Word X: Automatic behaviours

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
April 14th, 2003 • 5:50 pm

There is little that’s more grating in Word X (and previous versions, of course) than these automatic behaviours that cannot be turned off.

One of them is this stupid behaviour where the paragraph ruler automatically slides out of the top of the window whenever the cursor happens to be near the top. This behaviour is independent from the command that determines whether the ruler is visible or not (“Ruler” command in “View” menu)… and there is no way to turn it off.

I never use this “feature” to make the ruler appear. If I want to see the ruler, I use the “Ruler” command (I have assigned the cmd-R shortcut to it). Yet of course it happens quite often that I “accidentally” leave my mouse somewhere in the “trigger” area and the ruler slides out while I’m trying to do or access something else. Grrr…

Another one is all these stupid Word toolbars that appear out of nowhere in certain situations. For example, when I am editing a Word document in which people have unwittingly created active HyperText links (they don’t realize that the option is on by default and don’t disable it), each time I accidentally click on one of these links, Word automatically displays… its “Web” toolbar. Grrr…

I know there’s supposed to be an (undocumented) way to “disable” such toolbars altogether, but it doesn’t really work.


One Response to “Word X: Automatic behaviours”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    It turns out that the automatic ruler behaviour can be turned off by unchecking the “Provide feedback with animation” option in the “General” tab in Word’s preferences.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.