Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

 

Pick an apple! 
 
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.

 

 

Related Articles

 

 

The Tilery 4.0 Squares Off

Send Article to a Friend

The Tilery 4.0 Squares Off -- Rick Holzgrafe of Semicolon Software today released The Tilery 4.0, the latest version of his $15 shareware desktop launcher application. (TidBITS looked at the previous version in "Desktop Launchers, Part IV" in TidBITS-278.) The Tilery provides graphical tiles that, when clicked, open applications, documents, folders, volumes, control panels, and servers. In addition, automatic tiles appear for currently active applications. New features in version 4.0 include tile pop-up menus for access to additional features, keyboard control, hot keys for tiles, working sets of tiles, and editable tile text labels. The Tilery 4.0 is a 442K download.

<http://www2.semicolon.com/Rick/Tilery.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/01479>

 

Get more productive with software from Smile: PDFpen for
editing PDFs; TextExpander for saving time and keystrokes while you
type; DiscLabel for designing CD/DVD labels and inserts. Free demos,
fast and friendly customer support. <http://www.smilesoftware.com/>