Betalogue

Word is a royal pain in the you-know-what when it comes to editing page borders.

Typically, I use a page border on the title page of a document, which is the very first page of the document. In order to only have a border on that page (and not on all other pages in the document), I have to divide the document into two sections, by inserting a section break.

Once I’ve created two sections, I put my cursor somewhere in the first section, and go to the “Borders and Shading” dialog (Format menu). “Page Borders” is a specific tab within that dialog box.

The problem is that, by default, Word sets the “Apply to” option in that tab to “Whole document”. This means that, each time I want to use a border only on my first page, I need to remember to change that default option to “This section”.

But it gets worse. Even after I’ve specifically applied a page border only to my first section, if I put my cursor somewhere in that first section and go back to the “Page border” tab in “Borders and Shading”, Word displays the type of border that I have applied, but resets the “Apply to” option to “Whole document”!

In other words, even though my border is only applied to the first section, when I go to the “Borders and Shading” to edit that existing border, Word “forgets” that it only applies to the first section and puts “Whole document” in the “Apply to” field.

Of course, if I forget this quirk, and just edit my page border without changing the “Apply to” option back to “This section”, then as soon as I click “OK”, Word applies my page border settings to the entire document!

Grrr…

I know that in certain situations you don’t have to create several sections and can just check the “Different First Page” option in Word to add a page border to the first page only. But I cannot use this option if my page numbering starts after that title page — which is what you are supposed to do when you have a title page. (A title page doesn’t count in the page count.)

In any case, this is obviously a flaw in the “Page border” dialog. It is one thing that the default option when you want to create a new page border is to apply it to the whole document. (That’s bad enough.) But it’s quite another not to reflect the application range of an existing page border when editing it! It’s just plain wrong. A dialog box for editing existing settings is supposed to reflect these existing settings accurately.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, June 12th, 2003 at 1:16 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.