Betalogue » Blog Archive » Word 2008: How to assign command-G to ‘Find Next’: “Word 2008 is so bad that it is driving me positively nuts. Yet I have no choice but to use it sometimes, and in such situations I need to try and reduce the mental pain as much as possible. Inevitably, this process involves customizing Word, not to make it do things your way, but simply to make it do things the normal way, i.e. the way that every other Mac OS X application does it, which of course Word is incapable of doing on its own.
Case in point: a keyboard shortcut for the ‘Find Next’ command. The standard behaviour in word processors and text editors for the Mac is the following.”
(Via Betalogue.)
Thank you for this indispensable tip. As described on this page Word does not follow the UI standard adopted by well, everyone with respect to Find (Command-F) followed by Find Next (Command-G). Convincing Word that this really is what you want to do is way more complicated than it needs to be, but many thanks to Pierre Igot for unearthing how to accomplish this task.
Betalogue also has a number of other interesting tips and complaints about Word which hasn’t changed its spots since Office 2004. If you have to use Word, then take a spin by his site as there’s a pile of useful tidbits.
And while I’m on the subject of griping about Word, I’m going to add another one. Word does not play nicely with Spaces. If you’re using Spaces and Command-tab over to Word, you’ll get the menu bar, but it won’t necessarily bring its documents to the front most layer. Even more frustrating, clicking on the document window doesn’t bring it up either when this happens. However, if you happen to have two documents open, clicking on the other window changes the focus, still behind any other application windows and clicking on the first window at this point bring it forward along with the second window. WTF?
I was going to try for some screen shots, but it’s behaving right now. I think that’s probably the thing that annoys me the most about Word is its inconsistency. Don’t get me started on heading numbering behaviour - it’s a crapshoot.