A mini-tutorial for some MAC users
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I just wrote a free online mini-tutorial for those who want to quickly learn how to use Keynote, a MAC application for creation of slide shows. The link to this short guide is:

http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/keynote.html

Feel free to share it with others.

Ludwig, this question is off topic from your opening post, but your post is certainly an invitation for something I’ve been wanting to ask for a few weeks now.  Hope you don’t mind.

I’ve been working with spreadsheets these days and have this obnoxious problem that I can’t figure out.
I import Excel spreadsheets from folks using Windows - I can open and work with them on my MacBook {Mac OS X (10.5.8)} using Mac’s “Numbers ’08” (1.0.3) program.  For the most part it works great.  But every so often in the middle of entries it will change the formatting: font style, size, even changing the color (graying the 100% black).

Some of it has to do with cutting and pasting from other sheets, but it will happen when I’m simply entering a series of numbers.  It quite bizarre, even though I’ve formatted the whole sheet suddenly a couple cells will have altered styles, then just as suddenly it’s back to my original page format.  I’ve tried looking through ‘preferences’ and don’t spot anything useful.  Fortunately, it’s only an irritation since it’s easy enough to fix and everything else has been working fine, including Window’s folks being able to open and work with the files I return - but it sure is an irritant for a formatting freak like me. 

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

citizenschallenge.pm - 04 January 2012 08:30 AM

Ludwig, this question is off topic from your opening post, but your post is certainly an invitation for something I’ve been wanting to ask for a few weeks now.  Hope you don’t mind.

I’ve been working with spreadsheets these days and have this obnoxious problem that I can’t figure out.
I import Excel spreadsheets from folks using Windows - I can open and work with them on my MacBook {Mac OS X (10.5.8)} using Mac’s “Numbers ’08” (1.0.3) program.  For the most part it works great.  But every so often in the middle of entries it will change the formatting: font style, size, even changing the color (graying the 100% black).

Some of it has to do with cutting and pasting from other sheets, but it will happen when I’m simply entering a series of numbers.  It quite bizarre, even though I’ve formatted the whole sheet suddenly a couple cells will have altered styles, then just as suddenly it’s back to my original page format.  I’ve tried looking through ‘preferences’ and don’t spot anything useful.  Fortunately, it’s only an irritation since it’s easy enough to fix and everything else has been working fine, including Window’s folks being able to open and work with the files I return - but it sure is an irritant for a formatting freak like me. 

Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?

The same happens, as I learned from others, when a Power Point file is opened in Keynote, or when a Keynote file is exported as the Power Point document. I have no idea how to prevent this.

Have a good day,

Ludwik Kowalski

Ludwik thanks for taking the time to reply.

Fortunately, the important stuff is working, this thing is only an irritant, so I will learn to adapt.
Although I’ve found out that the documents I return do need some formatting readjustments back at the Windows side, but again nothing too serious.  Guess they have also adapted.