Betalogue

One of the drawbacks of rebuilding your Word customizations from scratch (which I have chosen to do after installing Word 2004) is that you have to deal with Microsoft’s totally inconsistent way of naming its commands internally all over again.

For example, I am used to the cmd-F keyboard shortcut for the Find command and to cmd-G for finding the next occurrence. By default, in Word, cmd-G it for the “Go To” command, which I rarely use.

So I go to the Customize Keyboard dialog where such things are changed, and try to find the “Find Next” command so that I can assign the cmd-G shortcut to it.

Well, good luck with that. See, the way commands are organized in that “Customize Dialog” window (and in its counterpart for customizing menus and toolbars) is totally absurd, totally inconsistent, and totally unusable.

For example, the “Find” command is actually listed as “EditFind”. So you’d think that the “Find Next” command would be listed as “EditFindNext”, right? Think again. Not only is it not called “Find Next”, but it’s not prefixed with “Edit” either. In actually fact, the command is called… “RepeatFind”. Interestingly, the description for the command says “Repeats Go To or Find to find the next occurrence” [my emphasis].

So it could have been worse, it could have been called “RepeatGoTo”!

As bad as it is, it could have been even worse: like many other commands, I might have had to look under “All Commands” to find it, because, even though there is an “Edit” category of commands in this dialog, Microsoft has only included a subset of “Edit”-type commands in that “Edit” category. The other ones can only be found under “All Commands” — which is a list of several hundreds of commands.

And they don’t all start with the “Edit” prefix either!

If you’ve followed me this far, you’ll probably be delighted to know that, in the “Edit” category of commands, there is also a command called “EditRedoOrRepeat” in there, whose description says that it “repeats the last action” — except if the action is a Find or a GoTo, obviously.

Ah, the fun of customizing Word…

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, June 3rd, 2004 at 1:23 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.