Trackpad Gestures

The trackpads on Apple’s Macbook and Macbook Air laptops are generally highly rated. By default, the same area is used to move the cursor and click. Unlike Windows computers, they don’t have a left and right click to display the context menu including properties, copy, paste etc. 

Use Numbers or Excel to check your Bank Balance

Apple Numbers or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets can easily be used to check your bank balance or any other type of expenditure against income account. The spreadsheet formulae are simple, but there are some differences in how you arrive at the result. 

Password Protection of Pages and Word Documents

There are many free ways  of doing this, Apple has Keychain and there are scores of free encryption programs. A popular payed for program is 1Password.  Keychain and 1Password rely on one password to protect all your passwords and account names; in the former, data are stored in iCloud – assuming you trust it.

Placing Images – Pages and Microsoft Word compared

At our March meeting we compared ways of adding images to documents in Apple Pages and Microsoft Word.  In both programs an easy method is to first place your cursor where the image is to be placed and copy the image (e.g. out of iPhoto) and paste it (Edit > Paste) in the text.

Greeting Cards using Pages

At our February meeting Rosemary C showed us how to produce a greeting card using Paqes.  The steps are listed below.  This soon widened to include a discussion on how to obtain and edit or save the images used on the cards.

Verulam U3A Mac Group

We had our first meeting of 2015 on January 15th which was very well attended.  The next meeting will be on February 19th  at Hatfield Road Methodist Church.

Apple Pages and Numbers – our experience

We talked about word processing and spreadsheets on the Mac during the January meeting and there were mixed opinions about the relative merits of Pages/Numbers, MS Office (Word/Excel) and OpenOffice. More people seemed to like Office than Apple’s offering and Joan showed us how Open Office (free) is a worthy contender.

Time Machine

What is it?

– a way to backup and recover selected files, or everything in the event of the a computer failure.  It can include documents, photos, emails etc. and can be used to completely restore your computer to a state in the past.

Printing Labels

Names and addresses in the Contacts app can easily be used to print labels.