Tools: Unresponsive Delete or Backspace key in Word 97--a solutio n!

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

I was editing a file, and discovered to my great perplexity that the Delete
key had suddenly started working erratically. I'd press Control-Delete to
delete the next word, or Delete to delete the next letter, and nothing would
happen: the cursor would remain in its current position, and the display
wouldn't change. (Ditto for Backspace.) Nor would search and replace
reliably replace all instances of a particular word or phrase.

It turns out the file had been edited using Word's revision tracking, the
changes hadn't been accepted, and "highlight changes onscreen" had been
deselected. I found this out by saving the file as rich text (RTF) and
reopening it in Word (a useful trick for solving certain kinds of incipient
file corruption), and lo and behold, tracked changes suddenly appeared!
Here's the problem: if you conceal your edits while tracking changes, the
deleted text remains in the file so that Word must still move the cursor
through it, but Word doesn't display the text so you can see what the
software is doing. When you hit the delete key with the cursor in the middle
of this invisible text, Word thinks to itself "that text is already deleted,
so no need to change the display--or warn the user, since he's much smarter
than I am and should already know this." Not a good assumption!

So if you're editing in Word and the Delete or Backspace key seems to have
stopped working, the cursor occasionally stops moving while using the
keyboard to move through the text, or similar "the key stopped working"
symptoms appear erratically, you may have met the same problem I did. Open
the Tools menu, select Track changes, then select Highlight changes. Select
"Highlight changes on screen" and see if the problem goes away.

Of course, it could just be a dying keyboard or other Word weirdness, but I
prefer to be optimistic about these things. <g>

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"With Linux, customers end up being in the operating systems business,
managing software updates and security patches while making sure the
multitude of software packages don't conflict with each other."--Microsoft
spokesperson in a News.com article
  
"And just how would that be different from Windows?"--Adam Engst, TidBITS


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