No, this is not a noodle dish at your local Thai joint. I'm referring instead to the behavior you see when you make formatting changes to text in a table. For the last few versions, Word has been plagued with buggy re-draw behavior. Since the issues have been around over many versions of the app, I can only conclude that MS's consumer testing has revealed that users of Word don't look at the screen when they work. Perhaps they should stop using moles and earthworms for their consumer testing, because re-draw errors drive me, a human, crazy. For some reason, tables are especially prone to these errors.
Yesterday, I was working on a large doc with many tables. Within these tables, I had to re-format a bunch of text to a new style. Every time I re-formatted the text, the display of the row would screw up, providing a sort of double-vision effect that new fraternity pledges might enjoy, but which really doesn't do much for my productivity. I've learned that the only way to fix this (the display issue, I have no idea how to "fix" those who pledge fraternities) is to scroll the section I'm working on up out of sight and then back again, thereby forcing a re-draw. Of course, this means taking my hands off the keyboard and using the mouse, which slows me down a lot.
So, I would try and work with the messed up display until each formatting change rendered the screen so illegible I could no longer tell what I was selecting. At that point, it looks like the image above. So, work grinds to a halt so I can scroll up and back down again to refresh the display.
Actually, wouldn't it be great if life worked this way? If you start really screwing something up, instead of having it all snowball and explode in your face, you could just close your eyes and open them again, and everything would be all pickles and puppies again. Sort of like reality is a giant Etch-a-Sketch you can shake and start over. Perhaps I've got MS all wrong, they just want to make our world more beautiful.
Nah.
No comments:
Post a Comment