PowerPoint 2011: Paragraph selection bug

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
February 13th, 2011 • 11:10 am

Here’s yet another example of the pathetic level of attention to detail in Microsoft products for Mac OS X. (This level is close to zero.)

Say you have a list of items formatted as bullets:

Bullet list

I don’t need to tell you how common this type of thing is in PowerPoint presentations.

As expected, a single click on the second word in the first bullet item here puts the insertion point in the word.

As expected, a double click on that word selects that word:

Select word

And still as expected, a triple click on that same word selects the entire paragraph:

Select paragraph

But now consider what happens if, after the triple click, instead if releasing the mouse button, you drag the mouse down to extend the selection. Since the whole paragraph was selected with a triple click, dragging the mouse down should extend the selection paragraph by paragraph. Instead, here’s what happens in PowerPoint 2011:

Extend paragraph selection

PowerPoint deselects the first word of the paragraph that I have just selected and extends the selection down word by word instead of paragraph by paragraph.

This is clearly wrong, and clearly a bug. Unfortunately, such bugs are legion in PowerPoint for Mac OS X (and in all other Microsoft products for Mac OS X). Microsoft’s engineers simply do not care about such details and don’t pay any attention. And we are forced to live with the bugs. Because you can mark my words: this will never be fixed in a PowerPoint 2011 update. Microsoft’s engineers don’t fix bugs. Instead, they constantly introduce new ones.


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