If there are only a few items in a particular document, then keep the default at 12, but if there are many more than 12, make the default something like 30 items.
Long documents can easily have hundreds of headings. The default size of the dialog box only displays 12 items in the list of available headings, figures, tables etc. Increase the number of items displayed by default.Oh, and for bonus points, someone at Microsoft decided not to list these selection options in alphabetical order! But someone, somewhere at Microsoft decided that this drop-down list would only ever display 6 items! Which means if you have a list longer than that, you have to scroll. Plate, Equation, Photograph), then the list is even longer. Even the default Reference type list includes more selections than are visible in the drop-down list. The current situation is just bad design, in my opinion. Resize the drop-down selection lists to fit the available selections.Yes, I know I can keep the dialog box open while I’m doing other things in the document, but sometimes I need the screen real estate and so I’ll close it only to re-open it again a few minutes later, and have to resize it again. But don’t get too excited… When you close the dialog, the size you’ve dragged it to is not ‘remembered’, so as soon as you re-open the dialog, it’s back to its default size and you have to resize it again. In Word 2007, this dialog box is resizable (yay!). Update August 2016: There’s now an add-in for Word for PCs that solves most (all?) of these issues. So, if you’re listening Microsoft, here are 10 productivity improvements I’d like to see made to this dialog box (numbers are used for reference only - they do not imply priority or sequential order): I’d appreciate it if someone using Word 2010 can report if any of these issues have been fixed.)
(NOTE: I have not used Word 2010 yet, so these comments are about Word 2007. While there have been some improvements to this dialog box in Word 2007, there’s a lot about this dialog box that just doesn’t work efficiently. And that dialog box alone sucks as far as usability is concerned (‘sucks’ is a technical term!). Most of the documents I’ve been working on for the past two years are long scientific reports - a single document can have hundreds of cross-references to figures, tables, plates, sections, appendices etc.Īs a result I’ve opened the Cross-reference dialog box more times than I can count. While there have been many improvements in Word 2007, there are areas that still have a way to go. I’ve been getting up close and personal with Word, as evidenced by the number of blog posts I’ve written on Word’s idiosyncrasies. I’ve been using Word since the heady days of Word 2.0, and I’ve been using Word 2003 and more recently Word 2007 day in/day out for the past two years on my current contract.
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