Word X: Not sweating the simple stuff
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshApril 15th, 2003 • 12:21 am
My level of irritation with Word X is in direct proportion to the utter lack of attention paid to small, yet essential details.
A constant source of annoyance today: I (and other people) often use tables for page layout purposes. This means that our table cells can be quite big and contain many paragraphs of text. This, in turn, means that such single cells are often too big to be viewed in full in the document window.
For example, I might have a Word document that consists of a 3-cell table used to present my text in a three-column layout without using Word’s unpredictable column-formatting feature. But I cannot view a full page in my document window, which means that I cannot view the entire contents of a single cell (column) without scrolling up and down. And that’s fine.
What is not fine, however, is that, if I am at the bottom of cell (column) 1 and press tab to jump to cell (column) 2 on the right and cell 2 is empty, the cursor jumps back to the top of cell 2, as it should. But Word doesn’t automatically scroll up my document window in order to display the area where the cursor is! It stays stuck at the bottom of my table, even though my cursor is now at the top and is hidden from view.
I then have to use the cursor keys as a workaround in order to cause Word to change the focus and move back up to the beginning of the table, where my cursor is.
Even worse: I press tab at the end of a table row, in order to create a new table row and move the cursor to the beginning (first cell/column) of the row — and Word scrolls back up to the beginning of the page! Again, the cursor is in one place, and Word is in another one — for no apparent reason.
Very annoying!