such a grammar freak...

you know you're in a bad state when you finally solve a problem in MS Word that had been plaguing you for months and get visibly excited...

I review translated tech docs for one client. comparing the original Japanese with the translated English. finding mistakes, etc.

each document ends with a copyright statement that is set off within a pasted graphic. the text can be edited. the client's policy is to treat the copyright year as a document variable.

okay. I can do that in Word. File, Properties... yadda, yadda, yadda...

except, what happens when the copyright spans multiple years?

grammatically, you are required to separate the years with an en-dash. not a minus sign, hyphen or plain dash. an en-dash.

Word handles these normally within text by auto-converting them for you. it assumes you learned how to type on a typewriter and would have learned to type two hyphens ('--') when an en-dash was desired, and Word automagically converts the hyphens into one en-dash ('–').

except...

you can't do that within a document properties field.

grumble, grumble, lousy Microsoft, grumble...

nor, sadly, is the Insert menu available, so you can't use the Insert, Symbols workaround...

but then something occurred to me...

I found this web page a few weeks back out of my desire to spell my clients' names correctly within Gmail. it's Hervé, not Herve...

and today, out of the blue, it occurred to me...

a Eureka, jump-out-of-the-bath, moment...

there must be an ALT combination for en-dashes...

and sure enough... ALT-0150

at last, problem solved!

if only my issues with my lawyer could be handled this easily... (wink)