Ho-ho-ho!
Pity I had to come in so late...
Firstly, Matthew, I well remember your revelation some months ago, and
you'll notice I have always used your name once you thus became a "real"
person (made easier by my elder son also having that noble name). And I
have greatly enjoyed your many posts. As for m'learned colleagues not
remembering, well, some have let slip their ages. Maybe, for them, you
could, er, manually add your name... ;-)
I agree with Matthew's comment about the desirability of being able to
select a preference in a more obvious place. Trouble is, I suppose, once you
start with that one I can think of dozens more. Then, impatient people will
complain they can't find it in among the choices. As they do already...
Speaking of impatience, I must confess that I find bombastic,
let-it-all-hang-out-after-milliseconds-of-thought comments a bit trying.
We've had a lot of them here lately. One is the OP's:
"What a dumb feature. I can't type a simple address on a cover letter.
Single spacing means single spaces. If i want a space between paragraphs I
can hit enter".
Surely it isn't too difficult to hold down the Shift key while hitting the
Return key at the end of a line, to force a new line in an address.
But "What a dumb feature" deserves comment.
You can switch it off if you want a typewriter. That's already been
addressed earlier in this thread.
But -- thank goodness -- Word isn't only capable of being used as a Vespa --
it's also very much, and uniquely, a Rolls Royce application, capable of
immensely more than the typewriter that the OP hankers after. If I want to
open up the paragraph leading [OP: = spaces between paragraphs] I can change
the definition of the style for, say, body text paragraphs (a) in that
document or (b) in all documents. Or I can manually add or remove leading to
one paragraph. Most often this is used to condense text back on to a
particular page when a little has flowed over to the next. Try doing that
with double paragraph marks / carriage returns.
Word enables me to do that in seconds or, with macros, less than a second.
Millions of people around the world use this "dumb feature" many times a
day. I've calculated my time savings through using Word well at almost 20
per cent compared with someone who doesn't deign to learn its features. Such
features, more importantly, immensely improve the quality of communication
that comes from the keyboard.
But I suspect the bleating by those like the OP who can't be bothered to
look beyond their noses will bend MacBU the other way before we know it. So
here's some advice: don't bleat here among fellow users: go to the Help menu
and tell the people at Microsoft what you think...
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================
Hey John - perhaps if we old timers started to ardently proclaim the old
technology as being *right* the young pups would exercise their defiance &
insist on the benefits & advantages of the newer technology. Isn't it ironic
that in this world of "gotta have the newest, latest & greatest - ain't your
father's Oldsmobile" mentality some insist on clinging to a kludge devised
by their [great-] grandfathers as a workaround only because it was the best
they could do at the time?
I wonder why the Blackberry, cell phone & iPhone came to be so popular when
rotary dial, transistor radios & 3-ring binders worked so flawlessly???? ;-)
Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
Hi Whatever Your Name Is...
(You've been in here long enough by now to add your name, especially when
ticking us off
)
Those of us used to producing text for publication would mutter something
about "no, it was foisted on people who have so far avoided becoming users,
in a pathetic attempt to help them learn to use Word easily."
Really! Documents are a hell of a lot easier to create and much more stable
in service if you include leading on your styles.
Yes, I know how tempting it is to just hit Enter twice when you want some
space. But if you do that, you insert an empty container in the text. A
paragraph is not a carriage return and new line character, it's a container
holding around 1,200 formatting properties. If you insert a "blank
paragraph", Word has to inspect all 1,200 pigeon holes to make sure there is
really no information in there.
Not only does this halve the speed at which it processes text, it leads to a
state of internal confusion that will roughly double the number of crashes
and freezes the user experiences.
Yes, I do agree: It would have been nice if they could have provided that
explanation in the "What's New". But "What's New" is written by Marketing
and approved by Legal.
If Legal had their way, "What's New" would be entirely blank, just in case
someone somewhere could impute the possibility of an error, mistake, or
shortcoming in any previous version of Word that has ever existed.
If Marketing had their way, every statement in "What's New" would begin "In
a major advance over the offerings from our competitors..." and talk only
about the stuff Google can't do.
Well, yeah, but I am 58 years old. Those of us who grew up on typewriters
are just about to kick the bucket. The real users of the product are a bit
more sophisticated these days
It does. You may wish to investigate "Format>Style>Modify..." Takes
perhaps five seconds to do it, once only, and all your documents can be
wrong, now and into the future
Cheers
