Dorchester — May 8th 2018
David P showed us a very neat way to create coloured/patterned paper in Pages. Zooming out to see the whole page, David filled it with a rectangular shape. He then demonstrated the various fill options available in Pages ending with a pleasant gradient fill, and pointed out that images can also be included. Reducing the opacity to avoid a dominant paper colour, he went to the drop down menu ‘Arrange > Section Masters > Move Object to Section Master’. Each new page will now use the same page colouring. Turning to special characters, David ran through how to call these up. Holding down a key reveals the related accented options. Useful shortcuts include alt+2 for Euro sign €, alt+3 for the hash #. The Character Viewer menu is accessed by pressing Ctrl + Cmd + Space, this includes emojis and all other character variants. To set up the small access icon in the menu bar, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard, tick Show Keyboard and Emoji. Foreign languages are available by clicking on Input Sources and the + sign below the lefthand column. In the keyboard viewer mode David showed the options available by pressing alt and alt + shift keys. He moved on to explain some of the differences he has found as a long term Excel User trying to use Numbers. For example trying to copy cells by dragging the bottom right corner of the cell in Excel to be copied whereas in Numbers having selected the cell you have to move to centre bottom of the cell when a yellow marker reveals to show from where to drag. There are significant differences in how to achieve the same ends and in many ways they are targeting different users. It was clear in the the discussion that whilst using Pages in lieu of Word has many advantages the switch from Excel to Numbers is more of a struggle for longterm Excel users.
John M followed up on his talk about Capto with a recommendation from Euan that using Capto, you can make a screen recording of activities on an IOS device by connecting its lightning port to the Mac. For his demo, John had chosen to record a movie running on his iPhone and was surprised at how jerky the process seemed although the resultant screen movie was fine. Mick explained that whilst the full data of what was being copied by Capto/QuickTime was being recorded the system could not keep up with displaying smoothly on the screen — whereas on playback the file was being played direct from memory. John also showed how to use the similar ability to record a screen-movie of an IOS device using QuickTime. Whether Capto has any benefit over QuickTime was left open, Euan will comment at the next meeting.
