Barkings! | The Small Dog Apple Blog

Pages is one of those apps that really filled a void in my world. Word was slow and cumbersome (and pre-version 2008 for Mac, not very pretty) and AppleWorks never transitioned into the vibrant OS X Cocoa world.

While I know the application pretty darn well by this point, I’m always excited when I learn something new. Case in point: the automatically-populating Table of Contents feature.

If you’re writing a paper that needs a Table of Contents, there’s no reason to do it manually. When done correctly, the TOC will display your Heading styles and apply a page number to them, and then update on the fly while you’re making changes. If you haven’t used it before, you should—but there are some initially perplexing things about the formatting, so here are some tips:

• Heading styles are found in the Styles Drawer, the window that appears to the right or left of the document you’re working on. (Note: if you don’t see it, click the View icon at the top of your document and select Show Styles Drawer.)
  
  
• Each page of your document should be its own Section; select Section Break in the Insert menu to break out each page.
  
  
• Once you have broken out your pages into Sections, your TOC should show each Heading (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) with an assigned page.
  
  
• To edit what is shown in the TOC, click on the Documents section of the Inspector, and select TOC. There, you can check or uncheck any number of options to show.
  
  
• The individual Section preferences are found in the Layout section of the Inspector. This is where you can designate your pagination.
  
  
• You can control your pagination by selecting either “Continue from previous section” or “Start at: [put your page number here]” under Section in the Layout part of the Inspector.
  
  
• Important: If you want to have your document start at ‘1’ after the TOC, you need to select “Continue…” on both the cover page (if you have one) and the TOC and select “Start at: 1” on the first actual page of your document.
  
  
• The font, font size, line spacing, etc. are all editable in the TOC using the Text section of the Inspector. And even though they are linked, you can make your page numbers a different size than the rest of the text in the TOC.

Anyone else out there a Pages fangirl or fanboy? Send us your comments!

There were a couple of notable mentions of the reliability and lifetime low cost of administering Apple computers this week.

First, Consumer Reports published the latest results of its tech support survey. Apple came out on top of the charts for both desktops and laptops. The report was based on feedback from over 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with problem solving, hold time, phone staff and online support. In notebooks, Apple scored 86 points while the second place company (Lenovo), only had 63 points. That’s an impressive margin of 23 points. Apple’s desktops rating was 87 total points, far exceeding second-place Dell with just 55 points.

Second, CIO (a magazine for chief information officers) reported that “Macs in the enterprise aren’t just cheaper to manage—they’re a lot cheaper.” That comes from a survey of 260 IT administrators in large U.S. companies with both Macs and PCs who are involved in some degree with IT cost calculations. Enterprise Desktop Alliance members include Centrify, Absolute Software, Group Logic, Web Help Desk, and most recently IBM.
released by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

The report went on to say that 65 percent of respondents said it costs less to troubleshoot Macs than PCs, 19 percent said they spent the same on both computers, and only 16 percent said they spent less to manage PCs than Macs.

With Macs dominating in almost every cost category, why would 16 percent claim they spent less troubleshooting PCs? “It might be an [issue] of expertise of the IT staff,” says Tom Cromlin, spokesperson for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. “They’re probably more comfortable troubleshooting PCs.”

Click here to read the entire report from CIO. At Small Dog, we’ve long said that Macs are less expensive to administer than PCs. Glad to see yet another report confirming this.

Small Dog offers data transfer services from any previous computer, including machines running older versions of Mac OS (even the classic Mac OS) and most any flavor of Windows. Last week I completed a tricky transfer from an iBook G3 that resulted in a MacBook Pro that booted to the Setup Assistant no matter how many times the assistant was completed. I was shocked by this, having never seen anything like it before.

The first step I took was to create a throw-away user account with the Setup Assistant. After completing the assistant, I went into the Accounts preference pane and selected Automatic login to this new account. A restart revealed this trick didn’t work—it seemed too easy to be a fix, anyway.

I restarted into single user mode by holding down Command-S immediately after the startup chime and removed the .AppleSetupDone file from /var/db. I knew that I’d have to create yet another throw-away account, but after a restart, the problem persisted.

At this point I chose to bomb the problem by reinstalling the operating system from the system disks that came with the new machine. I chose the Archive and Install option, which is nondestructive in that user files and applications are unaffected; only the core system files are replaced with this option. The bombs weren’t big enough.

At a loss, I resigned to wipe the machine clean and re-migrate the user’s data from the iBook. The faithful old hard drive did complain a bit when I put it into Target Disk mode and began the migration, but it held out through the entire transfer. I chose to migrate everything from the iBook user data, preferences and applications. I rebooted afterwards only to see the same behavior. Defeated and worried that the iBook hard drive wouldn’t survive another migration, I backed up the new MacBook Pro and did an Erase and Install.

This time I opted only to transfer the user account from the backup, not any system files, preferences or settings. Thankfully, the computer booted properly into the user account, but our customer had to reinstall some of his applications from the original disks.

After all that, I honestly can’t say what was causing the issue. Both the customer and I are happy with the results, though it bugs me that I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. Tech Tails readers will certainly be the first to hear the solution if I find one down the road!

We’re broadcasting our very first live Tech Tails TV show tomorrow at 5:00 PM EST on our Ustream.com channel. Rebecca and Matt will be hosting and taking Mac, iPod and even iPhone tech questions via Twitter and also via email.

If you want to send questions in via Twitter, simply post your question and reference @hellosmalldog so we see you’ve posted. Or, simply send your questions to matt@smalldog.com, and Rebecca is rebeccak@smalldog.com.

Tune your browsers to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tech-tails-tv tomorrow at 5:00 PM EST to watch live. We’ll record the show so you can watch it on our Ustream channel, YouTube, or our blog for viewing at any time.