Betalogue

Last week I wrote about this serious problem in Word where clicking on a background document with a selection to bring it to the foreground causes Word to lose the selection.

As I indicated in my post, this “click-through” behaviour doesn’t make sense in the context of editing multiple documents, and the fact that the selection is only lost when clicking on a background Word document window while Word is in the foreground confirms that this is a behaviour that simply should not exist.

Today I can add new evidence to support this assertion. In a Word document window, you can also use the split bar to split the window into two panes, which allows you to view two different sections of the same document in a single window at the same time.

These two panes cannot be both in the foreground at the same time. When one pane is in the foreground, the other is in the background, and vice versa. In order to switch the focus from one pane to the other, you can either use the mouse pointer and click anywhere on the pane that you want to bring to the foreground, or use the keyboard shortcut for the “OtherPane” command. (It’s F6 on my system.)

Expecting Word to be consistent in its inconsistency, I thought that switching panes with a mouse click would also cause Word to lose the existing selection in the background pane when it’s brought to the foreground by clicking on it. Well, I was wrong. If some text is selected in the pane that is currently in the background in the document window, and if you click anywhere on the pane to bring it to the foreground, Word doesn’t not lose the selection.

This is, of course, the normal behaviour, the one that the user should expect. The problem is that it is inconsistent with Word’s own behaviour when switching windows with a mouse click, which loses the selection, as described above.

So, to sum things up, when you have a Word document with some text selected:

• If you click on a Word document window that’s in the background from within Word, the mouse click also loses the existing selection.
• If you click on a Word document window that’s in the background from within another Mac OS X application, the mouse click does not cause Word to lose the existing selection.
• If you click on a Word document window pane that’s in the background from within the other window pane, the mouse click does not cause Word to lose the existing selection.

As for what happens when you click on the background pane of a background window from within Word, I’ll let you discover it by yourself :).

To me, such inconsistency is a clear reflection of Microsoft’s sloppy programming. When you experience such behaviours while using Word, you get the distinct impression that Microsoft’s programmers are simply not paying attention to such things. If they were paying attention, you would at least expect them to be consistent in their inconsistency (i.e. non-compliance with Mac OS standards). But no, they obviously can’t be bothered.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, September 20th, 2004 at 12:25 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.