mysteries wrapped in conundrums, the old Microsoft waazoo. Why have they gotta lob all this garbage at me? It’s enough to make me look for a way to make labels with “Pages.”
(Bill Gates dies and enters Heaven. Saint Peter sets him up in a small cottage in the shadow of the estate of Edward John Smith, captain of RMS Titanic. Gates complains: “How come I get such a tiny cottage, yet Smith gets an estate?” “Yes, Mr. Gates,” Saint Peter says; “but the Titanic crashed only once.”)