{"id":12,"date":"2005-05-06T10:21:45","date_gmt":"2005-05-06T15:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stein.everybody.org\/brain\/word-cursor-horizontal\/"},"modified":"2011-03-10T10:57:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T15:57:35","slug":"word-cursor-horizontal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/word-cursor-horizontal\/","title":{"rendered":"Word Cursor Horizontal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Microsoft Word 2003, I typed Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen to insert an optional hyphen.  What happened was that my mouse cursor changed to a horizontal line (like a big minus sign).  It worked normally in the document, but I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to get it back to the normal cursor.  When I went to Insert > Symbol to find the correct keyboard shortcut for the optional hyphen, nothing happened.  When I tried again, the Symbol option was missing from the Insert menu.  I had to re-add by customizing my menu bar.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually I figured out that Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen is the shortcut for a special cursor that deletes menu items.  From what I&#8217;ve read, this is supposed to be useful for deleting recently used files from the Files menu.  It seems less useful in the unpleasant situation I encountered.  When that key combination is pressed accidentally, the user is faced with a strange cursor.  As the user clicks through the menus to figure out how to change it, it deletes the menu option (without even a warning).  For the most part, I think Microsoft Word is a great product, but this is a really dangerous feature.<\/p>\n<p>The simple way to return to a regular cursor is to press escape.<\/p>\n<p>Google assistance:  Help, my mouse pointer changed to a dash!  Mouse icon shape is a hyphen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In Microsoft Word 2003, I typed Ctrl-Alt-Hyphen to insert an optional hyphen. What happened was that my mouse cursor changed to a horizontal line (like a big minus sign). It worked normally in the document, but I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to get it back to the normal cursor. When I went to Insert > [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microsoft-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremystein.com\/brain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}