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Mac OS X and Windows
Adding merge fields to a Word document without adding a datasource to it – and anyone working with multiple datasources, or programmatic mailmerge setup wants to do this sometime – is not at all obvious when the mail merge button is greyed out..
You can do it, unobviously via Insert->QuickParts->Field:
Choose MergeField from the list on the left, and then you can type in your merge field name.
There’s a great Q and Answer at dijkstra-path-finding-in-c-is-15x-slower-than-c-version which starts with C++ code at 2ms vs C# at 38ms; and finishes with C# at 2.8ms.
On similar lines, the solution to this riddle — why-does-net-core-2-0-perform-worse-than-net-framework-4-6-1 — has nothing to do with the framework; it results from the slower performance of 64bit code compared to 32bit.
Which just goes to confirm what you might have suspected;
VMs aren’t that slow; and
For best performance, you have to understand your VM, and your language, and your O/S, and ultimately your CPU.
This seemed to me an error and I and was on the point of raising it as a bug on the Powershell github repo:
PS> "\this".Split( [char]'\', [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).Length # >> 2
Presumably it is because [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries is coerced to a [char] and so the line is parsed as:
PS> "\this".Split( ([char]'\', [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries) ).Length
Instead of as
PS> \this".Split( (,[char]'\'), [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).Length
If the first parameter is a string not a character then it works as expected:
PS> "\this".Split( '\', [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).Length # >> 1
But the really unfortunate case is :
PS> "\this".Split( [System.IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar, [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).Length # >> 2
which results in
PS> "\this".Split( [System.IO.Path]::DirectorySeparatorChar, [StringSplitOptions]::RemoveEmptyEntries).[0] # >> $null # instead of # >> "this"
It turns out that it’s fixed in Powershell 6 Beta; or to be more precise, it doesn’t happen in PowerShell 6. What changed is that the underlying .Net framework has added new overloads to String.Split():
string[] Split(char separator, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(char separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(string separator, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(string separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)
Whereas PowerShell 5 only has these overloads available:
string[] Split(Params char[] separator) string[] Split(char[] separator, int count) string[] Split(char[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(char[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(string[] separator, System.StringSplitOptions options) string[] Split(string[] separator, int count, System.StringSplitOptions options)
And so the best-match overload that PowerShell 6 chooses is different to PowerShell 5’s best match.
Alas. I’ve been using Windows so long that now I go back to the Mac and want Ctrl-C to work. Sad, but there it is. At last I found Karabiner, which does keyboard remapping, and created a set of Karabiner rules to map the main Windows Ctrl-keystrokes to the matching ⌘-keystroke on Mac:
Okay, so Ctrl-W isn’t strictly a windows keystroke. But who can work without Ctrl-W?
{
"profiles": [
{
"complex_modifications": {
"parameters": { /* ... etc ... */ },
"README": "********************************************************************************************************",
"README": "*" COPY JUST THE ELEMENTS OF THIS "rules" array into your profiles.complex_modifications.rules array. "*",
"README": "********************************************************************************************************",
"rules": [
{
"description": "Change Control+Z to Command+Z",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "z","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "z","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+X to Command+X",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "x","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "x","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+C to Command+C",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "c","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "c","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+V to Command+V",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "v","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "v","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+N to Command+N",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "n","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "n","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+S to Command+S",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "s","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "s","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+O to Command+O",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "o","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "o","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+Y to Command+Y",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "y","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "y","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
},
{
"description": "Change Control+W to Command+W",
"manipulators": [ { "from": { "key_code": "w","modifiers": {"mandatory": ["control"],"optional": ["any"]}},"to": [{"key_code": "w","modifiers": ["command"]}],"type": "basic"}]
}
],
"README": "******************************************************************************************************",
"README": "******************************************************************************************************",
/* ... etc ... */
}
}
]
}
This approach didn’t work for me. I’m not sure what I missed.