How can I stop Word from rearranging my toolbars?

[Guest]

Hello,

I am using Word 2003 at the moment, with the standard and formatting
toolbars on the same line. Even at a resolution of 1280x1024 there are a
number of icons which fall off the end of the toolbar. Under Word 2000 if
memory serves, the application just drops the buttons to the right hand side
of the toolbar and offers you them in a dropdown. Word 2003 decides which
ones to drop, presumably according to usage data.

I've never liked the tendency of recent Office products to drop icons or
menu-items according to their frequency of use; I find it patronising, and it
really gets in the way of locating the items you're looking for, since most
people do this contextually. If the context is always changing, or the item
you need is prone to disappear, it is infuriating. I know of nobody who has
used Word seriously who has this function switched on, and fortunately you
can easily turn it off, which is the first job to be done after a new install.

However, there seems to be no option to prevent toolbar juggling in the
event of the toolbar running out of space. TBH it should obey the master
'always show full menus' switch, but it doesn't. Does anyone know of a
registry setting which will correct this issue? I did think it might be
possible to locate where the usage data is stored (if it is in a file), reset
it and then write-protect it to stop Word from juggling my menus, but I'm not
sure where to look for that either.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Guest]

Hi John

All you need to do is:
1. Right click a toolbar
2. Select Customize from the toolbars list
Result: Customize dialog is displayed

3. Click the Options tab
4. Uncheck the radio buttons in the 'Personalized Menus and Toolbars' section
5. Click 'Close' button

All being well you should have the desired results.

Alex

 

[Guest]

Hi John-

While following Al's excellent suggestin you might wat to explore the
Customize capability even further and create your own toolbars that give you
exactly what you want when you want it.

Regards |:>)

 

[Guest]

Hi John

If you do experiment with customising your toolbars (excellent suggestion
CyberTaz), have a good look at the 'All Commands' category within the
commands tab.

What you will notice is alot of commands previously used in earlier versions
of Word are stored here, i.e. the Insert table button that displayed a grid
for you to select the required number of rows and columns (as used in Word
97) can be found here and used in Word 2000, XP and 2003.

It's a long list to go through but well worth it.

Have fun playing

Alex

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The best way to make Word show all your toolbar buttons, though, is not to
try to combine two toolbars on one row.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Hi Al, thanks for taking the time to try and help me. Your advice, though
promising, did not solve my problem.

Hi John

All you need to do is:
1. Right click a toolbar
2. Select Customize from the toolbars list
Result: Customize dialog is displayed

3. Click the Options tab
4. Uncheck the radio buttons in the 'Personalized Menus and Toolbars' section

The options here are:

Show standard and formatting toolbars on two rows - which I already had
unchecked, because I like to maximise the screen space given to the document
I am editing, and minimise the space given to Word's UI.

Always show full menus - I keep this checked because I don't like the
'cut-off' menus. Unchecking it would not solve my problem. Unchecking it and
clearing my usage data does not correct my problem, either.

Neither of these really addresses my problem which is this: I don't like
personalised toolbars, but if any toolbar runs off the screen, it becomes a
personalised toolbar however you have it configured. Under Word 2000, the
simpler (and context preserving) mechanic of placing all the buttons which
would have otherwise fallen off the screen (or outside the window) due to
their location in the dropdown.

Really I am just looking for a way of compelling Word 2003 to function in a
similar way to the way it has done in previous versions, so that I don't have
continually have menu items jumping to and fro between the dropdown and the
visible toolbar. they may well settle down as more usage data is applied, but
they are likely to result in an illogical order, (for example right align and
justify become divorced from centre and left align, where they really belong,
even though I don't use them very often)

If you take a toolbar in Word 2000 and progressively push it off the right
hand side of the screen, you see the icons disappear in the order they leave
the screen. If you do the same in 2003, you see them disappear in an almost
random order, determined by how many times they have been clicked. I think
that the first behaviour is actually the more intuitive.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to help me, but I'm rapidly coming to the
conclusion that this is simply new default behaviour which I am going to have
to learn to live with - I can't reasonably revert to Office 2000, my
preference, because all of my colleagues are now on 2003.

 

[Guest]

Thanks to all for the helpful suggestions regarding customisation of the
toolbars in the thread. Unfortunately, what I am trying to do is escape
customisation!

I appreciate that dynamic toolbars and menus are a great feature for people
who are overwhelmed by options and only use a limited subset of the capacity
offered by the software. But my preference is to be able to use contextual
cues to find options; so I know that 'Insert Picture' is about three fifths
of the way down the 'Insert' menu, between 'web component' and 'diagram'.
Before long it becomes instinct, and options being removed changes the
location of options so that you can no longer work instinctively.

As such establishing a subset of the functions to place on a foreshortened
menu doesn't really appeal to me as a solution; I have established that I use
most of the buttons in the menu, and those which I use infrequently are used
as navigation beacons for the ones I do. To cut the toolbar down to size like
this I will in effect be doing manually what Word is doing automatically;
reducing my easily accessible options to the ones I use most frequently, as
opposed to all of those available..

I'm also aware that making the toolbars occupy two lines of my display and
eat a bit of my document viewing space is a quick fix which will apparently
solve my problem. But I want my formatting bar to the right of my standard
toolbar because after five years of it living there and behaving in a certain
way, for me that's where it 'belongs'. You can call me set in my ways, or ask
me to move with the times, but I think that this small, but arbitrary and
inconsistent change to the behaviour of an established function is not an
improvement

Thanks again for all the help offered and sorry to counter your kind
suggestions with dull and wordy moans

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Your question asked about toolbars, not menus, which is why you did not get
the answer you needed.

1. If this is Word 2000, on the Options tab of Tools | Customize, clear the
check box for "Menus show recently used items first."

2. For Word 2002 or 2003, check the box for "Always show full menus."

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Hi John

Apologies for misreading your original post, if I understand you it's not
dynamic menus you want to fix, it's dynamic toolbars?

From various MVP articles I've read in the past (and please VBA gods help me
out here), it might be possible to attain the desired result by changing the
commandbar priority for each toolbar using VBA.

The control.priority settings (if i remember correctly), dictate whether or
not buttons can be dropped off the toolbar as the screen resizes and the
toolbar runs out of space.

Maybe one of the nice VBA gods reading these posts can come up with an
appropriate bit of code that could be inserted into an AutoExec or AutoOpen
or AutoNew macro?

Hope this at least points you in the right direction

Alex