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.
Written by
Tonya Engst
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Palette Police -- Edward Reid <ed@titipu.resun.com> writes in support of Matt Neuburg's complaint about programs messing with the "colors" on his 4-bit monitor. "Yeah! Keep on them. I don't use IN CONTROL, but I have the same complaint about Quicken and Retrospect. I can understand a graphics program playing with the palette, but for the others it's just plain rude. I think it's a problem specific to 2-bit and 4-bit mode, although I tried some program a few months ago that had an option to "Use system color palette" to fix this problem. I don't know enough about color palette management to understand exactly what's going on, but my guess is that programs are tested on 8-bit color monitors and black and white monitors, but seldom on anything in between. Also, the problem might be more or less severe depending on how the user has customized the display (though I'm only conjecturing at this point). For example, I've changed my desktop to be a uniform gray instead of the standard dither. The programs we are discussing turn the desktop black, which is immediately obvious. It might not be as obvious with the standard desktop."
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