Friday, May 13, 2005
(2:49 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Microsoft Word Question
Is there a way that I can make it so that it defaults to "match destination formatting" when I cut and paste? I know the little pop-up menu lets you select that, but I think it's assinine that the default behavior is for it to preserve the formatting of whatever web page you're pasting it over from. Every time I paste and it screws up my formatting, a little piece of me dies.This is Yet Another Example of Microsoft's habit of making the worst possible settings the default. Here are others:
- Making it default to wasting system resources by having the "Paper Clip Guy" or whatever looking over your shoulder.
- Replacing internet addresses with hyperlinks -- no one is going to browse the web from a word processor, and in some addresses, having the unnecessary underlining makes it ambiguous if there are underscores.
- Making it so you have to "opt out" of having the "tip of the day" come up when you start Windows.
- None of the provided outlining formats match the standard outline hierarchy -- I. A. 1. a. i. -- so if you want a real outline, you have to manually change each level individually. Also, it's stupid that the numbers don't line up with the hanging indent of the previous level by default -- but then, that's the behavior most users would want, so it's more "helpful" to make it do something else.
- Generally speaking, it misrecognizes what you're trying to do when it "autoformats," and so causes a lot of unnecessary work (for those who aren't very computer literate -- i.e., the very group for whom such features are presumably designed) to get it to stop. Every time I sit down to use Word at a new computer, I turn off any and all auto-format behaviors, except for replacing double dashes with em dashes and using smart quotes -- that should be the default behavior.
- Shortcut keys are assigned to stupid features that no one would ever use -- for instance, alt+[right or left arrow] is assigned to mimic the features of a web browser, when in point of fact, no one uses a word processor as a web browser because they have a program that is better at it already. The appropriate default setting for that shortcut key is increase/decrease indent, which has the nice bonus of making the outlining feature much easier to use -- after you go through and fix the dumb default formatting.
- In general, features are turned on by default because they know that no one would ever voluntarily turn them on -- thus, they force their over-cleverness on people who are not comfortable changing settings, making work more difficult. The next upgrade of every Microsoft Office should consist of absolutely no new features and should instead focus on implementing best practices as the default behavior for every program -- it would be experienced as the biggest upgrade ever for most users.
