Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Word Stupidity

For years, the defaults for making references to other parts of a document in Microsoft Word have been insane.

First off there is the stupid dialog box.



There are eight default objects that Word lets you link to but the drop down menu only shows the first six. For some reason the options for 'Table' and 'Figure' - i.e. the types of object people are most likely to be adding a cross reference to appear at the bottom so you have to scroll down to see them.

The other bizarre choice is that the default is to insert a reference to the Entire Caption. Does this ever make sense?

The net is that the user has to scroll through two drop down menus every single time they insert a reference. Word does not seem to have an option to add in a shortcut. And the default options are reset each and every time the dialog appears.

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