Word 2004: When the Delete key does not delete

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
June 9th, 2005 • 5:51 am

Recent versions of Word have this weird behaviour where pressing the Delete key at the beginning of an empty paragraph with a negative left indent actually “deletes” the indent instead of deleting the paragraph by removing the preceding paragraph mark and merging the current (empty) paragraph with the previous one.

This behaviour is caused by a preference option called “Tabs and backspace set left indent” in the “Edit” pane in Word’s Preferences dialog box. (Don’t ask me why it’s called that.)

And of course, it’s a setting that is ON by default, even if you have never asked for it and can’t stand the idea of having to press the Delete key twice in order to remove a paragraph mark.

But it gets worse… Say this setting is ON, and you are in the following situation:

negative left indent with tab

If you place your cursor where it is in this picture, and then press the Delete key, you get this:

deleted negative left indent

Fair enough. Word has “deleted” the negative left indent for you. But now look at what happens when you press the Delete key a second time:

negative left indent with tab

If you think that this is the same picture as the first one above, it’s because it is the same picture. And why is it the same picture? Because that’s what Word does! That’s right: In this particular situation, no matter how many times you press the Delete key, Word steadfastly refuses to delete the paragraph mark and bring the text in line with the bullet in the paragraph above.

It’s head-shaking stuff, you know. Yes, you can eliminate this absurd behaviour by unchecking the “Tabs and backspace set left indent” option. But you shouldn’t have to. (It’s on by default.)

And most important, it is completely senseless to have an option that causes the Delete key to fail to act as a Delete key. I don’t care what excuse Microsoft might have to justify this behaviour. It is purely and simply wrong.


2 Responses to “Word 2004: When the Delete key does not delete”

  1. Pierre Igot says:

    Right. They are proud of it. Scary :).

    Thanks for the note about pMcode. The link should be fixed now. Markdown support will probably come when I move to a new blogging system altogether. That might take a while, though. For one thing, I have yet to find a tool that would import pMachine blog entries into WordPress…

  2. Olivier says:

    I don’t care what excuse Microsoft might have to justify this behaviour. It is purely and simply wrong.

    And it looks like they’re proud of it. OK, you know this page, I originally found it here.

    BTW, the link to pMcode below doesn’t work anymore. Maybe this is the new one: pMcode. I’d love Markdown support in comments, though.

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