a mode where you ADD auto features to a default blank slate

[Guest]

Office products, especially Word, do so much automatically that it often
behaves in unexpected ways and it is not clear how to "turn off" those many
features. I would LOVE to be able to click on a button and switch the default
mode to a COMPLETELY blank slate, where NOTHING would be done automatically
except those things I purposefully turned on.

In word, for example, you could start from a bare-bones mode that didn't do
anything except display your typing in a paper with 1-inch margins. From
there, you could add proportional spacing, paragraph protocols, turn on spell
check, grammar check, automatic list formats, etc......

Years ago, I had a word processing program called "Write Now" that was
arranged this way - it didn't do anything "fancy" until you told it to. This
meant that you could deal with features as you needed them and learned about
them. It made trouble-shooting SO MUCH EASIER.

Perhaps a "set up wizard" could be written that would ask you whether or not
you want to use the various features? Clearly, it would take a long time to
go through it, but it could also act as a mini-tutorial. For each feature,
there could be a brief explanation and then you could choose to turn it on or
off or set the default setting.

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[Jay Freedman]

Hi Amy,

Have a look at these articles:

http://www.word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Bend/BendWord.htm
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TameAutoFormat.htm
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/CustomizingWord2002.htm

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

While these articles go a long way toward helping users get rid of automatic
features, I think Amy's suggestion of a "bare bones" operating state, with a
Setup Wizard, is a good one.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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