Just curious, but does anyone else find the selection logic in MS Word absolutely infuriating at times? It’s so damn helpful that it’s unusable , at least with the mouse. It seems to want to find words and phrases in the selection, but it sucks at it. I have to resort back to the keyboard to select just the word or sequence that I want to highlight.

What tripped my trigger just now was trying to reference XML elements in a document through the use of a different font. The stupid highlighting logic absolutely insists on adding a space to the selection after the right bracket. That’s annoying, but not nearly so annoying as what it does with dashes in the selection.

For example, consider that I just want to select the element itself, which has a dash in the name: (Bold text represents Word selection)
    blah blah-blah <element-name> blah blah

Stupid Word decides to highlight it as follows if I use the mouse (dragging from the “e” in name back towards the “e” in element):
    blah blah-blah <element-name> blah blah

I have to use the keyboard every damn time this comes up if I just want to select the “element-name” and there’s a dash earlier in the sentence.

It seems to me that the first, most important, rule of user interface design should be don’t presume to tell the user what he’s doing (in other words, leave my damn selection alone!).