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Mysteriously Moving Margins in Word

In Microsoft Word 2008 (and older versions), if you put your cursor in a paragraph and then move a tab or indent marker in the ruler, the change applies to just that paragraph. If your markers are closely spaced, you may have trouble grabbing the right one, and inadvertently work with tabs when you want to work with indents, or vice-versa. The solution is to hover your mouse over the marker until a yellow tooltip confirms which element you're about to drag.

I recently came to appreciate the importance of waiting for those tooltips: a document mysteriously reset its margins several times while I was under deadline pressure, causing a variety of problems. After several hours of puzzlement, I had my "doh!" moment: I had been dragging a margin marker when I thought I was dragging an indent marker.

When it comes to moving markers in the Word ruler, the moral of the story is always to hover, read, and only then drag.

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Published in TidBITS 286.
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17 Jul 1995 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

FullWrite Follow-up

by Tonya Engst Send Email to Author

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A few people wrote in to correct what I wrote about FullWrite's beginnings in TidBITS-284.

Leonard Rosenthol <leonardr@netcom.com> said, "FullWrite started life at Ann Arbor Softworks, the same company that was the first to try (and succeed) in competing with MacPaint with their wonderful FullPaint product. The biggest history note for FullWrite during the Ann Arbor Softworks days was that they started advertising it a bit too early, and it was, for the longest time, the longest vaporware product around - close to two years!"

Roy Leban <royleban@aol.com> helpfully filled in some details, saying that the FullWrite project began at Ann Arbor Softworks (abbreviated as A2S) in April of 1986, and the public first knew that something was up in January of 1987, when A2S gave demos at MacWorld Expo. Although A2S thought they could ship FullWrite by April of 1987, by MacWorld Expo in January of 1988, they weren't quite shipping, though they did give away 10,000 beta copies at the Expo. About a month later, Ashton-Tate acquired A2S, and in April of 1988, FullWrite finally shipped.

Roy also responded to a few questions that people had asked me about FullWrite, saying that - unfortunately - Mastersoft's DocuComp does not work with FullWrite documents (DocuComp compares two versions of a document and identifies any differences between the two). Also, neither PageMaker nor QuarkXPress come with FullWrite filters. It's up to Adobe or Quark to decide that they want to include a filter, and I suspect that customer pressure would help in this regard.

http://www.chaco.com/~mastersoft/

Mastersoft -- 602/948-4888 -- 800/624-6107 -- 602/948-8261 (fax)
<info@mastersoft.com>

 

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