Word X: Brain-dead split bar behavior

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 14th, 2004 • 4:27 am

Open a Word document. Use the split bar to split the window into two separate panes in order to display two different sections of the same document at the same time.

Go to the second pane, scroll down the document, do some text editing.

Take your mouse pointer, drag it to the first pane, click somewhere in the first pane to insert the blinking I-beam cursor in a specific location in that first pane and indicate to Word that this is where you want the cursor to be now.

Double-click on the split bar to remove it and revert back to a single pane view.

Word reverts to a single pane view, but displays the portion of the document that is visible in the second pane, not the portion of the document where you’ve just put your I-beam cursor in order to indicate to Word that this is where you want to be.

Worse still, it puts your I-beam cursor back where it was in the second pane when you last edited text in there.

Grrr.

Even worse: Even if you not only insert your I-beam cursor somewhere in the first pane and start typing something, after double-clicking on the split bar Word X still displays the portion of the document that was visible in the second pane and puts the I-beam cursor back there.

Double grrr.

In addition, on my machine, with my dual monitor setup, if I try to add a split bar to a Word document window that is on the second monitor, the “ghost” split bar that is normally displayed by Word while you are dragging the split bar widget somewhere in the window, in order to indicate where in the window the split bar will be placed when you release the mouse, is invisible. Buh.

(I was going to take a snap shot of this ghost split bar with Snapz Pro X, but for some reason it is impossible. The ghost bar turns into a real split bar as soon as the Snapz Pro X shortcut is triggered, even if the mouse button is still down.)


2 Responses to “Word X: Brain-dead split bar behavior”

  1. James says:

    Maybe you could try to capture a movie of what you’re doing and you could grab frames from that movie.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Yeah — but I think it’s pretty obvious what I am referring to here :). (And I didn’t purchase the movie option for Snapz Pro X.)

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