Word auto-highlighting, how to make it STOP!

Anonymous
2014-01-17T18:00:43+00:00

How do you disable this STUPID feature?

I'm trying to highlight a single word or some part of a word for cut&paste operations and Word auto-highlights the whole line and sometimes the whole paragraph or page.

I can be using a mouse, I can be using the shift+arrow keys, it doesn't matter. The auto-highlight takes over.

it seems to be worse on any kind of bullets and numbering or any header/footer fields.

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auto-indent is another evil feature. cut and paste from a notepad  and the indent is changed on your bullets and numbering. pretty much control-v means indent text right ->

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-05-29T17:08:15+00:00

    Word 2016 is riddled with bugs and user-hostile features. But from what I can see, Microsoft doesn't give a rats about fixing bugs and is only concerned with forcing you to use their absurd cloud and 'the store'.

    As a software engineer, I would be embarrassed to have my name and professional reputation associated with a product that is so poorly implemented. Did Microsoft layoff its QA department?

    Simple things like allowing the user to edit a word in the spell checker popup dialog box have been removed and have been replaced with a very unusable 'task pane' that obscures part of the text that you're trying to correct - and then fails to redraw the screen under the task pane when you are finished spell checking. If the spell checker can't find a replacement word for something in your text, you have to kill the spell checker, scroll the text vertically in order to get the screen repainted, type in the replacement text yourself, and then restart the spell checker. Very amateurish.

    How about a spell checker that can not see the word "Follett" in my custom dictionary as a viable replacement for "Follet" in my text. Try it - even Microsoft can't get it to work.

    Anybody like the vanishing scroll bars? Or the fact that you can no longer make the mouse pointer snap to the default button in a dialog box?

    I have tried to get Microsoft to fix these and other failures and their response is that I have to go to some web site, write a complaint and hope that a lot of other people find the same bug. If a lot of people complain, then the self-anointed gods might try to fix the bug. But there is no profit in bug fixes, so don't hold your breath

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-05-04T15:55:03+00:00

    It seems that the selection occurring is due to Smart Paragraph Selection. Try disabling it.

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  3. Stefan Blom 352.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-04-19T12:26:25+00:00

    That is certainly true, and I should have mentioned the possibility of editing in Design mode.

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  4. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-04-19T12:17:54+00:00

    It depends on what you're talking about. If you're referring to the content control's "Click here to enter text," that can certainly be customized in Design Mode.

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  5. Stefan Blom 352.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-04-19T12:10:08+00:00

    Thanks for the follow-up.

    Indeed, if you are referring to the instructions in a content control, I wouldn't excpect those to be customizable.

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