PowerPoint 2008: Wrong behaviour when extending paragraph selection

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
November 11th, 2008 • 3:07 pm

I am forced to spend a lot of time in PowerPoint these days, and I am having so much fun. (Can you tell?)

Here’s further evidence (if needed) that Microsoft’s engineers could not design a proper text editor to save their own lives.

When it comes to text editing, some things are supposed to be universal, i.e. to work the exact same way in every application. One of these things is text selection with multiple mouse clicks.

A double click is supposed to select the entire word in which the clicking takes place. And that works fine in PowerPoint 2008:

Double-click selects word

A triple click is supposed to select the entire paragraph in which the clicking takes place. Again, this seems to work fine in PowerPoint 2008:

Triple-click selects paragraph

But now let’s try the following: triple-click on a paragraph and, without releasing the mouse button, try to extend the selection to the following paragraph by dragging the mouse pointer down.

Normally, in Mac OS X, this should cause the text editor you are using to extend the selection below the current paragraph, and to extend it paragraph by paragraph.

Instead, look at what PowerPoint 2008 does:

Triple-click-and-drag

It reverts to word-by-word selection (as opposed to paragraph-by-paragraph selection) and actually deselects the words that came before the word on which the triple-click took place!

What an idiotic program. What a bunch of incompetent programmers. What a joy it is to use this application.


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