selected text highlighting issue

[Keith G Hicks]

Windows XP SP3.

This has always bugged me so I figured I'd finally ask the question. I run 2
monitors and work on multiple things at once. If I have a Word doc open (or
notepad or some other editor) and select a block of text and then move to
another application, the text in the Word doc no longer appears selected.
This is extremely annoying at times. Just because my Word doc is no longer
the active application doesn't mean that I don't want to see what I've
selected. And if it's so that I know it's not the active application, well
that's pretty silly since I can tell that by the title bar at the top of the
window. I know the text is still actually selected and MS just feels taht I
shouldn't have to see it but is there a way to change this behavior?
(Access, outlook, OE, Excel all do the same darn thing).

I'm not sure if this is an XP issue or just a Microsoft issue becuase Open
Office Writer does not display this behavior. If I select some text in an
Open Office document and then go work with some other application that I
have open, the text in the Open Office document is still visibly selected. I
also tested this in Editpad Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Help & Manual and a few
other programs. They all still show the selected text even when going to
another app.


Keith

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Windows XP SP3.

This has always bugged me so I figured I'd finally ask the question. I run
2
monitors and work on multiple things at once. If I have a Word doc open
(or
notepad or some other editor) and select a block of text and then move to
another application, the text in the Word doc no longer appears selected.
This is extremely annoying at times. Just because my Word doc is no longer
the active application doesn't mean that I don't want to see what I've
selected. And if it's so that I know it's not the active application, well
that's pretty silly since I can tell that by the title bar at the top of
the
window. I know the text is still actually selected and MS just feels taht
I
shouldn't have to see it but is there a way to change this behavior?
(Access, outlook, OE, Excel all do the same darn thing).

I'm not sure if this is an XP issue or just a Microsoft issue becuase Open
Office Writer does not display this behavior. If I select some text in an
Open Office document and then go work with some other application that I
have open, the text in the Open Office document is still visibly selected.
I
also tested this in Editpad Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Help & Manual and a few
other programs. They all still show the selected text even when going to
another app.


Keith

Since this appears to be an MS Office phenomenon, I recommend you ask the
experts in an Office newsgroup. Remember to state the version of Office that
you use.

 

[Keith G Hicks]

Yeah, it is mostly an Office issue but not entirely. SQL EM, QA and SQLSMS
seem to work fine. But any CHM file regardless of the program that created
it also misbehaves. I'll repost this to the Office NG.

 

[Pegasus [MVP]]

Yeah, it is mostly an Office issue but not entirely. SQL EM, QA and SQLSMS
seem to work fine. But any CHM file regardless of the program that created
it also misbehaves. I'll repost this to the Office NG.

This is probably because .chm files use the same Microsoft-generated code as
MS Office files when it comes to highlighting a text.

 

[dadiOH]

Windows XP SP3.

This has always bugged me so I figured I'd finally ask the question.
I run 2 monitors and work on multiple things at once. If I have a
Word doc open (or notepad or some other editor) and select a block of
text and then move to another application, the text in the Word doc
no longer appears selected. This is extremely annoying at times. Just
because my Word doc is no longer the active application doesn't mean
that I don't want to see what I've selected. And if it's so that I
know it's not the active application, well that's pretty silly since
I can tell that by the title bar at the top of the window. I know the
text is still actually selected and MS just feels taht I shouldn't
have to see it but is there a way to change this behavior? (Access,
outlook, OE, Excel all do the same darn thing).
I'm not sure if this is an XP issue or just a Microsoft issue becuase
Open Office Writer does not display this behavior. If I select some
text in an Open Office document and then go work with some other
application that I have open, the text in the Open Office document is
still visibly selected. I also tested this in Editpad Pro, Adobe
Acrobat, Help & Manual and a few other programs. They all still show
the selected text even when going to another app.

So dump Office. Not much of a loss IMO, YMMV.



--

dadiOH
____________________________

dadiOH's dandies v3.06...
....a help file of info about MP3s, recording from
LP/cassette and tips & tricks on this and that.
Get it at http://mysite.verizon.net/xico

 

[Keith G Hicks]

LOL. I'd LOVE to do that. I actually have a big client that is working
toward the goal of eliminating all MS software from their systems.
Unfortunately I cannot do that since most of my clients use it. I'm sort of
stuck.

 

[Andrew McLaren]

monitors and work on multiple things at once. If I have a Word doc open (or
notepad or some other editor) and select a block of text and then move to
another application, the text in the Word doc no longer appears selected.
This is extremely annoying at times. Just because my Word doc is no longer

Hi Keith,

I'm not sure I understand the issue (although, you're obviously seeing
some kind of annoying behaviour!).

I tried it. I select and then "copy" some text in MS Word to the
clipboard; then alt-tab over to Notepad, and paste from the clipboard
into the Notepad text file. I alt-tab back to Word, and the original
text is still highlighted and selected. Same with the reverse operation,
too; and also Excel to and from UltraEdit text editor.

If when I alt-tab back to Word, I click in the original Window client
area then the selection disappears. That is normal and expected
behaviour; when the system caret changes, the Windows app (any Windows
app) will typically send a WM_CLEAR message. Same as if I select some
text, copy it to the clipboard and then click in the client area to move
the focus, without switching to another application. To restore focus to
the original Word window *without* removing the selection, I need to
click in the Window's Title Bar area. That way, no WM_CLEAR is sent.
I'll admit that's slightly unintuitive, and has caught me out a few
times over the years; but that's how Windows has worked since at least
Windows 2.03! (say, 20 years .

I suspect the reason you see different behaviour in Open Office and
Adobe Acrobat is that they are cross-platform applications, which may
use a more general UI mechanism for selecting, and copying, rather than
the strictly Windows-native functions and messages.

But maybe I didn't understand the problem you're seeing, so you're
welcome to correct me!

Regards

Andrew

 

[Keith G Hicks]

Thanks Andrew for the long explanation but you're not following my problem.

Open a word doc. Open a blank notepad text file. Make sure you can see them
both at the same time in your monitor. That's critical. Go to the word doc.
Select some text. It doesn't matter if you copy it or not. Just select it (I
never said anything about copy/paste in my OP). Now click over to the
notepad window. Notice that the selected text in the word doc no longer
appears selected. It still is selected but it doens't appear that way at
all. ALT+TAB or use whatever oterh method you want to use to get back to the
word doc (without as you stated clicking into the text itself as of course
this will unselect the previously selected text) and you'll see the text is
indeed still selected.

What I'm talking about is when you select something in any office app and
then go to another window to make some other app active, the selected text
in the office app no longer appears selected. It's no longer in reverse text
(black background with white lettering for teh default installation).

Now, if you ahve something like Acrobat on your computer, you can try the
same thing. Open up a PDF file, select some text, go to some other window
and you'll see that the text in the PDF still appears to be selected. You
can still see exactly what you selected before you switched to the other
app.

IMO this is a very impractical behavior.

 

[Andrew McLaren]

Thanks Andrew for the long explanation but you're not following my problem.

Open a word doc. Open a blank notepad text file. Make sure you can see them
both at the same time in your monitor. That's critical. Go to the word doc.
Select some text. It doesn't matter if you copy it or not. Just select it (I

Ah-ha. Okay, gotch now. Thanks ...

Well a quick test suggests this problem is not intrinsic to Windows as
such. I tried this with 2 Notepad windows, side by side; and the text
selection remained highlighted when each Notepad window lost focus. But
when I tried with 2 Word windows side by side, I did see the effect
you're describing: as soon as a window lost focus, the selection area
returned to a normal appearance (no highlight); and as soon as the title
bar was clicked to return focus to the Window, the selection appeared as
highlighted text again.

Interesting. So I ran the Spy++ utility from the Windows SDK on each
window, to capture the WM_* windows messages that were being passed in
each case. In the case of Notepad, the windows pass an EM_GETSEL message
as the window repaints, which is what you'd expect from an edit control.
The Word windows had a radically different pattern of messages:
basically a WM_SETFOCUS, then a custom message, then a WM_KILLFOCUS. I'd
guess that Word is using an Office-wide control to, um, "control" the
display of the highlighted selection text (this is the custom mesage);
and for whatever reason, this control decides to turn OFF the highlight,
while the window does not have focus. The text is still selected, behind
the scenes - you just don't get a visible indication of the fact.

Testing hh.exe on a *.CHM file showed a similar result to Word. The text
highlight goes away when the window loses focus. As Pegasus suggested in
his separate post, this is probably because hh.exe also uses the same
underlying Control which Office uses; although it's not a Windows
"primitive' API as such. Some developers must have decided to
specifically code for this behaviour.

That would explain why non-MSFT apps like Adobe and Open Office don't
have the same result - they're probably not using the same control which
Office is using internally.

We could debug deeper into it to isolate the specific DLL in question
but ... uh frankly, I'm just not that interested So far it's been
kinda fun, but ... you know ...

Why does Office behave this way? No idea! While it seems a bit flaky to
you and me, I'd guess (based on the little I know about how Office is
developed) that it wasn't an accidental oversight. Maybe some
counter-intuitive usability test showed this was the most popular
option. After all, apparently even the 2007 Ribbon got the Usability
thiumbs-up - which I find inconceivable!

Cheers

Andrew

 

[Keith G Hicks]

Cool. Thanks for all the research! You da man!

Yeah, I don't like the ribbon either. It's pretty and all but it takes up
WAY too much space by default and ironically it's much harder to find things
IMO. Not a good design at all IMO.