Back to the small but beautifully packaged things in life, well in the Beta. I remember way back in July last year, when someone showed me some early beta code, the one thing I was really excited by was what is called Live Preview. This means that when you have a chunk of text highlighted and you make changes to the formatting, you can see these changes happening as you are selecting the format option that you want.

This is rather hard to demonstrate in a picture but I hope that the image below shows roughly what I mean.

This is generally a very cool feature, especially for people who are visual and like to be able to see how something looks and adapt. But it actually does become a time-saving feature too, as I discovered when working on a PowerPoint presentation yesterday. If you have an area of text and you want to change the size of the font to make the text area the size of a slide, Live Preview means that you can just pull your mouse down all the font sizes and select the right one when you see the text in the size that you want. The same thing is really useful for letters, if you want the text to fill a certain size on the page, it means that you don’t have to keep guessing and adjusting to what might be the right size.

When you start looking at fonts, the time saved can be unbelievable, if you are the kind of fussy person like me who likes to spend time on getting the right font for the right document….