The New York Times is Finally Fixing One of Word’s Most Annoying Problems
The days of squinting your eyes and scrolling slowly while reading an article are coming to an end, at least if you’re using the New York Times website on Word.
A Brief History of Copy + Paste
This innovation has now been around for over 20 years, so it’s overdue for an update. Thankfully, this is a problem the Times is finally fixing with their updated copy-and-paste features. What used to take a word or two now spans the whole page, which is infinitely more useful for highlighting longer text and copying images and other media.
How Copy + Paste Ruined My Life
When I came across the headline The New York Times is Finally Fixing One of Word’s Most Annoying Problems, I was excited. The famed newspaper finally has a solution to all the errors I’ve been seeing in my Word document for years! The Copy+Paste function, though ubiquitous on computers today, has a lot of problems—
and you don’t need me to tell you about them. From duplicating words and sentences to cutting off text mid-sentence and missing small words like apostrophes or punctuation marks, Copy+Paste is often a source of frustration. But now there’s finally an easy way to fix this problem!
A Painful Case Study
Earlier this year, I opened up a Word document and found myself with an annoying problem. There was no spell check or grammar check on the entire document.
I have never experienced this while working in Word before and I soon discovered that it was because Microsoft is ending support for the app. This pain should soon be over as The New York Times is now in talks to replace the software with its product called ‘New Write’.
But at Least I’m Not the Only One
I’m not the only one who’s been wondering why there is no option to automatically skip over chunks of text you know you’ve already read and get right to the new stuff.
I know because I would have written this whole blog post differently if Word had offered me this option when I was finished reading the last paragraph. But at least The New York Times is finally fixing one of Word’s most annoying problems.
This Hurts Everyone — Especially Publishers
As a writer, this fix is especially gratifying. I write blog posts and publish them to WordPress. I love the platform because it gives me plenty of design options and lets me publish my work without any coding experience. What I don’t love is when a blog post is cut off mid-sentence.
The problem: Word doesn’t provide a way to let you see your whole text in its entirety as you type as WordPress does.
Often I have to stop what I’m doing and go find the little scrollbar to slide it up so that my entire sentence displays on screen — but then once I’ve scrolled back down, the sentence disappears into oblivion with the movement of my cursor.
Why Is This Happening?
On March 27th, the New York Times announced that they would finally be enabling tracking of a word count with their latest update. The new feature means that journalists can now keep track of how many words they’re writing each day and set a personal word goal. In addition to this exciting news, they also announced the release of two new fonts:
Herald Prime and TIPS Modern Display. These fonts give writers more options for text typefaces and styles, giving them more freedom in designing the look of their articles This is an especially important development for Word users because one of the most annoying features about Microsoft Word is its inability to properly handle fonts on documents.
The Times is finally rectifying one of Word’s biggest problems.
What We Can Do About It
Are you a writer, designer, engineer, mathematician, or scientist? Join us as we work on one of Word’s most annoying problems! The New York Times is finally fixing one of Word’s most annoying problems. We’re going to redesign the in-text citation experience. Together, let’s make writing a better experience for all of us!
The in-text citation experience in Word is so bad that we need a few examples to explain why. What if you wanted to cite The New York Times? If you’re using Outline view and click Insert Citation while your cursor is inside a reference, you get: (via The New York Times) Even if your cursor isn’t inside a citation,
you still get that boring choice. And sometimes it makes sense to not cite The New York Times because they’ve written about something else, or maybe it’s uninteresting. In other words, manually typing out references for common sources can be tedious, especially for people who write often and cite often.
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