Running from scissors

In grade school, my teacher would sometimes have us work on "collages". This lesson plan consisted of us kids cutting up old magazines with those crappy blunt-tip scissors and then pasting the pictures onto poster board with delicious library paste. It wasn't much of a lesson plan, I think my teacher saved it for days she was hung over. 

Similarly, I'm pretty sure the Word team was drunk when they implemented cut-and-paste. At the very least, they didn't have the benefit of my grade school teacher to teach them the basic concept. I'll review the concept here in case any of the MS Word development team is reading this little blog (yeah, right). Here's how it works in the real world: 

1. you choose a thing to cut. 

2. you cut the thing.

3. you choose a place to paste the thing

4. you paste the thing

Seems easy enough. Hell, I figured it out in grade school even when I was feeling woozy from eating too much library paste.

Not for Microsoft, though. Here's how cut-and-paste works in Word 2008:

1. you choose a thing to cut

2. you cut the thing (or so you think)

3. you choose a place to paste the thing

4. you paste the thing, but magically, it turns into a different kind of thing!

Yes, that's right. If you cut text from Word and paste it into a different application, Word decides you wanted to paste a picture of the text, not the text itself. Why in the hell would I want that? The mind reels. This is one of the very most basic Mac behaviors. We Mac users have been happily cutting and pasting since 1985. Don't think you're so smart, either, 'cause drag-and-drop does the same thing. Drag some text from a Word doc to the desktop and, ta da, a picture clipping appears. 

Frankly, and this doesn't happen often, I'm at a loss for words. Try as I might, I can't imagine the meeting where they decided violating one of the most basic Mac behaviors and doing something the user can't possibly expect would be the best way to go. Perhaps someone did it as a joke, maybe it was Backwards Day, and the team forgot to fix it?

Maybe the Word development team needs to go back to grade school and bone up on the basics... There are lot of days when I would rather be using crayons myself.

Crow-eating update: in the 12.01 update,  it looks like MS fixed this problem, mostly. I still can't paste text into a Fireworks doc, and drag-and-drop still produces a pictClipping, but now I can cut and paste text into most of the other apps on my machine. "Yay."