[Originally appeared 1999.]
Early in the summer, many of you offered suggestions for improvements to Microsoft Word. The following suggestions seem intriguing.
Layout
Several readers requested support for logical page subdivision of physical pages. This would be in addition to the tables or labels workarounds.
Improve line spacing, especially for equations and sub or superscripts. A reader suggested that a possible solution to the line spacing problem would be to provide a paragraph property that basically tells Word to turn off its “don’t overlap objects in one line with another at all costs” feature. This would allow the user to take responsibility for any overlaps and let them correct this problem.
Support portrait headers or footers on landscape pages. This would allow proper orientation for page numbers and other header or footer information in documents with a mixture of landscape and portrait orientation.
Views
After scrolling through a document in Print Preview, support exiting with the cursor moved to the matching location in the document instead of the location of the cursor when entering Print Preview.
Allow screen display of revision markings separately by author, and to review revisions sequentially for a particular author only. The reader suggested that an author can preserve all revisions in a marked up draft, while focusing temporarily only on those changes proposed by a particular colleague or adverse party, for example.
Tools
Allow Word to be able to sort by other than the first word in a field.
Improve spell checking:
(a) Offer an option to recognize a possessive form of a word marked to be ignored or have added to the custom dictionary in its nominative form.
(b) Suggest replacements for weird misspellings that arise only because a single character, adjacent on the QWERTY keyboard to the intended one, has been struck.
Searching
Support stronger find/replace wildcards (pattern matching). The reader commented that that pattern matching in Word 97 might generate a “pattern too complex” message more frequently than Word 95.
Offer conditional searching that would include “find occurrences of foo that are occurrences of foobar”. Example, Find all occurrences of “From:” that are not “^^pFrom:” (ie. “From: at the beginning of the sentence”)
Printing
Allow sections to print to different printers. This would assist with documents with some color diagrams, especially if the color printer is either much slower or more expensive than the black and white printer.
Add sections to the “Print what” choice in the Print dialog. On large, multi-sectioned documents, it would be very helpful to print the current section.
File Management
In the File Open dialog, offer automatic scroll down or filtering based on letters or numbers entered in the File Name field. There is no matching in Word 97. In Word 2000, the File Name field autocompletes to the nearest matching name, but the file list focus does not shift to highlight the matching file.
These are a few of the ideas offered by the readers of this column. Thanks again for the thoughtfulness of your comments. Rereading those e-mails reminded me how many issues have been raised. Please keep writing.
This 1999 article originally appeared in Office Watch.Subscribe to Office Watch free at http://www.office-watch.com/.