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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 129.
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15 Jun 1992 | Print Printer-Friendly Version of This Article

Basic Facts

by Adam C. Engst Send Email to Author

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ClarisWorks requires at least System 6.0.5 and 1 MB of RAM. Under System 7, like everything else, it requires 2 MB of RAM.

The manuals include installation instructions appropriate for floppy-based Macs and hard drive systems. The application itself occupies 562K on disk. The application memory partition defaults to 900K, but it can be set as low as 768K. ClarisWorks can work easily on a Mac with two 800K floppies, and it's possible with some finagling to place the application on a single 800K floppy disk along with a bootable System 6 or a bootable high-density System 7 disk. One must do without the spelling, file translator, and thesaurus functions under these configurations, but these can be kept on separate floppy disks. I would still recommend a Plus-level machine with at least 2.5 MB of RAM and a hard drive as the preferred entry point for using ClarisWorks, but if you're stuck with something less, it's a usable and attractive option. The communications documents require a hard drive, however, since they require installation of the Mac Communications toolbox under System 6.

 

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