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August 1, 2004

Word 2004 scrolling

I installed Office 2004 today (we have a campus license at work, I’m not giving any money to Microsoft) and mouse wheel scrolling in Word is so broken that it’s unusable. Scrolling up works as it should but scrolling down does nothing while you scroll the wheel, waits half a second after you stopped and then scrolls the document in one big chunk. Even scrolling by one wheel step is suffers from the half second delay.

A Google search on the subject led to the following page at Microsoft: Scroll at your own speed where one can read:

Without the correct mouse driver, Office uses your Mac OS X system settings to determine the number of lines to scroll when you use your scroll wheel. Because Mac OS X doesn’t include settings for a scroll wheel, Office programs scroll in one-line increments.

Helloooo1, what about System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Mouse > Scrolling Speed? Well, what about fixing the problem instead of telling me what drivers I must install too.

Another source of unimpressiveness is the lack of support for ligatures like fi and fl. Not only do they not automatically replace fi and fl but they make the spelling checker choke too. And seeing that Entourage 2004 replaces ligatures in e-mails, where it’s the most stupid place to do so, is even more puzzling.

1. Google validation reveals that four o’s is the correct spelling for this word:

  • Helloo: 15’600 results
  • Hellooo: 29’000 results
  • Helloooo: 35’000 results
  • Hellooooo: 16’200 results
  • Helloooooo: 8’940 results 
Do not meddle in the affairs of Coding Ninjas, for they are subtle and quick to anger.