Wicked Smaht idea of the day – re: sucky office suites

AutoCrossreference

So I’m at the office writing up some BS in MS Word and I’ve just typed “(blah blah blah) as shown in Figure…”, because I’m about to refer to a figure. Now to make a crossreference. I select crossreference, the window pops up and defaults to “Table”. WTF? With a modern computer’s gigahertz of processing at its disposal, is it really so hard to recognize that the last six letters I typed were F-I-G-U-R-E, and do something remotely smart with this information?

Beyond that, I should be able to define, and store in my template, a list of standard crossreference-able items (Figure, Table, Section, Task, Claim, etc.). Then, every time I type something in a paragraph that matches one of these patterns ( e.g. “Figure 1”), it should turn gray and (if it exists) automatically become a cross-reference to that item. Alternatively, I should be able to right-click on the “Figure 1” I just typed and select ‘AutoCrossreference’. Or simply type Figure, right-click on it and have a popup box of Figures (and of course, NOT Tables, Claims, etc.) appear.