Betalogue

For years, Word has had this stupid “feature” where the default behaviour of the Page Up and Page Down keys is not just to go up or down by one “page” (more accurately, by one “screen,” where a screen is defined by the size of the visible portion of the document in the document window), but also move the cursor (insertion point) at the same time.

This means that the only way to scroll up or down a document without moving the cursor is to use the mouse. I hate this. I want to be able to use the Page Up and Page Down keys without moving the cursor.

In previous versions of Word, it was possible to use macros for this. But of course Word 2008 no longer supports macros. You have to use AppleScript scripts via Word 2008’s script menu.

I was able to find the AppleScript equivalents for the macros that I had in Word 2004. They are:

tell application "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word.app"
	tell active pane of active window
		large scroll down 1
	end tell
end tell

for “Page Down” and

tell application "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word.app"
	tell active pane of active window
		large scroll up 1
	end tell
end tell

for “Page Up.”

I saved these two scripts as “My Page Down” and “My Page Up” with the Script Editor application and added them to Word’s script menu.

But then I wanted to reassign the Page Up and Page Down keyboard keys to these scripts. Word 2008 let me remove the keyboard shortcuts from its own internal PageUp and PageDown commands via the “Customize Keyboard” dialog box. But unfortunately Word 2008 does not let you assign keyboard shortcuts to AppleScripts in its script menu!

Instead, you have to use the “Keyboard Shortcuts” pane in System Preferences to assign keyboard shortcuts to the scripts, which are treated as Microsoft Word menu items once they appear in Word’s script menu.

The problem is that the “Keyboard Shortcuts” pane refuses to let you use the Page Up and Page Down keys for keyboard shortcuts, even for application-specific shortcuts.

This means that the only way to use the two AppleScript scripts in Word with keyboard shortcuts is to assign different keyboard shortcuts to them. I used F14 and F15, which are right above the Page Up and Page Down keys on my aluminum keyboard.

But of course it’s not ideal. Am I going to blame Apple for this? Of course not. It’s Microsoft’s fault that their default behaviour for Page Up and Page Down is so stupid in the first place. And it’s Microsoft’s fault that it is no longer possible to assign shortcuts to scripts in Word 2008 the way it was possible to assign shortcuts to macros in previous versions.

But of course Microsoft does not care about this. The best we can hope for is that the next version of Word (in, like, 2012) will support macros again in the same way that Word 2004. Knowing Microsoft, I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reintroduction of macros in Word 2012 (or whatever it’s called) turned out to be a crippled version of what was available in Word 2004.

Until then, F14 and F15 will have to do—and I’ll keep using Pages as often as I can.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.