Pages 2: Cancelling Paste command in table cell causes application to select entire table

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
March 9th, 2006 • 4:42 pm

This is a little bug with potentially hugely destructive consequences.

Say you have a Pages document with a table in it. You copy some text from somewhere else (another document or application) and you want to paste it into a cell in the table.

In order to do this, you need to click once to select the table (the table then gets a thin pale blue frame with anchor points in its corners) and then click a second time to select the actual table cell you want to paste your text into (the borders of the table cell in question then become highlighted in yellow).

Then you do command-V to paste the text.

But then you realize you made a mistake. For example, you pasted the text with its formatting, whereas you wanted to “Paste and Match Style” with command-option-shift-V instead.

So you hit command-Z to cancel the “Paste” command and then command-option-shift-V to paste and match style instead.

Ouch!

Your entire table has disappeared!

What happened here?

What happened is that, when you pressed command-Z
to cancel the initial “Paste” command, Pages not only cancelled the command, but also deselected the table cell and reverted to the situation before the table cell was selected, i.e. the situation where the entire table was selected (with the pale blue frame).

And then when you pressed command-option-shift-V to paste and match style instead, Pages did what it would be expected to do, i.e. pasted the contents of the Clipboard in lieu and place of the current selection, i.e. the entire table is replaced with the pasted contents!

Fortunately, it’s always possible to cancel that last command and reselect the target table cell first. But still… It’s a flaw that could have pretty nasty consequences for people who don’t pay enough attention.


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