MS Word has annoying habit of centering the line of text IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO and in addition to the desired line of text. WTF? Is there a way to stop this? If I try the obvious and “uncenter” the undesired line of text, then the desired line is now
uncentered, too.
I should note this usually happens when a centered line of text is at the top of one page and the previous line is at the bottom of the previous page. Yet another STUPID feature of MS Word. I wish MS would go back and get the bugs out of their damn products! (MS Excel is 100x worse.)
Is the centered line of text on the second page part of the same paragraph as the centered line of text on the previous page? Because, normally, you center a whole paragraph.
Step 1 of using Word: go through the menus and turn off every single automatic feature you don’t want. (Which isn’t all of them, but it’s 90%.) Turning off all but the most basic Autoformat and Autocorrect features will make using Word a much more pleasant experience.
A trick I do for a lot of cases like this is: Add a blank line just before and/or just after the line I want to format. Then format the line. Then delete the blank line(s).
One thing that also helps with MS Word: The last line of every paragraph is terminated by an end-of-paragraph marker. The presence of this marker is the thing that defines where a paragraph ends (and thus, where the next paragraph begins). This marker is usually invisible. There is a mode that causes this marker to be visible on the screen. (I haven’t used Word for years, so I’ve forgotten what menu it’s on. It’s not hard to find.)
So set that mode to display the end-of-paragraph markers. Then, you can see if any lines surrounding your target line are also part of the same paragraph. If you have to add blank lines as I suggested, you can see that they are separate paragraphs. To add a paragraph marker where there isn’t one already, just put the cursor at the very end of the line where you want to add it and press ENTER.
Another thing about paragraph markers, BTW: All formatting settings for a paragraph are stored along with that paragraph marker, although this information generally isn’t visible on the screen. (There was a way to see it all, but it’s been so long I’ve forgotten. Maybe just hover the mouse-pointer over the visible paragraph marker?)
Now suppose you have a multi-line paragraph with some specific formatting, different from the surrounding paragraphs. And suppose you put the cursor somewhere in the middle of the paragraph and press ENTER, thus breaking the paragraph into two paragraphs. Generally, the specific formatting of the original paragraph will remain with the SECOND of the two new paragraphs, while the first of the two paragraphs will not get any such special formatting.
Now you know why. The original end-of-paragraph marker, which contained the formatting information, is now the end of the second paragraph. The NEW paragraph marker that you inserted by pressing ENTER does not inherit all that information.
Jinx: to combine and clarify the prior posters’ comments …
There is nothing wrong with Word. What’s wrong is your comprehension. When a single paragraph splits across two pages, it’s still one paragraph. And as such, it can only have one justification: left, right, centered, or both.
There are settings to prevent paragraphs from splitting a single line onto a next page. You probably want to set that so the problem doesn’t happen. But be warned that has the side effects of sometimes pushing a long paragraph onto the next page, leaving a blank area at the bottom of the previous page.
I’m not sure about this. Word will, as others have mentioned, try to apply a format backwards even when a paragraph break is included. Highlighting a line and formatting it can often affect that previous paragraph as well. You do have to show formatting - there’s a little paragraph symbol that shows when the Home tab is clicked on a PC and is always on the top row above the tabs on a Mac - and make sure that each paragraph is formatted in the way you want it.
It’s a Word issue. Word has many quirks like this. That’s why so many people hate Word. I hate Word but I’ve spent so much time learning the fixes for the quirks that I’m reluctant to endure the learning curve for some other program’s quirks.
I second the above. It’s certainly true that Word has grown to be complex with a large number of ostensibly “helpful” automatic formatting features which, if not well understood, can be confusing. But that’s not always the whole story.
It’s also true that Word (like a lot of Microsoft software) has evolved into an ugly mess of unstructured spaghetti code that is essentially impossible to fully debug, or even come close. Some of this comes from trying to introduce new features while retaining maximum possible backward compatibility, some from just lazy coding. And some from spectacularly unstructured practices like the app branching to different procedures depending on detected OS variations. From what I’ve read, Word is worse than most such Microsoft spaghetti apps. Among the many annoying idiosyncrasies of Word, for instance, are circumstances where one apparently innocuous change will automatically and without warning reformat an entire document in some totally unexpected way! I’ve actually had this happen. There have been some wonderful humorous essays written on the trials and tribulations of Word, mostly by authors venting their frustrations, and the problems were not always a lack of understanding. Sometimes Word just sucks. It had to be said.
In my experience, Word does not “apply a format backwards to a previous paragraph,” unless one has highlighted that paragraph accidentally before applying the format change. Or possibly the user is applying a “line break” instead of a paragraph mark.
Word does apply other things inappropriately, mind you; it’s notorious for section breaks formatted “same as previous” to cascade backward and effectively make “previous same as [this one],” a highly undesirable issue I encounter people struggling with all the time. I’m not defending its purity.
But with paragraph formatting, it’s most likely the user is failing to clearly identify what he or she is trying to change, or using a feature not fully understood.
To be fair, I can’t think of any tool, including some very expensive professional ones, that did booklet printing well, or without a huge learning curve and a thousand gotchas. I learned never to use such features and do the pagination etc. myself.
I can’t think of any of Word’s “extra” or “special” features that work worth a damn… or sometimes at all. Even the relatively basic “combine files into a single master document” feature was completely broken for several revisions.
However, I’ll say it again: if you ignore all the CorelDRAW-y add-ins and go shut off most of the automated helpers that MS’s marketing department thinks sells things, and learn a few basics about using styles, Word is a very fine basic word processor that works better at that purpose than any tool I can think of - and I have used nearly all of them, over the years.
Out of the box, Word is marketing razzle-dazzle and half-finished, half-implemented, half-working (at best) Big Cool Ideas that no one actually wants.
I used that for quite some time at a job some years ago, back in the bad old DOS days with a plain-screen-text (not graphic) user interface, and only very slightly WYSIWYGish. Worked just fine for me!
I suspect the expectations for what fully-featured output looks like have morphed a bit in the intervening 20 years.
If all you’re (any “you”) are doing is producing 3-page memos with auto page numbers at bottom center, damn near any tool is good enough.
Hundred-page docs with tables of contents, footnotes, indexes, embedded pix & tables and consistent formatting throughout are a different matter. And folks who say Word sucks at that are probably not using it correctly.
To my eye, the central flaw of Word is that it tries to do both simple & sophisticated docs well. Which invites users to use techniques appropriate to simple docs when creating complex ones. With predictably poor results.
it’s akin to the difference between using CSS in html versus tables & embedded visual markup. For 2 pages aimed at a year 2000 audience, plain old html was fine. For a modern dynamic site multi-hundred page site aimed at multiple device types and languages, only a clueless fool would use anything other than strict CSS & format-free html content.
The difference is while we expect some professionalism from our web developers, we expect no such professionalism from the vast majority of Word users. So they stumble along criminally misusing their tools. Even though they spend several hours each workday using the tool, they’re still using it wrong.
Whippy was a fabulous tool in its day, made good use of the pre-Windows “SAA” keyboard interface (which standardized things like “Print - Shift-F12” among software makers who chose to adhere to the standard). For those who don’t remember, WP once owned the word processor market, and then completely fupped uck the transition to Windows, losing their market to the vastly inferior Word for Windows. Then it went to Corel, the wrecking yard where good software went to be turned out like a cheap whore.
WP was still the standard in legal offices until at least a few years ago. May still be. It handled things like line numbering far better than any other tool.
If I could go back and pick one winner to have survived and evolved, though, it would probably be Borland Sprint. It was written as an in-house tool for Borland during their programming language heyday, and never released after v1.something. It was the first tool to allow multiple open documents at one time, switchable with a keystroke and each with its own clipboard and editing buffers, and had the fabulous (and never quite duplicated) feature of allowing you to close a whole session and then re-open it, with a dozen documents exactly as you left them - buffers, macros, cursor position, everything. As a working writer it was a gift from the gods.
Agreed. I worked at a small publishing company for a while. We did initial proofing, copyediting, and styles in Word, and then imported into InDesign. The first thing they told me on my first day on the job was how to turn off every automatic feature in Word. It’s amazing how well Word works when it’s not constantly trying to turn your entire document into a badly-formatted bulleted list.
