"So, we had a problem, and it had a deceptively simple solution. This is exactly the kind of problem Word's Auto Formatter was designed to solve. The fancy name for Word's Auto Formatter is a "rule-based inference engine," which really means that it's like pattern matching on steroids. It takes into consideration the current state of the document, and interprets various keystroke input sequences in terms of a set of rules. It's designed to work very fast, so that users don't notice any effect on typing performance...."
"To summarize these rules, if the insertion point is:
- In an empty paragraph--always inserts a tab character;
- In the middle of a non-empty paragraph--always indents the whole paragraph; and
- In the first line of a paragraph:
- If there are no tab stops set, then indents the first line of the paragraph; or
- If there is a tab stop set, then inserts a tab character.... "
It gets better than that :) I really, really like this:
Personally, I'd like Tab to always be "Tab" and nothing else. Funnily enough, there's a solution for that as well. In order for 'Tab" to always be "Tab", you need to press "Ctrl+Tab".%A0 Now *that's* design ;)
I think the whole tool would work better if there was an option to unload the inference engine completely. It works only for short memo writing, and it absolutely sucks for anything more complex. Note to Microsoft - Word is awfully expensive for something suitable only for memos...
Read: Re: Why Word hates you
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