I do love my new Mac but sometimes the stuff I don’t know about it makes my head feel like it’s going to explode. In an ill considered moment of frugality I had iWork installed instead of Word. At my first one-to-one at the Apple Store I was tutored by a smart guy who I swear was about fourteen years old on how to use iWork. The first problem I had was the folder/file thing. When I had a real filing cabinet I’d put the folders into the files – but in computer world you put files into the folders. I’ve never gotten a handle on this. You know how the animals’ eyes turned into little X’s in Fantastic Mr. Fox? That’s what happened to mine during this file/folder debate with the smart guy. But after thirty minutes of appearing as a brain dead hysteric, I suddenly got the upper hand with paragraphs. We were formatting manuscript pages and I said I needed paragraphs, which appeared to be a slightly foreign concept to him, but finally he seemed to figure it out and said “Okay, you hit the tab when you want a new paragraph.”  I said, “I never hit tab for paragraph, I hit enter. And I also would like my page numbers to start on page 2, not the first page.” He had to look it up in the manual for Apple trainers.  I don’t have many moments of technological triumph so I gloated about this for days.

For those of you in the same boat check out my friend Rob Daly’s new website: http://meetyourmac.com/  Every couple of days he offers tips about your Mac. He also does private consultations and remote screen sharing (at a dollar per minute). The screen sharing teaching is pretty terrific and a good deal too – a lot of questions can be answered in minutes. He showed me how it worked and I decided to do a Mac Party for him so he can show my friends. If you live in L.A. and are interested in coming (probably late February) you can email him at RD11@mac.com  or me at B.Abercrombie@verizon.net.