Betalogue

In Microsoft Word, there is a myriad of inconsistencies, behaviours that don’t make sense and are simply the way they are because they have always been that way and nobody at Microsoft bothers to use his or her brains to think about whether these things still make sense today.

Take, for example, what happens when you double-click on a word in Word 2011. Double-clicking on a word is what is called “word selection”. No matter where you double-click on the word, it selects the entire word. It’s much faster and much less error-prone than having to position your cursor at the beginning of the word, to click-and-hold and then to drag your cursor to the end of the word. (And you can also select multiple words this way, by double-clicking on a word and holding the mouse button down while you continue to drag over several consecutive words. This is called “word-by-word selection”, as opposed to the default “character-by-character selection”.)

In every other OS X application, when you double-click on a word in the middle of a sentence, the application only selects that word. In Word 2011 (and every version before it), on the other hand, the application also selects the trailing space that comes after the word (if there is one, i.e. if the word is not immediately followed by a punctuation sign).

Why does Word 2011 do this? As far as I can tell, it’s because Word first came into being a long time ago, at a time when so-called “smart editing” features didn’t exist. These days, in most applications, when you double-click on a word to select it and then press Delete to delete it, the application is smart enough to also delete the extra trailing space that comes after it, so that you are not left with a situation where the two remaining words around the word that you’ve just deleted are separated by two spaces instead of one. Ditto if you cut the word with command-X.

This “smart” behaviour was introduced many years ago. Word itself introduced this feature many years ago. (If you don’t like it, you can turn it off in Word’s “Preferences” dialog box, under “Edit”, in the “Use smart cut and paste” customization options: the option is called “Adjust sentence and word spacing automatically” and it’s on by default.)

The thing is, the introduction of this very feature made the selection of the trailing space after the word irrelevant. As far as I can tell, the only reason why the original designers of Microsoft Word decided to include the trailing space with the word in word selection was in order to make it easier for writers to edit their text without having to constantly delete extra spaces. But once Word adopted the “smart” handling of word spacing, this automatic selection of the trailing space became irrelevant.

Try it: if, instead of double-clicking on a word to select it (and its trailing space) in a Word document, you select the word in question “manually” by positioning your cursor at the beginning of the word, clicking-and-holding and then dragging your cursor to the end of the word, without including the trailing space, and then you press Delete to delete the selected word, Word still deletes the extra space as well, because of the “Adjust sentence and word spacing automatically” option.

So why does word selection in Word still select the trailing space as well even today? As far as I can tell, it’s because no one at Microsoft has ever thought of using his or her brains to make the decision that, now that Word has smart handling of word spacing, the selection of the trailing space is no longer necessary.

Not only is it no longer necessary, but it is inconsistent with all other applications, and it has all kinds of undesirable side-effects. If you use word selection to select a word or a phrase in a Word document and then copy it to paste it in another application, the extra trailing space at the end will be copied and pasted along with it. Unless the destination application is an application that also has smart handling of word spacing (like another word processor), this extra space will remain.

It is the case, for example, if you use word selection to copy something in a Word document and then paste it in your web browser. You’ll always get that extra space along with it, and in many cases you’ll be forced to delete it manually in the destination application because it’s highly undesirable there.

Even within Word, the extra trailing space is highly undesirable when it comes to character-level formatting, because when you use word selection to select a word or a phrase and then apply some character-level formatting to the selection, more often than not this character-level formatting gets also applied to the trailing space, and so if, later on, you put your cursor after the trailing space to type something else, often times the new text you type will also have that character-level formatting, even though there is no visual indication that the space before it has that character-level formatting (a space in bold or italics looks just like a regular space). The worst situation is what happens with underlined text. I cannot count the times I see documents that contain underlined words where the underlining also extends to the space after the word, which is horrible from a typographic point of view. (Word has certain exceptions to this, but they don’t work all that reliably and only in limited circumstances. See this post for example.)

Does anyone at Microsoft care about all this? Apparently not. Today, in 2013, many many years after smart spacing was introduced in Word itself, word selection in Word still includes the trailing space. It is yet another indication that there is no actual thinking about real-world usage that takes place at Microsoft in the minds of the software engineers working on Microsoft Word.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, June 13th, 2013 at 10:11 am and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.