Word 2003 - selecting lines of text

[Mike Goodson]

Hi,

I have just rolled out Office 2003 to our users and a handful are
complaining that selecting lines of text is not working as it should.
Their documents start after a couple of tabs, so they do not start right at
the left side of the document but about a 1/4 of the way in - when they put
their cursor at the beginning of the first word in each line, their cursor
doesn't change to the "arrow" to allow them to select the line of text. The
only way this happens is if they move their cursor to the left hand side of
the document and then they can select the line (does that make sense??).

I tried this myself by opening up a "normal" doc where the left and right
margins are default and sure enough the cursor changes to an arrow at the
beginning of each new line. If I select a paragraph and tab along until the
text starts half way across the page, the cursor will only change if it is
still placed at the far left hand side and not the beginning of the
sentence.

Probably nothing can be done and I just need to "manage my users
expectations" but thought I would ask!!

Thanks.
Mike

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You need to teach your users to use indents instead of tabs. If they're
really inserting tab characters, then those characters are part of the
paragraph, which still begins at the left margin, and the mouse pointer must
be in the left margin in order to select the line/paragraph. If an indent
(left or first-line) is used instead, then the paragraph can be selected
with the mouse just to the left of the first word.

Note, too, that even when tab characters are required, you should rarely
need to insert more than one; this is a symptom of using the default
built-in tab stops instead of setting custom ones where they're needed; see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/SettingTabs.htm

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

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[Mike Goodson]

Many thanks Suzanne.

Mike

You need to teach your users to use indents instead of tabs. If they're
really inserting tab characters, then those characters are part of the
paragraph, which still begins at the left margin, and the mouse pointer
must
be in the left margin in order to select the line/paragraph. If an indent
(left or first-line) is used instead, then the paragraph can be selected
with the mouse just to the left of the first word.

Note, too, that even when tab characters are required, you should rarely
need to insert more than one; this is a symptom of using the default
built-in tab stops instead of setting custom ones where they're needed;
see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/SettingTabs.htm

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

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.