Word X: ‘HyperText’ fields

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
April 10th, 2003 • 7:07 pm

Who ever came up at Microsoft with the idea that, by default, cross-referential fields inserted in Word documents should be “live” and behave like hyperText links when one clicks on them.

It makes editing them a horrible pain in the neck. You have existing Word documents in which you need to edit the field or the text around the field.

But if the field is “live”, just clicking on it once by accident is enough to send you flying to the source of the link, which might be several pages away, and you’re left scrambling to find your way back to where you were. Grrr….

Microsoft are masters of the highest ORDER in the art of choosing wrong default settings for their features. Of course, most users don’t even realize that there are settings you can change. And so Microsoft’s dubious choices become de facto standards and a pain in the neck for people like me (and many others I suspect).

(The same thing happened with HTML email. One day someone at Microsoft decided that the default email format in their flagship Outlook Express email application should be HTML rather than plain text… And the rest is history.)

Grrr, grrr, double grrr.


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