Word 2008: Irritating flickering of table selection control

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
April 24th, 2008 • 1:33 pm

Speaking of editing text in tables in Word, like previous versions of the application, Word 2008 suffers from a really irritating behaviour when you are typing text in a table cell in Print Layout View.

When in Print Layout View, as soon as you place your insertion point anywhere inside a table, Word displays this small proxy icon in the top-left corner of the table:

Table selection control

This little control is meant to be used for selecting the table and moving it around on the page.

The trouble is that, as soon as you start typing text inside a table cell, this control starts constantly flickering on and off. It’s a purely visual glitch and has no impact on the usability of the Print Layout View or the control itself (it stops flickering when you stop typing), but I find this flickering highly irritating and distracting.

And it serves as a constant reminder that Microsoft is unable to produce quality software with enough polish to qualify as real Mac OS X software.

Sure, there are many more important bugs to fix first. But the trouble with Microsoft is that there are also hundreds of such less important bugs, and Microsoft’s engineers simply never get around to fixing them—which means that we have to live with them for years, and cannot help but feel that Microsoft will never be able to achieve high enough levels of quality in their products.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.