TechnoLust's Journal: MS Office 2003: When did they start THIS shit?

I gave up on MS Office after Office97 and have been using OpenOffice for a while now. (And StarOffice8 on my solaris boxen at work.) Today I was on my windows box and needed to do the cool little "hold down ATL while dragging and select a rectange" then delete that rectangle. Office let me highlight and I hit delete... and nothing happened. I hit delete again. Still nothing. I hit backspace... nope. I finally cursed Microsoft aloud then tried CTRL-X which worked. WTFSoF? So I highlighted (without ALT) a word and pressed delete and STILL NOTHING HAPPENED. That was when I noticed down in the status bar and little text message saying "Delete Block? (Y)es (N)o" or something like that. If I hadn't wanted to delete it, I wouldn't have pressed the muthafuckin' delete key. If I pressed it accidentally, I'd hit the damned Undo button. Thanks MS, you just doubled the amount of work it takes me to delete a word. Good job numbnuts. Now, where's my OpenOffice installation CD?

Maybe revision control was on

[JohnnyComeLately]

It sounded like you were modifying a document originally created by someone else. Is it possible they had turned on Revision Control? I'm not familiar with it, but my wife (a contract negotiator, so a document is touched by many people) uses it and it sounds like something she'd experience.

Re:

[TechnoLust]

Good point, but no. It was a brand new doc. Situation was I asked for a list of usernames in comma delimited format. The person (obviously a manager) only read every 3rd word and I got an excel sheet where the leftmost column was the 3 letter location code where the user is located. So I exported to a csv file and pasted it into word to do the ALT-highlight trick to remove that column. So it was a brand new doc. I don't get it.

Re:

[RevMike]

Why not just do a regex in vi, the way God intended? ":1,$s/^[^,]*,//" What could be simpler? Or maybe even "1GOdf,j@aESC"add@a"?

Re:

[TechnoLust]

You missed the part about being on a window machine, didn't you? I use vi when I'm on a linux or solaris box, but I don't have it on my winders box.

Re:

[RevMike]

I carry vim on a usb drive and install it on just about any machine I touch.

Vi Vi Vi

[Morosoph]

Maybe this is what you're after? :o)

http://www.winvi.de/en/ [winvi.de]

Re:

[Otter]

No, that shouldn't produce anything like he describes, nor would a read-only document. I've never seen a dialog appear in the status bar, in any context.

That said, thank you, TL, for that alt-select trick! I didn't know about that one!

Re:

[TechnoLust]

Man, that shit comes in HANDY for things just such as this. With that and document in a fixed width font, you can do some cool stuff.

noob

[ellem]

That's a feature not a bug!

Don't you have google on your internet?

[L-Train8]

The first hit on google for '"delete block" word' returns this page [iu.edu], which explains that you have "Help for WordPerfect" users enabled. Tools->Options and then the "general" tab will take you to the checkbox for that feature in my Word 2002. Probably something similar for your Word 2003.

Open Office...

[huckda]

yes... yes... yes!!!! *yes that was an orgasmic scream*
because for the first time I have a damn word processor/spreadsheet that does WTF -=I=- tell it to, not what some damn programmer THOUGHT I wanted it to do...

Thank you, thank you, thank you!