Inserting fractions in Times

[Elliott Roper]

Only in WinWord 2002/2003, John, presumably as an attempt to force people to
use the Win equivalent of the Formatting Palette. Still there in default
configurations of MacWord 2004, thankfully.

Daiya

I'm not so sure. Mine had to be put back in after a default install.
Maybe it starts off giuded by the compatibility settings. Or maybe Word
likes to tease the unwary.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Or maybe yours accidentally got terminated while invoking cmd-opt-minus. I
checked in a new user account, where I deliberately (with some hassle)
unloaded my global templates so it was a completely default install. It's
still there. Confirmed by others.

Heh!. I'm not betting real money against that proposition. I'm
constantly amazed that worse things have not happened while typing the
right shortcut into the wrong application. ;-)

 

[Clive Huggan]

Heh!. I'm not betting real money against that proposition. I'm
constantly amazed that worse things have not happened while typing the
right shortcut into the wrong application. ;-)

Elliott,

When I want to modify a style (which is frequently, as you know, because of
the needs of disparate clients) I simply use the time-honoured sequence:

1. Make the changes manually in a paragraph styled with the style I want to
modify.

2. Click in the styles pop-down menu and press Return (the Formatting
Palette doesn't have to be open to do this, unlike what I understand was the
situation in Word X ­ in fact, having gone straight from Word 2001 to 2004,
I have never had to use the FP).

3. Click Return to affirmatively answer the "update style?" question.

When I want to change the template or style inheritances, I use Format menu
-> Style (for which I use a keyboard shortcut, of course).

FYI.

Cheers,

Clive
=======

 

[Clive Huggan]

Thanks, no, you are right. I was whining about 11.2, and its all fixed
now.

Just FYI, knowing how you had problems in changing styles by keyboard
shortcut in Word X when the Formatting Palette was not visible, I responded
on my keystroke-only way of modifying styles, Elliott - in the "Inserting
fractions in Times" thread, because I had (on the current thread) an
instance of Entourage's "subject heading gobbles the most recent posts" bug.
Probably means I have to rebuild the $&*#!! database again, and re-allocate
*all* my project settings one by one... :-\

Clive
=====

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

All:

Just make sure you haven't missed the new mechanism that has replaced Modify
Style...

The functionality has been superseded in Word 2004 by a better mechanism on
the Formatting Palette. Agreed, it's a bit non-intuitive and isn't
explained well in the Help, but it works REALLY well.

If you wish to change the formatting of a style:

1) Format a paragraph or some text the way you want it.

2) Select the text with the desired formatting

3) Display the formatting Palette

4) Display and scroll to the style you want to change

5) Drop-down the disclosure triangle for that style

6) Choose "Update to match selection"

Once you get used to it, this is very quick and extremely powerful: You can
make ANY style adopt the formatting you have just applied to the paragraph.
You do not have to enable Automatically Update Styles, and you can use it to
copy from one style to another

Hope this helps

Just FYI, knowing how you had problems in changing styles by keyboard
shortcut in Word X when the Formatting Palette was not visible, I responded
on my keystroke-only way of modifying styles, Elliott - in the "Inserting
fractions in Times" thread, because I had (on the current thread) an
instance of Entourage's "subject heading gobbles the most recent posts" bug.
Probably means I have to rebuild the $&*#!! database again, and re-allocate
*all* my project settings one by one... :-\

Clive
=====

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

The mechanism Clive refers to has been extended to the Formatting Palette in
Word 2004, where some will find it easier to find and use...

Agreed, it's a bit non-intuitive and isn't explained well in the Help, but
it works REALLY well.

If you wish to change the formatting of a style:

1) Format a paragraph or some text the way you want it.

2) Select the text with the desired formatting

3) Display the formatting Palette

4) Display and scroll to the style you want to change

5) Drop-down the disclosure triangle for that style

6) Choose "Update to match selection"

Once you get used to it, this is very quick and extremely powerful: You can
make ANY style adopt the formatting you have just applied to the paragraph.
You do not have to enable Automatically Update Styles, and you can use it to
copy from one style to another

Hope this helps

Elliott,

When I want to modify a style (which is frequently, as you know, because of
the needs of disparate clients) I simply use the time-honoured sequence:

1. Make the changes manually in a paragraph styled with the style I want to
modify.

2. Click in the styles pop-down menu and press Return (the Formatting
Palette doesn't have to be open to do this, unlike what I understand was the
situation in Word X ­ in fact, having gone straight from Word 2001 to 2004,
I have never had to use the FP).

3. Click Return to affirmatively answer the "update style?" question.

When I want to change the template or style inheritances, I use Format menu
-> Style (for which I use a keyboard shortcut, of course).

FYI.

Cheers,

Clive
=======

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Elliott Roper]

All:

Just make sure you haven't missed the new mechanism that has replaced Modify
Style...

This one really rattles my cage. It is the world's most hopeless
mis-application of pointy-clicky idiocy.

If you want to change a style, which should be rare indeed, you need to
do it with precision, and in one place. It is a different *kind* of
operation, utterly unrelated to semi-random mouse clicks all over the
application as you change the /look/ of J Random Paragraph, and then
finally press a button that should be labelled "In spite of my better
judgement, I will now trust Word to do what I meant and not what I
clicked when altering my previously carefully crafted style to what
looks vaguely right on screen, and I hereby rescind all claims against
the designer for wrecking the rest of my document."

Fortunately Beth showed me how to get the old behaviour back. Yet I
have a horrible feeling about the next version of Word. There is going
to be lots more of this silliness isn't there?

The functionality has been superseded in Word 2004 by a better mechanism on
the Formatting Palette. Agreed, it's a bit non-intuitive and isn't
explained well in the Help, but it works REALLY well.

If you wish to change the formatting of a style:

1) Format a paragraph or some text the way you want it.

2) Select the text with the desired formatting

3) Display the formatting Palette

4) Display and scroll to the style you want to change

5) Drop-down the disclosure triangle for that style

You omitted to add ".. which is not normally shown. It hides behind
either a big fat lower case a or a pilcrow depending on whether the
original style was character or paragraph until you hover the mouse
over it"

What *were* they thinking of?

6) Choose "Update to match selection"

Once you get used to it, this is very quick and extremely powerful: You can
make ANY style adopt the formatting you have just applied to the paragraph.
You do not have to enable Automatically Update Styles, and you can use it to
copy from one style to another

I see the smiley. I guess you are being ironic. Why would you *ever*
want to change a style like that? It is nothing more than an invitation
to destroy your document.

And, while we are at it, there is still no way to disable that stupid
alert box that asks whether you want to change the style to match the
formatting. And the only setting you can make is to always allow Word
to butcher your carefully crafted style whenever it feels the urge
coming on too strong.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Elliott,

When I want to modify a style (which is frequently, as you know, because of
the needs of disparate clients) I simply use the time-honoured sequence:

1. Make the changes manually in a paragraph styled with the style I want to
modify.

2. Click in the styles pop-down menu and press Return (the Formatting
Palette doesn't have to be open to do this, unlike what I understand was the
situation in Word X ­ in fact, having gone straight from Word 2001 to 2004,
I have never had to use the FP).

Here it is changed. I no longer need the formatting palette on screen.
Now I need the formatting toolbar. Progress ain't what it used to be.
Fortunately I can throw everything off it but the style name box. But I
still need it on sreen for cmd-shift-s to do anything sensible.

3. Click Return to affirmatively answer the "update style?" question.

When I want to change the template or style inheritances, I use Format menu
-> Style (for which I use a keyboard shortcut, of course).

Yeah, I know. I just got stuck into McGhie on a similar subject.

I'll reluctantly admit that method could be used once a year when
setting up the first rough draft of templates for a new customer.
Otherwise, I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. It is a recipe for
having a document go feral on you, minutes before a deadline.

The more I see of the direction Word is going, the better LaTeX is
looking.

Why should I have to go to so much trouble to lock down the styles of a
series of documents?

Seriously, the gap between professional and casual use needs to be made
more explicit rather than less. Styles and templates are the chief
tools in getting consistent design across a company's or customer's
documents. They are so firmly at the professional end of Word's
repertoire that if ever anything needed to be precise, lockable and
non-clicky it is those.

 

[CyberTaz]

finally press a button that should be labelled "In spite of my better
judgement, I will now trust Word to do what I meant and not what I
clicked when altering my previously carefully crafted style to what
looks vaguely right on screen, and I hereby rescind all claims against
the designer for wrecking the rest of my document."

But how could all that possibly be included in a Control Tip Box? And what
kind of icon could conceivably represent it 'intuitively'?

Regards |:>)

 

[Elliott Roper]

But how could all that possibly be included in a Control Tip Box? And what
kind of icon could conceivably represent it 'intuitively'?

Regards |:>)

Heh!
A helix, sharpened at one end.
;-)

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Elliott:

Your response is exactly as mine was when I first saw the mechanism

All I can suggest is: Use it for a while. You may even have to "force"
yourself to do it the first couple of times.

Once you get used to it, you may find it becomes habit-forming. I did.

I find I can change styles with exactly the same precision as before
(because the mechanism uses the same commands and dialog boxes...) but less
guesswork (because I can see what I am doing in WYSIWYG while I am working).

Yes, there are several more tools like this coming down the pike. And the
reason is that the user interface that you and I are used to was too
difficult for people to use. I'm not saying it was too difficult for
documentation professionals -- it wasn't. But we make up less than one per
cent of Word's user base.

It was too difficult for the other 99 per cent. I watched my ex-boss
starting a new document the other night. She did it all in Normal Style,
using the Font pulldowns from the Format menu. Now, she is a power-user who
knows about styles and would use them if she could find them.

There are two fundamental changes coming down the pike at us in the next
version:

* The first is that the user will be less and less aware of what we know of
as "Styles". Increasingly, these will be replaced by "Building Blocks",
document components chosen from a gallery containing multiple preformatted
objects, which will include paragraphs. For example, there will be "chunks"
of documents that users can drag into place.

* The second is that behind the scenes, "styles" will become the only way
that Word does formatting. What "looks" like direct formatting to the end
user will in fact be a style behind the scenes.

It's going to represent a change in the way you and I work. All our old
keystrokes and menu access will go. The change will not really be noticed
by ordinary users. I've watched ordinary users playing with the PC version
of the new interface: they "notice" that it is new, but they find their way
around it literally within minutes.

Much more importantly, a huge percentage of ordinary users achieve
"precision formatting" very similar to that created by a document
professional, and far faster than they did in previous versions of Word.
They continue to drive Word the way they always have: hack and chop, point
and plop. But the code that ends up in the document is tight, clean, and
styled

I could go on for pages without really convincing you. All I can suggest is
that you decide to suspend disbelief until you've have a chance to use the
thing a bit.

I wasn't convinced immediately. I'm not entirely convinced yet The
whole implementation is still under development. It's far from perfect yet.
But it's already better than what we have now. Far, far better.

Conceptually, it's a real leap forward. This is one of the truly "great"
achievements in computing. This gets us several steps forward in putting
the power of the computer in the hands of the people who need it: the users.
This change is massive and its impacts will be reverberating for years.
Those of us in IT have known about the huge improvement in computing power
in the past ten years: it's been obvious to us. But not to the ordinary
user. The ordinary user is not creating documents any faster, better,
bigger, or more reliably than they were in WordPerfect ten years ago! In
the next version, they can.

This is not just new menus and toolbars. But there are new menus and
toolbars. There are also a few new things. This is not just a new file
format. But there is a new file format, that is a quarter the size and
open-standard and human-readable. This is not just a more efficient way of
doing things, but it is more efficient: the PC early betas are much faster
than the production release of the previous version. This is the
convergence of a huge amount of work that has been going on all over
Microsoft behind the scenes for the past five or so years.

We're going to have a lot of fun talking about this one. The Fat Lady
hasn't sung yet: but when she does, I think we'll like the tune

Cheers

All:

Just make sure you haven't missed the new mechanism that has replaced Modify
Style...

This one really rattles my cage. It is the world's most hopeless
mis-application of pointy-clicky idiocy.

If you want to change a style, which should be rare indeed, you need to
do it with precision, and in one place. It is a different *kind* of
operation, utterly unrelated to semi-random mouse clicks all over the
application as you change the /look/ of J Random Paragraph, and then
finally press a button that should be labelled "In spite of my better
judgement, I will now trust Word to do what I meant and not what I
clicked when altering my previously carefully crafted style to what
looks vaguely right on screen, and I hereby rescind all claims against
the designer for wrecking the rest of my document."

Fortunately Beth showed me how to get the old behaviour back. Yet I
have a horrible feeling about the next version of Word. There is going
to be lots more of this silliness isn't there?

The functionality has been superseded in Word 2004 by a better mechanism on
the Formatting Palette. Agreed, it's a bit non-intuitive and isn't
explained well in the Help, but it works REALLY well.

If you wish to change the formatting of a style:

1) Format a paragraph or some text the way you want it.

2) Select the text with the desired formatting

3) Display the formatting Palette

4) Display and scroll to the style you want to change

5) Drop-down the disclosure triangle for that style

You omitted to add ".. which is not normally shown. It hides behind
either a big fat lower case a or a pilcrow depending on whether the
original style was character or paragraph until you hover the mouse
over it"

What *were* they thinking of?

6) Choose "Update to match selection"

Once you get used to it, this is very quick and extremely powerful: You can
make ANY style adopt the formatting you have just applied to the paragraph.
You do not have to enable Automatically Update Styles, and you can use it to
copy from one style to another

I see the smiley. I guess you are being ironic. Why would you *ever*
want to change a style like that? It is nothing more than an invitation
to destroy your document.

And, while we are at it, there is still no way to disable that stupid
alert box that asks whether you want to change the style to match the
formatting. And the only setting you can make is to always allow Word
to butcher your carefully crafted style whenever it feels the urge
coming on too strong.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Elliott Roper]

Hi Elliott:

Your response is exactly as mine was when I first saw the mechanism

All I can suggest is: Use it for a while. You may even have to "force"
yourself to do it the first couple of times.

<snip well reasoned optimistic stuff>
I'll try to keep an open mind then.
I'm a curmudgeonly old assembler programmer who never really got all
that excited over the language du jour stuff of the last 25 years.
So often, I could not see the *improvements* that were touted. It's not
till you get a framework that really really works elegantly that the
benefit is obvious. The really elegant stuff is what works well for all
classes of user, from control freak to the happy point and plopper
(I'll pinch that phrase if I may)

I'll hope that that is an analogy for Word 12. It is going to be a
bigger leap for Mac users with the single main menu bar being such a
strong unifying concept absent from Windows.

I'm heartily sick of toolbars in every application I use. I normally
use Word with just one - formatting - cut down to a single button, and
it with only a few pixels peeping out from one edge of the screen.

Would you say the data merge manager is something like the new
interface. A panel with some precision, definite function, that gets
out of your way when you are done with it?

What you are describing sounds a little bit like the inspectors in
OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. I could almost live with something like
that, as long as there were plenty of ways of driving them from the
keyboard at breakneck speed.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Elliott:

We really don't know what's going to land on the Mac in Office 12 yet.

What we do know, so far, is that there will BE an Office 12 on the Mac, and
it WILL support the new XML file formats coming to the Windows version.

Microsoft has also announced that the Mac version will run on both MacIntel
and PPC.

We should expect that it will not be EXACTLY like the Windows version,
because some of the new user interface widgets, while they have equivalent
classes in OS X, are expressed differently.

The Windows version has some very exciting abilities: they don't sound so
revolutionary on paper, but when you see them working in real life... Well
we had a roomful of equally-curmudgeonly old industry dinosaurs at Redmond
gasping with delight. This thing is 'eloquent'

Toolbars have gotten way out of control: there will be very few of those in
the next version (basically, only "one", although it has multiple dynamic
sections). There will be task panes, they will appear when needed and go
away when they're not -- but they're a lot smarter and the likes of you and
I can make custom task panes to our heart's content.

I think you will find that the story on using it from the keyboard is
"mixed". Yes, you can assign keystrokes to the various widgets, and if you
do, you can drive it rapidly (it's very fast compared to the current
version) from the keyboard. However, I think you will find that if you do,
you will be doing far too much typing just to specify what you want to
happen.

Since you're an unreconstructed bit-twiddler, think "Data Dictionary for
Documents". You have layered, dynamic "galleries" of pieces of document
that you either double-click or drag into position. Many of the pieces are
fairly complex assemblies, and they can be positioned independently of the
text. I am not sure I would want to type all the parameters involved

But for you and I, building "Document Types" for end-users, this thing
enables stunts we could only dream about previously. If you get into the
native XML (and you can...) you can create documents with a concept similar
to a "make file", and specify multiple transforms enabling output to a
variety of devices. And no matter what the end user does to it, it will
hang together and work properly. Man, lemme at it...

BTW: Why doncha send me your email address and phone number? Otherwise
I'll get Huggan onto you...

Cheers

Hi Elliott:

Your response is exactly as mine was when I first saw the mechanism

All I can suggest is: Use it for a while. You may even have to "force"
yourself to do it the first couple of times.

<snip well reasoned optimistic stuff>
I'll try to keep an open mind then.
I'm a curmudgeonly old assembler programmer who never really got all
that excited over the language du jour stuff of the last 25 years.
So often, I could not see the *improvements* that were touted. It's not
till you get a framework that really really works elegantly that the
benefit is obvious. The really elegant stuff is what works well for all
classes of user, from control freak to the happy point and plopper
(I'll pinch that phrase if I may)

I'll hope that that is an analogy for Word 12. It is going to be a
bigger leap for Mac users with the single main menu bar being such a
strong unifying concept absent from Windows.

I'm heartily sick of toolbars in every application I use. I normally
use Word with just one - formatting - cut down to a single button, and
it with only a few pixels peeping out from one edge of the screen.

Would you say the data merge manager is something like the new
interface. A panel with some precision, definite function, that gets
out of your way when you are done with it?

What you are describing sounds a little bit like the inspectors in
OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. I could almost live with something like
that, as long as there were plenty of ways of driving them from the
keyboard at breakneck speed.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Barry Wainwright [MVP]]

1. OK OK I made that word up. Someone who hates meeces to pieces.

If you made it up, that's pretty good. The correct word is a Musophobe or
Muriphobe