When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at
..52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an
even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5".

Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1.

You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can
enter settings in the Tabs dialog.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"danhattan" wrote in message
...
When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler,
they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at
.52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on
an
even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5".

Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1.

Thank you. That's a very useful function, though I still wonder why Word
wants to default to a location .02" off from where it logically should. But,
now it no longer matters. Thanks again.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can
enter settings in the Tabs dialog.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"danhattan" wrote in message
...
When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler,
they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at
.52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on
an
even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5".

Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1.

To some extent it depends on the grid interval you have set (in the Draw |
Grid dialog), but the fact is that recent versions of Word just don't set
tabs very precisely.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"danhattan" wrote in message
...
Thank you. That's a very useful function, though I still wonder why Word
wants to default to a location .02" off from where it logically should.
But,
now it no longer matters. Thanks again.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

You can set measurements exactly by pressing Alt as you drag. Or you can
enter settings in the Tabs dialog.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"danhattan" wrote in message
...
When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal
ruler,
they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance,
at
.52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to
stop on
an
even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5".

Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1.

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 14:27:03 -0800, danhattan wrote:

When I drag the margin handles or the tab stops on the horizontal ruler, they
want to stop .02 inches from where they normally should. For instance, at
.52" rather than .5". No amount of gentle tugging will get them to stop on an
even measurement, so I have to use the Format menu to get 'em to .5".

Anyone know why this happens. This is Word 2003 SP 1.

This is the result of multiple poor decisions in the design and
implementation of Word.

To fix it, set you measurement units to points, change the drawing
grid to nine points, then set your measurement units back to inches.

For the gory details, see below:



You can set Word's default interface measurement units in Tools |
Options | General. The choices are inches, centimeters, millimeters,
points, and picas.

No matter what unit you choose as the interface default, Word stores
measurements as integer TWIPs. There are 1440 TWIPs per inch. Note
that the user interface does not offer TWIPs as an entry possibility.
You can enter TWIPs indirectly by remembering that one TWIP is .05
point.

No matter what unit you choose as the interface default, you can enter
measurements in any of the units by typing in the value and the unit
abbreviation. (Font size is an exception; it is always specified in
points (or half points) and it may be internally stored in that form.)
Many measurements are typically specified in inches or centimeters,
but can be set in points if desired. Margin sizes and tab positions
are examples. There are 72 points per inch. There are 20 TWIPs per
point.

Whatever you enter will be converted to TWIPs by Word for storage. If
the measurement that you enter does not happen to be an integer number
of TWIPs, Word will round it to an integer. Most of the common
fractional inch settings will convert to integer TWIPs exactly.
The fact that measurements are stored as integer TWIPs means that you
cannot set measurements more precisely than one TWIP, i.e. about .0007
inch or about .0017639 centimeter. This is close enough for practical
purposes, but can be disconcerting when Word gives you 6.4999mm
instead of 6.5mm.

Word rounds measurements to two decimal places for display purposes.
(It ignores the setting for decimal places in Windows Regional
Settings.) For example, if you enter a value of .125 inches, Word will
convert it to 180 TWIPs and store it exactly. If you open the dialog
box again, you will see the number displayed as .13 inches, which can
be disconcerting but is harmless in itself. But it gets worse.

If you now click OK on that dialog, either because you have a bad
habit of using OK instead of Cancel or because you have changed some
other value in the dialog, Word will see the .13 inch value and
convert it to 187 TWIPs and store the new value! I know of only two
ways to avoid this bug. One is to always re-enter correct values in
all measurements whenever you are going to click OK on a dialog box.
The other is to set the default measurement unit to points, because
two decimal places of points are enough to specify TWIPs exactly. (The
third approach is to relax and not let errors of .005 inches bother
you too much.)

Things are even worse when setting the Drawing Grid. In this case Word
rounds on input instead of on output, so you cannot manually set the
correct value of one eighth of an inch! The only way to set the
correct drawing grid is to change your measurement unit to points and
set the grid for nine points.

This bug is particularly insidious if you accidentally end up with the
Drawing Grid set to .13" instead of .125", because from then on your
ruler settings will snap to strange values like .52". The error is
cyclic; it is zero at 0", 3.25", and so on, and maximum halfway
between.