Sleeping Floppies -- Rich Wolfson <72467.617@compuserve.com>, author of The PowerBook Companion, passes on this helpful PowerBook hint. Apple tells you to shut down the PowerBook 100 before attaching the external floppy drive. The reason for this is not because of electrical danger, but because even though the driver for the floppy drive loads from ROM, the PowerBook 100 sets a bit at startup that indicates whether or not a floppy drive is attached. If you boot without the floppy drive attached, that bit thinks there is no floppy drive, and attaching the floppy drive after the fact won't work. So, follow this procedure. Shut down the PowerBook, attach the floppy drive, boot the PowerBook again, and when it wakes up, put it back to sleep. You can now safely remove the floppy drive, and when you want to use the floppy drive again, assuming you haven't rebooted, you can put the PowerBook to sleep and attach the floppy again. The Duos are even neater; you can attach the floppy at any time to a sleeping Duo because it has the floppy driver in ROM and also includes special docking features that allow you to attach a floppy drive (via the floppy adapter or MiniDock) when the Duo is asleep. Never attach an external floppy to any PowerBook while it is awake!
Mysteriously Moving Margins in Word
In Microsoft Word 2008 (and older versions), if you put your cursor in a paragraph and then move a tab or indent marker in the ruler, the change applies to just that paragraph. If your markers are closely spaced, you may have trouble grabbing the right one, and inadvertently work with tabs when you want to work with indents, or vice-versa. The solution is to hover your mouse over the marker until a yellow tooltip confirms which element you're about to drag.
I recently came to appreciate the importance of waiting for those tooltips: a document mysteriously reset its margins several times while I was under deadline pressure, causing a variety of problems. After several hours of puzzlement, I had my "doh!" moment: I had been dragging a margin marker when I thought I was dragging an indent marker.
When it comes to moving markers in the Word ruler, the moral of the story is always to hover, read, and only then drag.
Written by
Tonya Engst
Published in TidBITS 173.
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