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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | FEBRUARY 2026 17 By Steve Beno There's an app available for free to all Apple users that I never considered having on my phone. When it comes to word processing and spreadsheet apps, Microsoft leads the pack. So much so that competitive apps are designed to include the same file formats as Word and Excel — .docx and .xlsx. I started my custom electronics business in 1969. It didn't really get going until 1975. For a few years I operated alone. Allow me to reminisce. What essentially put me in real business started with a cold call to a construction site. The developer asked me if I knew anything about intercoms. I didn't, but I said I did. His current installer made some installation errors which I easily fixed. All of a sudden, I become his intercom and TV cable installer, working at 20 homes in Bel Air and 20 more in Westlake Village. I still fondly remember working alone in the blazing hot summer sun, exhausting myself drilling holes and pulling wire. It may seem crazy to you, but that's the best I've ever felt as a working stiff. I wonder if my penchant for riding my bike up steep hills is just an effort to reproduce that feeling. Anyway, I soon hired Joe Hayes, without a doubt the world's best employee. It took a year for Joe to tell me it was the first job he had drug-free (thanks to Narcotics Anonymous). Soon after, I put him in charge of hiring and he brought on almost all NA people. In the early days, all my accounting was with pencil and paper. But in the early 1980s, I bought an Apple IIe. I used a spreadsheet program (perhaps VisiCalc) for my accounting and even wrote a program to calculate payroll. When I replaced the Apple with an IBM running an Intel 80286 processor, I couldn't use the same program. That's when I switched to Excel (and Word). I've been a faithful Microsoft Office user ever since. Even when I abandoned Windows computers for Mac. (Yes, there is Office for Mac.) I tried Apple's Pages and Numbers. I was probably too steeped in my Office habits to switch, even though the Apple programs are free, and I had to pay for Office (still do). There are other free Word/Excel type programs available for download – Google Sheets and Docs and OpenOffice Writer and Calc are excellent examples. Let's put aside my insistence on paying for Office in the face of all these free programs. That's just the way it is for me. But, lo and behold, I did find a great use for one particular free program — Apple Pages. Not on my desktop Mac or my iPad (did I tell you I gave up my laptop for an iPad?), but on my phone. This is how it came about. As it happens, we have a caregiver who comes to the house twice a week. I could, of course, write out a note to her. But I prefer to write the note first thing in the morning from the comfort of my bed. I have no doubt, there are many ways to achieve the same result, but I chose Pages. (Google must have the same thing for Android users.) I downloaded it from the App Store. I open Pages on my phone and write the note. So, here's the caveat. The only way this works is if you can access your printer from your phone. I think the days of connecting a cable from your computer to your printer are mostly behind us. Most printers are Wi-Fi enabled. That means you access them over your network. In my case, my printer is connected to my network via an Ethernet cable. But a Wi-Fi connection works just as well. So, having created the note on my phone using Pages, including selecting font and size, I print the note from my phone. This whole process takes a minute. It's quick and easy thanks to a pretty powerful, free word processing app right on my phone. If you use an app you'd like to share with others, let me know at steve.benoff@verizon.net. THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT! Apple's Pages — A Free Word Processing App In Your Hands

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