Fear The Hand Of Non-Selection

One of those "remember it for when you need it" posts:

On Tiny, I've been unable to select text in the Outlook preview pane for about a month. When I tried to select things, I'd get a not-quite-looking-like-the-web-hand hand instead of a selection bar, and it would grab at the document rather than just sorta sitting there browser style.

It hasn't been a big deal, but I couldn't find anywhere to turn it off in the options, or work out what was happening.

I wondered if it might have been new-fangled Outlook behaviour on Tablet PCs, but couldn't reproduce it on any others.

Cutting a long story short: I found the culprit - it kinda was a tablet thing, but more due to my use of the scroll bar on a tablet.

At the top of Word scroll bars (and I guess this flows forward into Outlook 2007, which uses Word for email rendering), just above the top scroll button, there's a little hand.

Clicking that little hand (intentionally) puts you into drag-the-document-but-don't-modify-or-select-anything mode.

Clicking that little hand (unintentionally, and less likely to happen if you have a mouse wheel rather than a tablet) will cause the same effect, only you won't be able to work out what happened or how to undo it! :)

I happily accidentally ended up in scrolly mode today while reviewing a Word document, but noticed the effect and was still staring at the button I'd failed to tap.

Yay!