I’d like a button to jump to the end of Go To’s bookmark menu.

[RogerKni]

It can be quite lengthy.

----------------
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http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...b0e042&dg=microsoft.public.word.docmanagement

 

[Pat Garard]

Develop your own GoTo Box.
It would be quite an education for you.
Many people develop such AddIns - the sensible ones actually make money!

 

[RogerKni]

I made a mistake on this. There is a slider bar on the right that can be
pulled down to move rapidly to the end of the bookmark menu. But that
suggests a different improvement: Enlarge the slider's "bar-handle" (or
whatever it's called) to make it more visible. It's only 1/3 the height of
the up- and down-scroll buttons at the top and bottom of the slider, so it's
easy to miss. It's also so small it's "fiddly" to latch onto with the mouse,
to drag it.

Another little tweak I suggest is to dynamically make the dialog box
"taller" when there are a large number of bookmarks detected when the box is
opened. In my 100-page document, I have 80 bookmarks, which means that very
slight motions of the slider bar produce awkwardly large jumps in the menu.
The desirable fine-tuned level of control is eroded as the number of
bookmarks increases. (This is something that might have been missed in
usability testing, where the test data might have included only two or three
dozen bookmarks.)

This, like most of the other suggestions-for-improvement I've made to this
topic/area (Bookmarks and Go To), is only a tweak. But two hundred such
tweaks, each undetectable in itself, would raise the overall satisfaction
level with Word and lead reviewers and consultants to recommend upgrading.
This would be a less expensive way of encouraging upgrades than MS's 9-digit
"dinosaur" ad campaign.

 

[Pat Garard]

This is my last observation ....
It is called a (Vertical) Scroll bar.
The vertical size of the slider is inversely proportional to the length of the
list.
It has been around for a while, only ONE person has complained.
It is a 'standard' control that nobody is going to redesign anytime soon.
There is a very interesting extended scroll bar in 'DateLens'.
...

 

[RogerKni]

The slider-grabber is hard to see when the list is long (because it shrinks).
Therefore, at a minimum, it should be given a contrasting color, so it's
easier to see. That wouldn't require a redesign. If nothing else comes out of
my complaint but this little tweak-ette, I’d still be justified in having
raised the issue. It often happens that the solution proposed is unfeasible
for one reason or another. That doesn’t mean that the product should
absolutely stand pat. Instead, a search for partial solutions to the problem
should be engaged in.

More ambitiously (but less ambitiously than my previous suggestion of
enlarging the box’s height dynamically), I think the slider-grabber should be
prevented from shrinking below some minimum size. I hope that would be
do-able without “shaking the foundations.â€

I wouldn't expect there would be many complaints about the design of the
slider bar, because in most cases the contents of the underlying list are
fixed, or rarely grow to any great size. But I think that, despite the
absence of complaints, it can’t be disputed that this feature is awkward to
work with when many items DO populate the list, relative to the box's height,
causing it to shrink to a hard-to-grab size.

I'm only running this up the flagpole for MS to consider, as a way of
possibly making its products friendlier. Of course a poll of their focus
groups would be “in order†to see if it would really provide widespread
benefit. I'm not insisting that a redesign be done, just because I think it
would be cool.

 

[RogerKni]

Hold the phone! I just discovered that by clicking underneath the slider, it
drops down one screen’s-worth of lines. (And similarly by clicking above the
slider, it jumps up one screen’s-worth.) Well, that solves the problem. (But
it would still be nice to use a contrasting color on the slider.)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

That is the way all such scroll bars work. Haven't you ever tried this on
the vertical scroll bar in Word or Internet Explorer?

 

[Pat Garard]

Hold the phone! I just discovered that by clicking underneath the slider, it

drops down one screen's-worth of lines.

Well $hit a Brick! The World WILL be pleased! Who would have known?

it would still be nice to use a contrasting color on the slider

Perhaps a Pretty Pink...or even a different shade of Grey?

 

[Roger K]

This is my last observation ....
It is called a (Vertical) Scroll bar.
The vertical size of the slider is inversely proportional to the length of the
list.
It has been around for a while, only ONE person has complained.
It is a 'standard' control that nobody is going to redesign anytime soon.
There is a very interesting extended scroll bar in 'DateLens'.
...
--
Regards,
Pat Garard
Melbourne, Australia
_______________________

I've just discovered that it already has been redesigned, by Apple in 1999,
in the manner I suggested. It's described in "Switching to the Mac" by Pogue
& Goldstein, p. 33:

"Mac OS X introduces a new scroll bar option called "Scroll to here." ...
Now when you click in the scroll-bar track, the Mac ... scrolls directly to
the spot you clicked. That is, if you clicked at the very bottom of the
scroll-bar track, you see the very last page."

 

[Roger K]

Perhaps a Pretty Pink...or even a different shade of Grey?
--
Regards,
Pat Garard
Melbourne, Australia
_______________________

The muted contrasting color that IE and OE use on their sliders would be fine.