Betalogue

You are typing a text in Word. You want to create a new style for a particular series of paragraphs. You go to the “Style” dialog by choosing “Styles…” in the “Format” menu, you click on the “New…” button, you name and define your style, you click on “OK” to validate the creation of the style.

At this point, you are back to the main “Style” window. The “Cancel” button has changed to “Close” and the default button is still “Apply”. In other words, you cannot “undo” the creation of the style. Clicking on “Close” will further validate the creation of the style without applying it to the current paragraph, whereas clicking on “Apply” will both further validate the creation of the style and apply it to the current paragraph. If you want to “undo” the creation of the style, you need to select it in the list of styles and click on the “Delete” button.

The problem is that, if you click on “Apply”, and then change your mind and decide you don’t want to apply the style that you’ve just created to the current paragraph, and you type cmd-Z to cancel the application of the style, Word also cancels the actual creation of the style and deletes the newly created style from your document’s style sheet!

It is obviously counterintuitive. If the choice in the “Style” dialog is between “Close” (without applying) and “Apply”, this obviously means that the creation of the style is already a done deal, the penultimate action. When you click on “Apply”, the last action is to apply the style, not to create and apply the style. Cancelling the last action should therefore only cancel the application of the style, not its creation.

It’s seemingly little things like this that make the process of creating and using styles in Word so counterintuitive for so many people.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Sunday, June 29th, 2003 at 5:35 pm 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.