Betalogue

A while ago, I wrote about the problem with windows and toolbars in Word X. I explained that it was far too easy to drag a Word document window by its title bar and drop it behind Word’s toolbars, thereby making the window’s title bar effectively inaccessible.

I am afraid I have to report that Microsoft has done nothing to fix the problem in Word 2004. Things work in exactly the same way, and it’s still far too easy to “accidentally” drag and drop a document window in a way that renders its title bar inaccessible. (Follow the link above to see how you can work around this problem once this has occurred.)

So on one side you have a software company (Apple) that provides third-party developers with tools that let them make their applications “Dock-aware” or includes a feature in Mac OS X that automatically resizes a window when you move it to a secondary screen where it’s too big to fit.

And then on the other side you have a software company (Microsoft) that’s not even able to design its application so that it is aware of its own interface elements and prevents such situations from happening in the first place. When you drag a document window in Word, Word does not appear to be aware of the existence of its own toolbars and does nothing to prevent you from dropping the window’s title bar behind the toolbars.

Grrr.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, August 30th, 2004 at 12:28 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.