Hi
You know how when you move the cursor to a different part of the document,
how it automatically switches to whatever the local font, size, color, etc?
I would like a lock button so that the style travels with the cursor. This
would be useful for adding comments or ideas into an existing text.
Examples:
A teacher receives rough draft papers from students submitted online. She
wants to insert comments into the papers using red bold type, but each time
she moves the cursor to where she wants to insert the comment, it reverts to
local style. So now she has to reselect red, and reselect bold. This occurs
on average ten times per paper and for thirty students each assignment.
Switching to her style three hundred times per assignment is tedious, to say
the least.

A student rewriting his own paper inserts comments into his own paper,
typically by highlighting. Since the style cannot be locked, occasionally
these ideas (like, "add data here" ) revert to local and get missed during
rewrite. Paper is submitted and grade suffers.

I like to respond to long emails by inserting comments where appropriate.
Because the text style automatically reverts, it gets to be a mess where I
can't tell where the original and my comments are, unless I am very careful
to change style each time. Even then, the style can automatically switch
without my noticing! That requires me to highlight and change the
erroneously formatted text.

All of these situations lead to distractions which change the focus of one's
attention from the work itself to the tedium of using the software. I
envision a lock button right along with the colors in the color drop-down
menu (so it would be 'lock', 'Black', 'Maroon', 'Green', etc.) and the same
for other attributes (bold, italic, underline, etc. could share one) or maybe
just one "Lock Style" button would be cleaner.

Yes, this is similar to the cut-and-paste option box which asks "Keep
source" or "Match destination formatting", but now it is for newly-typed text.

I would like to see this in Outlook Express, Word, Excel, ... actually, in
all products which have text formatting as a feature.

For anyone who actually read this whole thing, thank you for your patience
and attention.

~WClayB


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