---
title: "A lesson in usability"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/24/a-lesson-in-usability.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/2/24/a-lesson-in-usability.html"
published: "2003-02-24T08:07:00"
updated: "2003-02-24T08:07:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Delete a bookmark On the Insert menu, click Bookmark . Click the name of the bookmark you want to delete, and then click Delete . Note To delete both the bookmark and the bookmarked item, select the item, and then press…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# A lesson in usability

By Roy Osherove February 24, 2003

**Historical article** · Originally published February 24, 2003; technical details may be outdated.

# _Delete a bookmark_

1. _On the **Insert** menu, click **Bookmark**._
2. _Click the name of the bookmark you want to delete, and then click **Delete**._

_**Note**   To delete both the bookmark and the bookmarked item, select the item, and then press DELETE._

**\[From Word 2002 manual\]**

crap. just wanted to create a template .Doc object with bookmarks to work with from COM automation, but once you get into these bookmark adventures, you never know how your gonna come out...

so i got this text that is part of a bigger bookmark, but i just want to clip the last word from the bookmark field, but i **bloody can't**! i have to delete the whole goddamn thing and reapply it...

**Update: Just thought i'd clarify what bothers me:**

1) you have to press "Insert" to "Delete" something. that is one of the pourest usablity designs i have ever seen..

2) Deleting a bookmarked item automatically deletes the bookmark. Word shoud tell you that you just deleted or about to delete a bookmark

3) It's hard to work with bookmarks which are invisible. word provides no means of working with an invisible bookmark to edit a template. you have to have text items that are bookmarks to easily design template documents. why is that so hard to accomplish?  Last i saw, using Bookmarks in template documents was one of the most commonly used ways to create a word document with data inserted through automation. Yes, You could use Mail Merge, but this way is much simpler (or am i wrong..?)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

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### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/