If you select an item, then click Insert and leave the dialog open, then select another item and click Insert again, the next time you try to do this, you lose the scroll bar and end up at the top of the list.Surely it would be a simple thing to add expand/collapse icons for the Headings list? The heading levels cannot be collapsed - they always open fully expanded, which makes it painful to get to Section 12 of 24 sections, for example.As soon as you re-open it, it goes back to the default size.

This is sort of fixed in Word 2007 - the dialog is resizable for both height and width, but the resizing does not hold if you close the dialog box. You cannot resize the dialog box any which way, which means that you have to continually scroll the list nine items at a time (Home and End work within it as do the page up/down keys, so that helps a little).So how is this Word 2003 dialog box broken? HereвЂ™s the Word 2003 dialog box, showing that there are many many headings in this document - the vertical scroll bar on the right indicates that Section 5.6 in this example is only about a quarter of the way into this document. IвЂ™ve been working on hundreds of these types of documents since last September and there are some simple things that could improve the experience for those of us who have to use this function many times a day. WhatвЂ™s so annoying about it? Well, it just DOESNвЂ™T work well with long documents where you have to insert many cross-references.

So whatвЂ™s my peeve this time? The Word 2003 Cross-reference dialog box (and, to an extent, the Word 2007 Cross-reference dialog box, though some things have been fixed). (I did hear that Microsoft employees use an internal XML system for their documentation, which if true, gives lie to вЂeating your own dog food!вЂ™) My experience with Word would suggest not.

Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft employees have ever used Word for a long document with multiple heading levels, hundreds of headings, figures and tables, and lots of cross-references to those headings, figures and tables.

Word cross reference figure not listed