It has also, somewhat predictably, prompted Microsoft’s Rick Schaut to post a response of sorts on his own blog. (Rick Schaut does not respond directly to my post. Even though he does not say it, he responds to John Gruber’s posting of a link to my post. He’d be very happy and very silent if John Gruber never posted links to my posts.)

I frankly have better things to do than try and address Rick Schaut’s post item by item. It’s Sunday, the sun is shining, we have guests coming for supper, and simply thinking about companies like Microsoft and Adobe these days makes my stomach all tensed up. I just don’t need the aggravation.

That said, if you are interested in getting a sense of how warped the minds of the people behind the design and engineering of Microsoft’s products for the Mac are, his post is a fairly insightful read. In all honesty, most of the time, I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

My post was about very simple things, such as the fact that Word is incapable of displaying the current character style and the current paragraph style at the same time. Or that Word is incapable of displaying the current styles of a mixed selection (i.e. a selection consisting of two or more paragraphs formatted using two or more different paragraph styles, or two or more words formatted using two or more different character styles).

His post is about… I don’t know, really. Something about reviewing the structure of a document. Or the fact that, “with Pages, the user is still saddled with having to scan a list of styles in order to see which ones are applied.”

Shocking! With Word 2008, the user is saddled with… not being able to see which styles are applied at all. That is undoubtedly much better.

And, oh yes, with Word 2011, everything will be perfect. Wait for it.

At the time, I wrote that, since Word 2008 does not support custom keyboard shortcuts for AppleScript scripts and AppleScript scripts are the only way to try and fix the default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down commands in Microsoft Word 2008, that means that the only way to assign keyboard shortcuts to those scripts is to use Mac OS X’s built-in keyboard shortcuts feature, in the “Keyboard” preference pane in System Preferences.

Unfortunately, that Mac OS X feature is limited to keyboard shortcuts that involve either function keys or modifier keys. So it is not possible to use it to redirect the Page Up and Page Down keys to the appropriate AppleScript scripts instead of Word’s own built-in behaviour.

Today, however, I am an avid user of Keyboard Maestro, and I am pleased to report that, unlike Mac OS X’s “Keyboard Shortcuts” feature, Keyboard Maestro does allow you to intercept any key stroke in any application. This means that Keyboard Maestro can intercept the Page Up and Page Down keys in Word 2008 and use them to trigger my custom Page Up and Page Down scripts, which scroll the document up and down without moving the insertion point.

(For more information on those scripts, see the original post about Word 2008.)

And so today, thanks to Keyboard Maestro, I am once again able to bypass Word 2008′s own stupid behaviour and force it to scroll without moving the insertion point when I use the Page Up and Page Down keys in a Word document.

Of course, the next version of Microsoft Word will supposedly bring back support for Visual Basic macro commands, and one assumes that it will also bring back the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to those macros within Word, including shortcuts that involve the Page Up and Page Down keys. But with Microsoft, you never know. I wouldn’t be surprised if the restored support for Visual Basic turned out to be somewhat crippled and incomplete.

And even if it is complete and satisfactory, you don’t need to wait until that new version is out. You can fix Word 2008 today with Keyboard Maestro.

When you open the exact same document in Word 2008, with the exact same use of paragraph and character styles, and you do “Select All” to select the entire contents of the document, here’s what the “Styles” section of the Formatting Palette looks like:

And here is what the “Styles” control in the formatting toolbar looks like:

And here is what the “Styles” dialog box looks like:

If there is a better illustration of the contrast between the approach and usability of Pages and the approach and usability of Word 2008, I don’t know what it is.

In Word 2008, you have at least three different ways of viewing the same information (the style[s] of the current selection), i.e. a palette, a toolbar control, and a dialog box, and none of them is able to provide any useful information. In addition, each of them provides a difference piece of false information!

In Pages, you only have one way of viewing the information, i.e. the styles drawer, and it gives you all the information that it can give you, by highlighting all the styles that are currently in use somewhere inside the selected text.

Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I do wish that Apple would provide at least one other way to edit styles, because the drawer is not exactly the ideal interface for modifying style attributes. (You have to select an occurrence of the style you want to edit and apply the changes you want to apply to the style definition, and then choose the command to redefine the style based on the selection.)

But at least Apple does not try to pretend that it offers a useful, flexible user interface like Microsoft does. It actually does offer one. Whereas the user interface for working with styles in Word is still lousy, after all these years, and it still fails to provide any useful information when you have a mixed selection that uses a variety of styles. Heck, it’s not even able to display both the current character style and the current paragraph style at the same time.

I should also note that, unlike earlier versions, Pages ’09 does provide more than one way to view/apply styles, since it also has controls for styles in its Format Bar, in the form of two separate menus for paragraph styles and character styles.

But here again, Apple does the right thing and, in case of a mixed selection, it shows in the menu these styles that are applied to parts of the selection as partially checked items, with the conventional dash:

(As you can see, the font smoothing in these menus is pretty bad, however. But at least that’s a purely aesthetic problem.)

Do you think we’ll ever have a version of Microsoft Word that is capable of displaying both the current paragraph style and the current character style at the same time, and is able to reflect the mixed nature of a selection containing multiple styles by following the standard conventions in Mac OS X for such a situation?

I don’t, and that’s why I switched from Microsoft Word to Pages as my main word processor several years ago. I’d love to see Microsoft prove me wrong and actually make such improvements, so that Pages would actually have some competition. But I just don’t see it happening. As far as one can tell, Microsoft’s MacBU is a completely ossified institution that just keeps churning out version after version of the same old crap.

It’s a nifty feature, and one that’s sorely missing in Apple’s iWork suite of applications.

Unfortunately, as per usual with Microsoft, the feature is plagued by bugs, and things aren’t getting better with time, on the contrary.

As far as I can tell, in PowerPoint 2008, the feature is broken to the point of being unusable.

If I open a blank new presentation in PowerPoint 2008, type a few words in the title and subtitle fields, and then go to the “Window” menu and choose “New Window” to open a second window showing the same presentation, PowerPoint correctly does just that.

But then if I try to continue editing the text boxes in the original (first) document window, PowerPoint 2008 seems completely unable to refresh the text display properly. Typing seemingly produces nothing—but I can see that the text gets inserted properly, because it is displayed properly in the other (second) window in the background. But in the first window, the only way that I can force PowerPoint 2008 to display what I have just typed is to resize the document window. This somehow forces PowerPoint to “refresh” the contents of the text boxes and render them properly. But it does not fix the problem.

In that first window, it is pretty much impossible to edit text boxes, unless you enjoy doing things like typing in the dark.

So that makes the two-windows feature in PowerPoint 2008 pretty much unusuable for anything other than viewing slides.

I cannot reproduce the problem in PowerPoint 2004, so it looks like a “new” bug in PowerPoint 2008. (If it is indeed new to PowerPoint 2008, it has been there for the past year and a half, so it’s not “new” in that sense any longer!) I obviously cannot entirely rule out something specific to my configuration that might be causing the problem (dual monitor setup, maybe?). But still… It’s a pretty bad and obvious one. (I didn’t notice it earlier because really, in all honesty, I tend to avoid PowerPoint like the plague and only use it when I am really forced to do so. And when I do have to use it I don’t always have to use the “New Window” feature.)

To be fixed in Office 2011 or whatever it’s called? Don’t count on it. With Microsoft’s lackadaisical attitude towards bugs, it’s more likely to be ignored for another few years.

Note where the insertion point is located (at the beginning of the second paragraph).

Now what do you think will happen when I start typing from that insertion point?

More specifically, do you expect the inserted text to be in bold or not?

Well, here is what happens:

The text is in bold. Why? The reason is simple. The previous paragraph ended with text in bold, and I only changed back to regular (not bold) at the beginning of the next paragraph before typing “Not bold.”

In such a situation, Pages, like other common word processors, “remembers” the exact location where the change from bold to regular took place, even though that location is now invisible to the user. And when the user places the insertion point in that same location (even though the user cannot tell that this is the location where the change from bold to regular was made) and starts typing, the resulting inserted text is… in bold.

On the other hand, if, when typing the first paragraph, I had changed back from bold to regular before inserting the paragraph mark (i.e. before typing Return), this problem would not be occurring now.

Yet, from a purely visual standpoint, the two different behaviours produce the exact same result. the first paragraph ends with something in bold (including the closing period) and the second paragraph begins with something not in bold.

Now my question is simple: Why can’t we get a word processor that is smart enough to understand that, in 99% of all cases, when the user goes to insert something at the beginning of the second paragraph, he expects that something to be in the character formatting of that paragraph (i.e. here the regular font) and not in the character formatting of the end of the previous paragraph (i.e. here the bold font)?

Is that really too much to ask?

Yes, I know that, from the perspective of the word processor program itself, the behaviour above makes sense. The change from bold to regular was made after inserting the paragraph mark, so to the word processor it makes sense to begin the second paragraph in bold. But it does not make sense from a purely visual point of view, which is all that the user can refer to once the typing has been done.

Now, of course, since I am more than familiar with this problem myself, I am usually careful to change my character formatting back before inserting a return character at the end of my paragraph. So for documents that I create myself, I don’t usually encounter the issue described above (except when unwanted text selection problems make it inevitable that I end up applying my formatting to unwanted trailing characters such as spaces and invisible return characters).

My real problem is that, in my job, I spend a lot of time editing other people’s documents. And the number of documents exhibiting the issue described above that I have to deal with is frustratingly high. There are probably various reasons for this, but the main one is of course the lack of intuitiveness of word processor interfaces in general and the lack of proper training of most word processor users.

It is for that same reason that there are no simple solutions to the problem. In the example above, it is merely a matter of switching back from bold to regular, which is not too painful. But far too often the character formatting changes are numerous: different font, different weight, different size, different colour, etc. It is simply too frustrating to have to change all these manually.

And reverting back to the paragraph’s underlying default character formatting by stripping all the inappropriate manual formatting with a “Remove Formatting” type of command usually is not an option either. More often than not, those word processor users who only change formatting options after inserting the paragraph mark are the same users who do not know how to use paragraph styles, and so apply document-wide formatting options manually as well. This means that the underlying default character formatting of the paragraph (i.e. the character formatting defined in the default paragraph style) does not match the actual default character formatting used in the document. Stripping the unwanted manual formatting also strips the manual formatting that needs to be preserved.

There is no easy solution here. The only tolerable approach that I have found when this happens to me is the following. Instead of putting my insertion point at the beginning of the paragraph, where I get the wrong character formatting when I start typing, I put it one or two characters to the right, inside the first word of the paragraph. I start typing what I want, then I go back to the beginning of the paragraph and remove the extra letters that I no longer want, and then I jump back after the first few letters that I have typed and resume typing.

It is utterly inelegant, but it is the only realistic solution that I have found.

Of course, as an experienced and demanding Mac user, I am profoundly bothered by inelegant solutions, even when I have no choice but to use them. Each time I have to use them, it adds a little bit to the low-level frustration that I experience on a continuous basis in my daily work due to the limitations and lack of intelligence of the tools that I am forced to use. I simply cannot resign myself and get used to this situation. I dream of smarter tools. I strongly believe that they are more than possible with today’s hardware and software. It is just a matter of “political” will. But the priorities of the market and of our current crop of “innovators” are obviously elsewhere.

In an ideal world, innovation would take place on a continuous basis on multiple fronts, including less “flashy” and less glamorous areas such as word processing and text editing. But that ideal world is far from today’s reality, where word processors are more or less just as dumb as they were 20 years ago (and not even faster!).

UPDATE: Sven-S. Porst writes to report that Apple’s own TextEdit behaves properly, and so do AppleWorks and InDesign. Even the basic (WebKit) text editor used when composing messages in Mail or filling out forms in Safari actually behaves properly too. I was able to verify this myself in TextEdit, Mail, and InDesign.

Considering the lack of polish otherwise afflicting all these other tools, this is rather shocking news. It appears to confirm that both Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages, the two flagship word processors for Mac OS X, have their own way of doing things and can’t get the simple things right, even after years and years (decades in the case of Word) of supposed polishing, fine-tuning and improvements.

Every once in a while, however, I have no choice but to work on the Word document with Word itself. Most of such cases are when documents contain a large number of tables (Pages’s table editing tools can be very frustrating) or Microsoft Office-specific graphics typically generated by Excel and inserted in the Word document or generated within Word itself.

These days, I am working on one such document. It contains a large number of tables, as well as numerous graphics such as this one:

My task, as a professional translator, is to translate the entire document, including such graphics. If the graphics are not editable, I have to advise my client that I will provide the translation in plain text underneath the graphic, and his graphic designer or whoever designed the document will have to update the graphic himself.

But if the graphic is editable, I have no excuse but to do the editing myself:

(Things might look a bit different for you depending on which version of Word you are using. I am using Word 2008 for Mac OS X. Microsoft’s developers keep changing the look of the frames and handles and other controls for editing graphics, without ever doing anything about the flaws in the actual behaviours of the controls.)

As you can see in this picture, the “labels” for the pie chart are editable text boxes that can be clicked on and “entered” in order to edit the text inside.

And that’s where the frustration starts.

See, in most computer systems, a double-click on a word is a shortcut for selecting the entire word. When you want to edit text, it is a pretty convenient shortcut. In the example above, my task is to replace “Strongly Agree” with “Tout à fait d’accord” on the first line and to add a non-breaking space between the number and the “%” symbol on the second line (which is required in French typography). My first instinct is to double-click on either “Strongly” or “Agree” and then expand the selection to the left or to the right (depending on where I have started) in order to select the entire line and type the French over the selection.

The problem is that some software developers have other ideas and think that double-click is a convenient shortcut for all kinds of other things. In Word 2008, for example, double-click on the text inside such a text box, instead of selecting the text, will bring up… a dialog box for changing the format of the text box:

Argh. This might make sense as a shortcut for accessing the “Format” dialog box for a graphic object that does not contain any text, and is therefore not editable to begin with. But unfortunately, Microsoft’s engineers have decided that it should apply to all objects, including text boxes.

So now, each time I want to edit the text inside a text box (and I have dozens of text boxes to go through), I have to click just once on the text inside the box to select the box first, and then pause for a short while, and then click on the text again to “enter” the field.

But even then, look at what happens:

Depending on the actual position of the mouse pointer, Word throws a tool tip in my face to tell me what the label is for, which I don’t give a flying hoot about, and that tool tip hides part of the text that I want to edit! And even if I start typing in the text box, the tool tip does not go away. The only solution is to move my hand back to the mouse and move the mouse pointer elsewhere, so that Word will show a tool tip for something else and remove this one from my sight.

Double argh.

At this point, you might think: “Why doesn’t Pierre just do a document-wide Find/Replace operation to replace all occurrences of ‘Strongly Agree’ with ‘Tout à fait d’accord,’ especially if he has dozens of those to do?”

Well, I would—except that Word’s Find/Replace command does not work with the text inside text boxes! It’s as if this text didn’t exist. Word can’t find it, and Word does not include it in its word count. (Another bonus for translators who rely on an accurate word count for billing purposes.)

So I actually have to do each and every graphic manually, one at a time.

Now that I have finally entered the text box and am able to edit the text (as long as the tool tip lets me see what I am doing and does not force me to type in the dark), I have to deal with Word’s esthetic brilliance.

See, while you are editing text inside a text box, Word is apparently unable to recalculate the size of the text box on the fly, and so it continues to display the current borders of the text box, even though they are not longer correct:

This image is supposed to represent text that is centered inside the box. And when I am finished typing I get more prettiness:

Now, somehow, Word has realized that it needs to widen the text box, but the centered text spills over the other edge of the box!

It’s only when I exit the text box altogether that Word finally adjusts its borders to accommodate the new content properly:

Except that—Darn! I’ve forgotten to add the non-breaking space before the “%” on the second line!

And so we start all over again… Double-click on the text box’s second line—oh no, here comes that “Format” dialog box again. Escape that. And try again, this time with a pause between the clicks. And so on. And so on. And so on.

Repeat the same scenario over dozens of similar text boxes, and you get an idea of how maddening this can get.

Oh, and by the way, even if you uncheck the “Show Paste Options buttons” option in Word’s preferences (under the “Edit” pane), Word 2008 still shows the “Paste Options” button each time you paste something inside a text box, thereby adding to the screen clutter and hiding even more of the text you are trying to edit.

And I am not even mentioning Word’s performance issues, which mean that, even on a 2009 Mac Pro with 12 GB of RAM, half of the time, when you try to expand the selection inside a text box, there is a slight but very noticeable delay before Word actually draws the proper selection highlighting. Or responds to your mouse click. Or to your keystroke. Which causes you to make more errors, and to have to repeat all these stupid actions even more.

And I am not mentioning document scrolling issues either. I have dozens of such graphics one after the other, so when I scroll down to edit the next one, it’s not always fully displayed in the visible area of the document window. Or sometimes, even when the graphic that I am editing is fully visible, editing it still causes Word to jump up or down while I am trying to edit a perfectly visible text box, and so I have to readjust my own positioning due to Word’s uncontrollable scrolling, and scroll back up or back down, which causes yet more headache-inducing jumping, because Word is not designed for the scroll ball on my Apple mouse and thinks it’s a scroll wheel and Word’s scrolling is way too sensitive, and there’s nothing that can be done to adjust that either!

Oh, and did I mention that the blinking I-beam cursor keeps disappearing while you are typing, making it even harder to keep track of what you are doing and avoid more unwanted errors and more repetition?

I could go on and on. Working with Word is just horrible, and it’s probably even worse in Mac OS X with Word 2008, although other versions of the software are probably affected by most of the flaws illustrated above as well.

It’s hard to believe that we are in 2010 and we still have to use such crappy, badly designed, horrendously flawed software. But we are, and we do. And we have Bill Gates and his clique to thank for it (although Adobe’s own software wizards are not far behind, and are getting closer and closer all the time).

It’s maddening, and it’s profoundly discouraging.

On the whole, it is a welcome simplification. After all, the paradox at the heart of the very existence of Microsoft Word’s “Normal” view mode (now called “Draft” in Word 2008) is that it’s supposed to be designed for those who don’t want to be slowed down by all the “bells and whistles” of a true WYSIWYG mode (which Word’s “Page Layout” view mode isn’t either, although it gets closer to it), but in actual fact, even Word 2008′s “Draft” view mode is significantly slower and more painful to use than Pages ’09′s regular WYSIWYG view mode.

But WYSIWYG does come with some of its own obvious limitations.

One example is what happens when editing endnotes. By design, endnotes are meant to appear at the end of a document or section. But after you’ve inserted an endnote in your document—which has taken you to the end of the document, where you’ve typed the text of the endnote—you typically want to go back to the main body text to continue entering/editing it.

With a non-WYSIWYG view mode such as Word’s “Normal/Draft” mode, you can view and edit footnotes and endnotes in a separate pane at the bottom of the document’s window. This way, while you are editing an endnote, you can still see the main body text with the endnote reference in context, and you can easily return to it with a simple mouse click.

But in Pages ’09, as soon as you insert an automatic endnote, the application immediately takes you to the end of the document, where the endnotes are. You can no longer view the endnote reference in context.

And what do you do when you are done editing your endnote and want to return to the main body text? There is no obvious control to do this. No “Back to Text” button/command or anything of the kind.

But in fact there is a fairly easy way to return to the text. You can simply double-click on the endnote’s number itself, which causes Pages ’09 to jump back to the corresponding endnote reference in the main body text. It’s not obvious, but once you know it, it’s fairly convenient.

(It works the other way around too. In order to view an existing endnote, you can just double-click on the endnote reference in the body text.)

This does not eliminate the other shortcoming of the WYSIWYG approach, which is that you cannot view the endnote reference in context while editing the endnote itself. And that is part of a more general problem with WYSIWYG, which is that you cannot view two different portions of the same document at the same time. I frequently need to refer to another existing section of the document that I am currently working on. Pages ’09′s WYSIWYG approach forces me to jump back and forth without being able to view two different sections at the same time. It’s frustrating, and forces me to do an excessive amount of double-checking to make sure that all sections of my documents are consistent.

I would feel much more comfortable about my work in Pages ’09 if it offered a way to view two different sections of the same document at the same time, like Word with its control to divide a single document window into two panes or with its command to open the same document in a second document window, which can then be scrolled independently.

In Pages ’09, I am often forced to resort to a clumsy workaround such as creating a copy of my existing document in the Finder and opening that document copy in a separate document window in Pages ’09—which of course is far from an ideal substitute, since the copy is not updated when I make changes to the original, and there is a greater risk of experiencing confusion between the two versions and applying changes/edits to the wrong version.

So WYSIWYG orthodoxy has its limits, and I wish Apple would realize this. Without resorting to the multiplicity of view modes so generously offered by Microsoft, it could at least offer the option to open the same document in a second window that can be scrolled independently. Both windows would be WYSIWYG. They just would enable you to view two different sections of the document (endnotes and endnote references, or any sections) at the same time.

Unfortunately, I have submitted this “enhancement request” to Apple multiple times, so far without any success.

That said, if I had read the release notes about Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.2.0 Update, I would have noticed this:

Improvements for Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac

• Compatibility is improved with SpellCatcher X.
This update fixes an issue that improves compatibility with SpellCatcher X.

No, it’s not a dream. Microsoft’s MacBU did actually notice a bug that was introduced in the initial release of Word 2008 (more than a year and a half ago) and caused a buggy handling of input methods, including Spell Catcher X. And they did actually fix it.

This means that now, when you type text in a Word 2008 with Spell Catcher X’s input method (so as to benefit from Spell Catcher’s automatic as-you-type features), Word no longer treats each and every keystroke as a separate event and, when you try to undo your typing with command-Z, Word no longer requires you to undo it character by character, which was excruciatingly painful.

Not only did Microsoft notice the bug (albeit long after Word 2008 came out and I reported it) and not only did they eventually fix it, but they even documented the fix in their release notes.

I am amazed—but then, I am only amazed because Microsoft has such a long history of totally ignoring existing bugs for years, especially bugs that affect me in my daily work. (I am not being paranoid. It’s just that Microsoft obviously pays very little attention to the needs of “power users” like me who actually use Word for Mac OS X to make a living.)

That said, there are numerous other bugs that remain in Microsoft Word 2008, including new bugs introduced with the initial release of Word 2008 that are obvious and deserve to get fixed as much as the bug with the input methods.

(By the way, the bug that Microsoft fixed in 12.2.0 didn’t just affect Spell Catcher X. It also affected all other forms of keyboard entry that rely on an input method, as opposed to a simple keyboard layout. But since I don’t know whether Word 2008 is actually usable with any other input method beyond Spell Catcher X—we are talking about the input sources in Mac OS X’s system preferences that list a number of sub-systems, such as the ones called “Kotoeri” and “Hangul”— I don’t know if only Spell Catcher X users were affected.)

Other bugs that were introduced in Word 2008 and are totally unacceptable in a quality product include the fact that Word 2008 document windows don’t remember their position on the screen when you close and reopen them, the fact that, more often than not, Word 2008 refuses to respect Mac OS X’s window layering and brings all its windows in front of other application windows when you bring one of its document windows to the foreground, the fact that things don’t get redrawn quickly and properly when automatic page breaks change, the fact that extra paragraph marks appear when you delete a selection of more than one paragraph, and so on. (I’ve documented these bugs in various posts. There is a recap here.)

And these are just the newer bugs. There are still plenty of old ones that have been with us for years and will probably never be fixed.

But yeah, for once, Microsoft did actually fix a bug—and one that affected me in my daily working life. Amazing.

Well, if so, I invite you to try the following experiment: open a blank document in Word 2008 and start typing.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. But you have to pay attention to one other thing while you’re typing: the state of the blinking I-beam cursor that indicates your current position in the document.

What does this I-beam cursor do while you are typing? It disappears.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me, that is simply wrong. The cursor should not disappear. On the contrary, it should stop blinking at stay constantly visible as long as you are typing, moving along with your typed text. Once you stop typing, it should start blinking again.

It’s as simple as that.

You would think that something that simple would be universally accepted and supported. And you would think that, given that Word 2004 does the right thing here, Word 2008 would do the right thing as well.

But it does not. As soon as you start typing, the cursor disappears. And it only reappears when you stop typing.

Why is this wrong? For a variety of reasons. The most obvious that I have right now is what happens in tables. When you are in a table in Word, you can use the Tab key to jump from cell to cell. But since the Tab key is a keyboard key (duh), it is interpreted as “typing” and causes Word 2008 to stop displaying the cursor. If you are tabbing into a cell that contains text, that’s not a problem, because Word selects the contents of the cell by default, so you have some visual feedback about the fact that your selection is there now.

But if the cell is empty, the only visible sign that the selection is in the cell is… the I-beam cursor. And as long as you are pressing the Tab key, i.e. “typing,” the I-beam cursor remains invisible. When you are tabbing through a series of empty cells by pressing Tab repeatedly, this means that it is unfortunately very easy to lose track of where you are. The I-beam cursor only flashes by from time to time, presumably if you are hitting the Tab key repeatedly but slowly enough that Word thinks that you’ve stopped typing and starts making the cursor blink again.

Of course, it’s the type of flaw that primarily affects “power users” who tend to work fast and expect their application to be as responsive as possible. In other words, people who actually work for a living and try to be as efficient as possible. But Word 2008 is not designed for such people. In fact, it’s not designed for anyone in particular. It’s not designed, period. It’s a slapdash assembly of defective parts that makes a monster of an application with atrocious responsiveness. The only person that such an application would be designed for is some kind of monstrous alien creature with three heads, 2 fingers and a major eye/hand coordination problem. Word wouldn’t work any better for such a creature, but at least the creature probably wouldn’t notice the flaws.

For anyone else, Word 2008 is the kind of application that is crappy enough to ruin your mood as soon as you launch it and start typing. I mean, when it comes to word processing, it does not get much more fundamental than the I-beam cursor, does it?

Out of curiosity, I reviewed other applications. As indicated, Word 2004 does not suffer from the problem (but it does still suffer from disappearing cursor syndrome in some more specific situations). So obviously this is something that Microsoft’s engineers broke when converting Word into an Intel-native application.

I have already reported on the blinking cursor problems in Excel 2008 and PowerPoint 2008. So sadly Word 2008 is in good company here, even though the problem is by far the worst in Word 2008, i.e. the… word processor in the lot.

Other Apple tools that I use commonly for text editing, including Pages, TextEdit and Mail, do not suffer from the problem. When you type in these applications, the I-beam cursor stays constantly visible, until you stop typing, which is when it then starts blinking again.

The only other application where I have noticed the problem is… BBEdit, the application in which I am writing this post right now. It’s rather surprising to me, as Bare Bones usually pays close attention to such details. But the truth is that it has never bothered me much in BBEdit. I suspect that it is because, unlike Word 2008, BBEdit the application as whole is otherwise so highly responsive that you cannot really lose track of where you are. (It also helps that it’s only a text editor and not a word processor.)

Still, if I were a Bare Bones engineer, this would bother me and I would get it fixed eventually.

I cannot find a specific reference to the expected behaviour of the I-beam cursor while typing in the Apple User Experience Guides. A search for “blinking cursor” does not return any useful results. The correct/recommended behaviour might be in there somewhere, but it’s not in an obvious location.

Still, I don’t think it takes an official guide to figure out what the expected/recommended/correct/desirable behaviour is here. Besides, it’s not like Microsoft’s engineers ever follow Apple’s guidelines anyway…

To me, the simple fact that things were working fine in Word 2004 and got broken in Word 2008 and no one at Microsoft seems to have noticed or done anything about it, even after numerous incremental Word 2008 updates, is a clear indication of how bad things are at the MacBU and how little they care about the responsiveness and usability of their applications.

Fortunately, Pages ’09, like most other well-behaved Mac OS X applications, also supports the system-wide keyboard shortcut customization feature provided through the System Preferences application, in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane:

(If you are wondering why you cannot see the Expand/Collapse triangle next to the “Pages.app” entry in the list, it’s because Mac OS X has had this bug for years where it fails to invert the triangle when a list item is selected. The problem is made more acute by my choice of selection highlighting colour, which is a shade of green darker than the default sky blue. This bug will apparently finally be fixed in Snow Leopard.)

This compatibility with the system-wide keyboard shortcut customization feature means that you can use the system-wide feature to assign a keyboard shortcut to a specific menu command in Pages:

It works reasonably well for most commands, although the system-wide keyboard shortcuts feature in Mac OS X suffers from some limitations, which prevent you from using certain keys or certain key combinations.

It also means that, if a specific command in Pages cannot be accessed through a specific menu command in the Pages menu bar, then it’s impossible to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. For example, the “Keep lines together” and “Keep with following paragraph” formatting options are essential features if you want to maintain a certain level of control over your document’s pagination without resorting to ugly hacks such as the use of manual page breaks:

Unfortunately, the text inspector is the only way to access these options in Pages ’09, so you cannot assign keyboard shortcuts to them, like you can in Microsoft Word.

The keyboard shortcuts for styles feature is the only area in Pages ’09 where you can assign keyboard shortcuts to things that are not accessible via the menu bar (styles, in this case). But of course this feature is also very limiting, since you can only use 8 shortcuts, and these shortcuts have to be the F1 to F8 keys.

What makes the limited keyboard shortcut customization abilities in Pages ’09 even more frustrating, however, is the profound ambiguity regarding the way user-defined keyboard shortcuts are stored and preserved in Mac OS X.

For the F1 to F8 shortcuts used for styles in Pages, there aren’t any problems. These shortcuts are document-specific and are saved with the document itself.

But what about the application-specific keyboard shortcuts defined via the System Preferences application, in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane? Well, it looks like it takes a degree in Mac OS X engineering to figure out where they are stored and how to preserve/protect them.

Apparently, they are stored in the Pages preference file, i.e. com.apple.iwork.pages.plist, in your home library folder. If I open that file in a text editor, here is what I find:

	<key>NSUserKeyEquivalents</key>
	<dict>
		<key>All Caps</key>
		<string>@$a</string>
		<key>Export…</key>
		<string>@~$e</string>
		<key>Small Caps</key>
		<string>@$h</string>
		<key>Superscript</key>
		<string>@$=</string>
		<key>Title</key>
		<string>@$t</string>
	</dict>

These are shortcuts that I have just assigned via the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane to various menu commands in Pages that I use a lot. (“@” stands for the Command key, “$” for the Shift key and “~” for the Control key.)

But my problem is that I have just had to reassign all these keyboard shortcuts to these commands, even though I have been using them for years. Why? Because, for some reason (probably a system update some time in the recent past), at some point the ability to view and edit the existing application-specific shortcuts in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane was lost.

The shortcuts were still working, but if I went to the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane and tried to look under “Pages,” to view the application-specific shortcuts that I had defined, I could no longer see them. There was no entry for “Pages” in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane anymore.

And as soon as I decided to add a new Pages-specific shortcut for some other command through the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane, Mac OS X promptly eliminated all the existing shortcuts that, until then, were still working properly in Pages ’09, even though they were no longer visible or editable in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane.

This happened, presumably, because defining a new shortcut via the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane caused Mac OS X to wake up and realize that it no longer had any shortcuts listed for Pages commands in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane, and so it started again from scratch.

This is eminently frustating, and it’s not the first time it’s happened to me. It seems that, every time there is a significant system update or I have to reinstall my system for whatever reason, somehow the connection between the shortcuts defined and stored in the com.apple.iwork.pages.plist preference file and the shortcuts listed in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane is lost.

This forces me to keep a list of my user-defined shortcuts for Pages in a separate file, because I regularly have to reassign them in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane. In other words, if you are planning to do any keyboard customization in Pages via the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane, make sure you keep a separate list of all the shortcuts you define, because you’ll more than likely have to reassign them again and again over the years, just like me.

A long time ago, I submitted a bug report to Apple about this. I never got a satisfactory reply. The only thing that they ever said to me was:

After reviewing your submission engineering has determined that the behavior you reported is as expected.

If you go that route, you also need to preserve “com.apple.universalaccess.plist”.

(“That route” was referring to a clean install of the OS, which I provided as a step that could be used in order to reproduce the problem. But it’s not a required step. I have had the problem happen to me without a clean install.)

Well, I am sorry, but I have never touched the “com.apple.universalaccess.plist” file in my home folder and Mac OS X has still managed to “misplace” my application-specific keyboard shortcuts again and again over the years. Besides, if I look at the contents of this file, I don’t see anything related to application-specific keyboard shortcuts. (I should note that this feedback from Apple dates back to 2006. It is possible that the architecture used for storing keyboard shortcuts has changed since then. But as far as I can tell, Mac OS X still does not have the ability to properly preserve application-specific shortcuts and keep them viewable/editable in System Preferences over several years and several system updates.)

On a more positive note, I would like to conclude by pointing out a couple of things that have actually improved for keyboard shortcuts in Pages in recent times.

I used to have a user-defined keyboard shortcut (command-shift-P) for inserting a manual page break in Pages, because Pages did not have one built in. I had initially tried to assign a shortcut using the Enter key on the numeric pad, because that’s what the standard keyboard shortcut in Microsoft Word uses, but Mac OS X would always refuse to allow me to define a keyboard shortcut using the Enter key in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane.

In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), however, I now able to use the Enter key as part of a keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane. In addition, Pages ’09 itself now comes with a built-in keyboard shortcut for inserting a manual page break, which is… command-Enter, or control-Enter. (Both work fine, as well as shift-command-Enter, etc.) So I actually no longer have any need for a user-defined keyboard shortcut for this particular command.

The capitalization commands (in the “Font” menu) in Pages used to be another source of frustration:

As you can see in the picture above, it is possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to the commands for “All Caps,” “Small Caps,” and so on. These commands are formatting options. In other words, applying “All Caps” to a string of text does not replace the characters with capitals. It applies “All Caps” formatting to the string of text, but that can be reversed by selecting the “None” option.

This behaviour is different from the corresponding feature in Microsoft Word. Word also has an “All Caps” formatting option, but the command to activate this option has a “toggle” behaviour, which means that, if you use the command twice in a row, Word applies the formatting, and then removes it. Whereas if you use the “All Caps” command twice in a row in Pages ’09, the text just stays in all caps. The only way to remove the “All Caps” formatting in Pages ’09 is to use the “None” command

This was particularly frustrating in previous versions of Pages and Mac OS X, because it was, in my experience anyway, impossible to assign a keyboard shortcut to the “None” command—or at least the keyboard shortcut that I am used to using for this purpose, i.e. command-shift-option-Space.

However, in Pages ’09 under Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), I find that I am now able to do just that, i.e. assign the command-shift-option-Space to the “None” command via the “Keyboard & Mouse” preference pane, as can also be seen in the picture above. And it works!

It’s still not exactly what I want. In Microsoft Word, I use command-shift-option-Space as the shortcut for the all-purpose “Default Paragraph Font Style” command, which strips not just All Caps formatting, but all other character-level formatting options from the selection.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to assign this keyboard shortcut to the corresponding command in Pages ’09, because the only way to access this command is to click on the “None” style in the “Character Styles” section of the styles drawer. You can assign a shortcut to that “None” style, but it can only be one of the F1–F8 keys. And I just cannot get used to using a function key for this. Function keys are not as easy to hit as a shortcut such as command-shift-option-Space, because the function keys, especially on Apple’s aluminum keyboard, are smaller and the small text label on them is harder to see. They are OK for occasional use, but not for a command as commonly required as stripping all character-level formatting.

Still, being able to assign the command-shift-option-Space shortcut to the “None” command in the “Capitalization” submenu is better than nothing, and is better than what used to be possible in previous versions of Pages and Mac OS X.

So there have been some improvements on the keyboard shortcut customization front. But Pages ’09’s capabilities are still too limited, especially for power users who make heavy use of styles in particular and of keyboard shortcuts in general.

Consider the following situation:

This is a section of a long document, where I have a heading with an automatic number (or letter, to be accurate) of “H,” followed by a table.

I want to move that table up so that the heading will move to the right to flow with the rest of the text on the right-hand side of the table.

So I grab that weird proxy control that is supposed to let you move a table around and I lift it up:

And then I drop the table in its new location:

WTF?

I just moved the bloody table, and Word 2008 changed the heading’s automatic letter from “H” to “A”!

Why does it do this? I have no idea. It’s not like there any kind of hidden section break or anything like that between the heading and the text that might explain (but not justify) the existence of such a bug. There is nothing else on this page, only the table and the heading and the text. What am I supposed to do here?

I am not making this up. It’s happening to me here right now. If it were up to me, no one would use Word’s automatic numbering feature in their documents. But people do. And I have to deal with it in the resulting documents that I have to work on.

It’s maddening. And it’s not an isolated incident, of course. There are hundreds of such problems in Microsoft Word that one has to deal with on a daily basis. It simply is a totally unreliable piece of crap.

Of course, Microsoft’s developers would probably argue that it’s a “minor” problem, that it does not cause the application to crash, so they have worse problems to address first.

Well, yeah, except that Word’s automatic numbering feature was introduced more than 10 years ago and it’s still full of bugs. It’s not just that these bugs are a low priority. It’s that they never get fixed. Ever.

Microsoft’s engineers seem to live in a parallel universe where only application crashes are important bugs (and even then, they still can’t make a Mac OS X application that does not crash; I have numerous crash logs to prove it) and all the rest is just stuff that people have to learn to live with.

That’s not the world in which Mac users live. They expect quality applications, applications that not only never crash, but also are reliable in daily use and in which key features work as expected, and not in totally unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.

Microsoft is simply totally incapable of delivering such an application.

I am pretty sure that one of the reasons why Microsoft’s engineers (if you can call them that) have failed to fix the problem after that many years is that they haven’t put much effort into trying to reproduce the problem.

Well, if any MacBU employee cares, I guess I should report something that I have noticed consistently over the past few months. In Word 2008 at least, I able to reproduce the problem each and every time I copy something in a Word document and then use my AppleScript script to paste the contents of the clipboard as unformatted text elsewhere in the document.

The script I use for this is the one suggested by Joe Kissell in the comments on my blog post about pasting as unformatted text in Word 2008, i.e.:

tell application "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word.app"
	tell selection
		try
			set theClip to Unicode text of (the clipboard as record)
			type text text theClip
		end try
	end tell
end tell

The script works fine (although there is often an annoying delay before it kicks in, due to the general slowness of Word 2008), but each and every time I use it to copy and paste without formatting something in a Word document, at the same time I paste the text, Word 2008 adds an “OLE_LINK” bookmark to the original chunk of text that I just copied.

This does not occur when I use the “Paste Special…” command in the “Edit” menu and then choose the “Unformatted Text” option, which is obviously a much more cumbersome process. It only occurs when I use my AppleScript script, to which I have assigned the command-option-shift-V shortcut.

But still… it occurs each and every time. This is now officially a 100% reproducible bug as far as I am concerned.

Of course, Microsoft’s engineers, since they are (or believe themselves to be) software developers and not actual users, probably don’t realize how important it is, in the real world, to be able to paste unformatted text as opposed to text with its original formatting, which is why the command is so difficult to access in the standard Word 2008 interface (if you can call it that) to begin with and why any serious Word user would want to create a script and a shortcut for it.

And Microsoft’s engineers probably also don’t ever bother to make bookmarks visible in their Word documents, which is another condition required to actually notice the bug, since it works invisibly behind the scenes.

In an ideal world, Microsoft would have a proper bug reporting mechanism and not just some kind of crappy generic feedback page. And in an ideal world, Microsoft would actually read this feedback and take it into account.

In that ideal world, I would actually bother to submit the bug as a bug report to Microsoft. But in the real world I will not, for the very reasons that I have mentioned several times over the years and that are summarized in my “About” page.

If there actually is a Microsoft employee out there who cares, well, he or she will have to make the effort to read this blog and reproduce the bug themselves and then do something about it—you know, just like that Firefox developer who spontaneously contacted me this morning after reading my blog post about the full-page zoom feature in Safari 4 and Firefox 3 to let me know that he had filed and fixed the alignment bug in Firefox 3 that I had incidentally described in my post and illustrated with a screen shot.

Now that’s what I call a developer. (It won’t convert me into a Firefox user, because there are a number of such flaws in the software and I still don’t find the browser Mac-like enough, but it is still impressive that the developer noticed my blog post so quickly and did something about it right away.)

I should also mention that, a few months ago, a Betalogue reader, Rob Gilpatric, wrote me an e-mail to describe a VBA script that can be used for removing the spurious bookmarks:

Sub NoMoreOLEBookmarks()
' Word for Mac has this annoying habit (in some documents, but not all) of creating a bookmark each time you cut and paste text. _
' After a while, you can accumulate hundreds of these bookmarks. _
' This macro automatically cycles through every bookmark and deletes it if its name begins with OLE_LINK.

Dim bkmk As Bookmark
Dim n As Integer

For Each bkmk In ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
If Left(bkmk.Name, 8) = "OLE_LINK" Then
bkmk.Delete
n = n + 1
End If
Next bkmk

If n > 0 Then
MsgBox n & " bookmarks removed!" & vbCr & vbCr & _
"(Brought to you, courtesy Rob Gilpatric)", vbOKOnly + vbInformation, "No more OLE Bookmarks"
End If

End Sub

Of course, the script cannot be used in Word 2008, since it no longer supports VBA. And I don’t think I am going to try to “translate” this script into an AppleScript script. I don’t really have the time, and it doesn’t really fix the problem anyway. It just gives you a somewhat quicker way (than the manual way) to remove the bookmarks when you have finished working on your document. But you still have to remember to use it each and every time…

More often than not, when you get a Word document with an embedded picture on the Mac, it’s pretty much impossible to edit the picture, even though the same picture might be editable in the same document when opened in Microsoft Word for Windows.

It is also often impossible to simply extract the picture from the document. If you try to use Microsoft Word’s own “Save as Picture…” command (available through the contextual menu when you right-click on an embedded picture), most of the time you’ll end up with a useless picture file with a low-resolution version of the picture. Obviously no one at Microsoft has ever bothered to actually test this particular command on the Mac, at least not with some of the most common image formats used by Mac and PC Word users.

That said, extracting the picture in its original high-resolution format is not necessarily impossible. There are a couple of things that you can try. One is to save the Word document in question as a web page. When you do that, Microsoft Word saves the document as an HTML file, and it saves all the embedded pictures as individual files in a folder next to the HTML file. You have little control over the file format that Word uses for the files, but at least you can the individual picture files and, in my experience, they are usually in the (apparent) original resolution, not in a useless, pixelated low resolution format.

Another way to achieve a similar result without having to save the entire document as a web page is to drag the picture from the Word document onto the desktop (or another Finder location). It can take a while, but eventually this operation creates a “.pictClipping” file in the Finder. You can then double-click on the clipping file to open it and use command-C to copy it to the Clipboard.

Then switch to an image editor or graphics program such as Photoshop, create a new blank file and paste the contents of the Clipboard. You’ll then get the picture in its original resolution and you’ll be able to save it in the format of your choice.

and all of a sudden you get this:

?

It truly is remarkable. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: Microsoft Word 2008 is pure, unadulterated crap. It’s not worth the plastic used to produce the discs.

Meanwhile, my wife is still using Microsoft Word 2004 (because she needs some VBA macros for her work) and the application is crashing nearly each and every time she attempts to print a document.

What am I supposed to tell her? What am I supposed to do? How can any reasonable human being justify spending any amount of time trying to find ways to work about Microsoft Word’s endless list of bugs, flaws, and general insanities?

Based on my parents’ hair colour, I don’t expect to go grey any time soon. Then again, since I am still forced to use Microsoft Word on a regular basis for my work, I wouldn’t be surprised if I started going grey sooner than expected.

And because they are used as containers for blocks of text, they need to support text navigation and selection in the same way that text editors and word processors do. Even though I am a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts for text navigation and selection myself, I am also including mouse-based interactions here.

The support for keyboard shortcuts for text navigation and selection has been notoriously poor in table editing tools in both Apple’s Pages and Microsoft Excel for ages, but there are also numerous problems when attempting to work with blocks of text in table cells with the mouse.

Today, I would like to focus on Microsoft Excel. I am using Excel 2008 as the reference here, but I am pretty sure that the problems are the same in previous versions of Excel for Mac OS and probably in Excel for Windows as well. (I don’t have time to check, but these types of bugs have been around forever and I highly doubt that they have been fixed in any version of Excel.)

Let’s start with something very simple: a table cell in Excel with some text in it.

Right now, the cell is simply selected as a whole (see green outline) and the cursor is the regular cross-shaped cursor for cell selection in Excel. Now let’s get down to business and enter the cell in order to edit its contents, by double-clicking on it:

Already, we have a glitch: Why did the flow of the text change? How does the simple fact of entering a cell to edit it alter its contents in any way? Microsoft has never cared about such “details,” so we just have to live with it and constantly adjust our eyes to the unpredictable way the text flows, depending on whether the cell is in editable mode or not.

Right now the insertion point (I-beam) is right in the middle of the text in the cell—more specifically after the “s” in “support.”

I am in editing mode, so I expect Excel to behave like a proper text editor here. But as soon as I start pressing the Left or Right cursor key repeatedly to move my insertion point around, another “glitch” surfaces, this time one that really affects the usability of the software in a very significant way: While I am pressing the Left or Right cursor key repeatedly, the cursor keeps blinking! Instead of saying constantly visible as it should while it is moving, it keeps going on and off, which means that it is impossible to follow its exact position with one’s eyes.

This is ridiculous. It is Text Editor 101 stuff. Any text editor, any context in Mac OS X where text is being edited has the same behaviour: When the user hits the Left or Right cursor key repeatedly, the cursor stays visible at all times, so that the user can keep track of where the cursor is.

Only Microsoft is incompetent enough not to be able to produce software that complies with this basic rule of text edition. And it’s not an isolated occurrence. Consider these blog items that I have written in the past:

• “Word 2004: New bug with blinking I-beam cursor“
• “Word 2004: More on disappearing I-beam cursor“
• “Word 2004: Insertion point in Find/Replace dialog blinking even when it’s in the background“
• “PowerPoint 2008: Disappearing cursor when using cursor keys in text box“
• “Word 2008: Bookmark symbols hide I-beam cursor“

I think it’s hard not to see a patter here: Microsoft’s Mac developers don’t know how to program a Mac application where the blinking cursor behaves as expected. Considering how basic, how fundamental the function of the cursor is, this gives you an idea of the level of competence of Microsoft’s Mac developers. We are not talking about some obscure bug here. We are talking about what happens when you hit the Left or Right cursor key repeatedly, which is an action that must be repeated dozens of times per day by hundreds of millions of computer users worldwide. If you happen to be a Mac OS X user using Microsoft products, tough luck. Your cursor will keep blinking and you’ll keep having to adjust your actions because, inevitably, when the cursor disappears and you can no longer see where it is, you end up hitting the cursor keys too many times and overshooting.

It’s pathetic. But it’s not all.

Now see what happens when I double-click on a word next to a parenthesis:

A double-click on a word is a shortcut to select that word. Any text editor worthy of the name is smart enough to know that, when the target word is preceded or followed by a parenthesis, it should not select the parenthesis as well, because it’s not really part of the word, even though there is no space separating the word from the parenthesis.

Not Microsoft Excel. No, that is too much to ask. Even though Word 2008 behaves properly here, Excel 2008 does not and systematically selects the parenthesis as well, which makes it utterly frustrating to try and use the double-click to select words in a table cell in Excel.

And it does not stop here. See what happens when I attempt to double-click and drag near the top of the table cell. First I double-click on the second word in the cell to select it:

Then, while still holding my mouse button down, I accidentally drag to the left and up, which adds the previous word (i.e. the first word in the cell) to the selection:

I didn’t mean to do that but hey, stuff happens. People’s fingers slip. Big deal. So, while still holding my mouse button down, I drag in the opposite direction to correct my wrong selection:

Thanks Excel. Now it has changed the direction of the word-by-word selection, but without deselecting the first word, which was accidentally selected when I dragged the mouse in the wrong direction!

If you try to reproduce this at home (at your own risk), you’ll notice that the problem does not occur every time. Sometimes Excel behaves properly, and deselects the first word after the change of direction. But not always. It appears to depend on the exact curve of your mouse movement. I am not going to keep experimenting for half an hour to determine exactly which mouse movements cause the bug to occur. That’s Microsoft’s job. Suffice to say that it is easy enough to reproduce on your own.

The bug probably has to do with the proximity of the cell’s top or bottom edge. If I try to reproduce it in the middle of the cell, I cannot, probably because my error in direction is not large enough to cause my mouse pointer to reach the edges of the cell. But if I reach the edges of the cell, the bug is fairly easy to reproduce.

And of course, here again, if you go back to previous blog posts on this very blog, you’ll see that there is nothing new about word-by-word selection bugs in tables in Microsoft products:

• “Word X: Word selection ugliness in tables“
• “Word 2004: Bug in word selection“

So it’s hardly a surprise that this bug exists in Excel 2008. There are probably still similar bugs in Word 2008 and PowerPoint 2008, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were such bugs in Microsoft products for Windows as well.

You know I could go on. There are many more bugs and quirks in Excel 2008′s basic text editing tools when you try to edit text in table cells.

Again, I want to stress that the problem is not unique to Microsoft. Apple’s Pages and Numbers also have a number of quirks and bugs when editing text in tables, some which I have already documented on this blog.

But I think any reasonable person would agree that, in this area as in so many others, Microsoft takes the cake. They are the only company that has consistently paid so little attention to these small “details” which are so important to get right in order to provide the user with a consistent, predictable user experience and avoid creating all kinds of unnecessary frustration and wasted time.

They are the only company that is utterly unable to get even the smallest, most fundamental things right. They are, in a word, incompetent Mac software developers, and they obviously do not care enough about the Mac platform to fix the quality of their software by hiring competent developers that would pay attention to such “details” and ensure that Microsoft applications behave like normal, quality Mac applications.