Pages 2: Double-click-and-drag on table cell text fails to select word and extend selection

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Pages
March 13th, 2006 • 11:11 am

Take a Pages document containing a table with cells containing paragraphs of text.

With your mouse, double-click on a word of text inside a table cell that is not the currently selected table cell (i.e. is not highlighted with thick yellow borders).

This correctly selects the table cell in question and, in an appropriate click-through behaviour, also selects the word of text on which the double-click was.

So far, so good.

Now, try the exact same thing, but when you double-click on the word, instead of releasing the mouse button, hold it down and start dragging to the left or to the right.

Normally, on regular paragraphs of text, such an operation would select the word on which the double-click was, and then start extending the selection to the left or to the right word by word with your dragging movement.

With text within a table cell, however, if you do such a double-click-and-drag operation, Pages completely fails to select the word, and instead understands your sequence of mouse operations as an attempt to drag the table cell itself around.

Oops.

It is very irritating, and the very fact that things work as expected when you only double-click (without dragging) proves that this is a clear oversight on Apple’s part. They implemented the proper “click-through” behaviour for the simple double-click, but not for the double-click-and-drag.

This is also means that it’s a problem that is simply impossible to get used to, because if it works for the simple double-click, you are not going to be able to remember that it doesn’t work for double-click-and-drag.

The end result is that, when I edit text in table cells, I encounter the problem all the time. Very irritating.


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