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Mysteriously Moving Margins in Word

In Microsoft Word 2008 (and older versions), if you put your cursor in a paragraph and then move a tab or indent marker in the ruler, the change applies to just that paragraph. If your markers are closely spaced, you may have trouble grabbing the right one, and inadvertently work with tabs when you want to work with indents, or vice-versa. The solution is to hover your mouse over the marker until a yellow tooltip confirms which element you're about to drag.

I recently came to appreciate the importance of waiting for those tooltips: a document mysteriously reset its margins several times while I was under deadline pressure, causing a variety of problems. After several hours of puzzlement, I had my "doh!" moment: I had been dragging a margin marker when I thought I was dragging an indent marker.

When it comes to moving markers in the Word ruler, the moral of the story is always to hover, read, and only then drag.

 

 

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ExtraBITS for 9 November 2009


Apple TV 3.0 Disappearing Content Flaw Fixed in 3.0.1 -- A flaw in the recently released Apple TV 3.0 software can make all your available content appear to be missing until you re-sync to iTunes. Apple strongly recommends updating to 3.0.1 to fix this problem.


Fortune Names Jobs CEO of the Decade -- Fortune Magazine has named Steve Jobs CEO of the Decade. Why Jobs? Fortune says in the past 10 years he has "radically and lucratively reordered three markets - music, movies, and mobile telephones - and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown."


UPS Creates Free App for iPhone -- If you're an iPhone user who regularly ships or receives packages via UPS, download the free UPS Mobile app for the iPhone and iPod touch. It lets you track shipments, create shipping labels, find nearby UPS locations, and estimate shipping costs for different services.


Turn an iPod classic or iPod nano into an Ebook Reader -- A beta service called Notescasts.com promises to provide users of the iPod classic, iPod nano, and 5th generation iPod with an online store for downloading free and inexpensive ebooks. It's a gutsy move, given all the attention devoted to the iPhone and iPod touch and the App Store, but will enough users of the supported iPod models notice?


Mini Video Seminars for Panorama 5.5 -- Jim Rea of ProVUE Development has started producing short video training seminars for the company's Panorama 5.5 database program (which we use for Take Control order tracking and royalty databases). If you're a Panorama user, watch the first video about Live Clairvoyance (ignore the Windows interface elements, since the feature works identically on the Mac). Panorama has a ton of capabilities that most users never find; hopefully Jim's videos will expose more of them.

 

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