Microsoft Word 2008 keyboard shortcut insanity

One of the rules of software design is that menus and commands should be as similar as possible between all applications. In OS X, Command-C means copy and Command-V means paste. This eases Transfer of Training from one application to another. Microsoft Word 2008 violates this principle, however. To initiate a search, the standard Command-F is used. However, to find the next instance of the search term, Command-G is traditionally used. This is not the case, unfortunately. It is possible to re-assign shortcuts to different commands. As blogger Pierre Igot found out, it is surprisingly and ridiculously difficult to do.

Snip:

“Easy,” you say. “Just go to the ‘Customize Keyboard’ dialog box, find the ‘Find Next’ command and assign command-G to it.” Right.

First of all, good luck finding “Find Next” in the list of commands in the “Customize Keyboard” dialog box. Due to Microsoft’s completely nonsensical way of naming Word’s internal commands, the “Find” command is actually listed as “EditFind,” but the “Find Next” command is not listed as “EditFindNext”:

That would be too easy. Instead, it is listed as… “RepeatFind”:

In the menus, the commands are listed as “Find” and “Find Next.” However, in Word’s internal naming, the command is “RepeatFind.” That’s not even transfer of training - that’s simple consistency, and it is not followed here.

Hit up the rest of the post and read about this exercise in frustration.