Word X: Selected objects are not what they appear to be

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
March 6th, 2003 • 5:37 pm

Yesterday I was working on a Word document that I had to translate.

The document includes tables with numbers (money amounts — not my own money, unfortunately!). Since the formatting for money amounts is different in French from what it is in English (“$” sign before rather than after, comma separator for thousands rather than space, etc.), I wanted to select all the cells with money amounts and apply a series of batch find/replace commands.

I selected three columns with numbers and asked Word to change all trailing ” $” to “” (nothing) and then change spaces to commas. And here is what I got:

A picture named WordXSelection.gif

Notice anything strange? The characters were properly replaced in the first and second column, but not in the third one. Why? I have no idea. The third column is obviously selected, so the find/replace commands should have applied to it as well.

I tried applying the same changes again, to no avail. I deselected and then reselected the three columns. Nada.

Before you ask: Yes, this is a straightforward, 4-column, 8-row table. No merged cells. No table acrobatics. A plain vanilla table.

Nothing worse that being faced every day with the fact that the only “professional” word processor available for Mac OS X cannot even do the most simple stuff right.

Microsoft products should be outlawed.


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