All my button/toolbar configurations disappeared

[Guest]

I just spent 4 hours configuring toolbars & buttons in Word (which I use for
work -- transcription). I just bought this new machine and it's the first
time I've worked with Windows XP or Office 2003. That shouldn't matter,
though, since there isn't much here on these new platforms that are
completely unrecognizable. But I'm so furious now that I almost cannot
speak. Basically, I made everything beautiful for myself, with regard to
tools and buttons I use frequently but most of which are not on the default
toolbars. Did I say I spent 4 hours doing this? I closed Word after
admiring my new configurations, and then about 20 minutes later opened it up,
and Poof. Everything is back the dumb way it was.

Now I'm super mad because not only did this happen, but I can't even figure
out how to turn off the flipping auto-formatting so I can write a regular
document that is not full of auto-corrected medical terminology. And yes, I
have "cleared formatting." About seven times. As though clicking on it more
than once would make it stick. I've also tried to make another template
(apart from normal.dot) that I can try to make load whenever I want to write
something non-formatted. It's not working. I'm going insane.

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?TW9ja2luZ2JpcmRiYXQ=?=,

1. The AutoCorrect stuff is under Tools/Options/AutoCorrect Options. You want to
change settings in the AutoCorrect AND the AutoFormat as You Type tabs.

2. You have to be very careful when you make changes to toolbars and such that
you save them where you expect. Globally, this should be in the Normal.dot. If
you by any chance saved them in a particular document, they would still be there
IF you saved that document.

3. there's a chance that you did put the changes into the Normal.dot template,
then managed to exit Word without saving them. For example, if the prompt "Do
you want to save changes to Normal.dot?" came up and you clicked "no".

The other possibility would be that you have some kind of "management" software
on your system that's not allowing changes to be saved to Normal.dot This could
even be some kind of anti-virus Add-in, for example.

I just spent 4 hours configuring toolbars & buttons in Word (which I use for
work -- transcription). I just bought this new machine and it's the first
time I've worked with Windows XP or Office 2003. That shouldn't matter,
though, since there isn't much here on these new platforms that are
completely unrecognizable. But I'm so furious now that I almost cannot
speak. Basically, I made everything beautiful for myself, with regard to
tools and buttons I use frequently but most of which are not on the default
toolbars. Did I say I spent 4 hours doing this? I closed Word after
admiring my new configurations, and then about 20 minutes later opened it up,
and Poof. Everything is back the dumb way it was.

Now I'm super mad because not only did this happen, but I can't even figure
out how to turn off the flipping auto-formatting so I can write a regular
document that is not full of auto-corrected medical terminology. And yes, I
have "cleared formatting." About seven times. As though clicking on it more
than once would make it stick. I've also tried to make another template
(apart from normal.dot) that I can try to make load whenever I want to write
something non-formatted. It's not working. I'm going insane.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In addition to all the possibilities Cindy mentioned, a likely possibility
is that you are running Adobe Acrobat 7, which prevents Normal.dot from
being saved. If so, see the last section of
http://www.gmayor.com/lose_that_adobe_acrobat_toolbar.htm

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

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Hi Cindy! Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my post(s).

1. Yes -- I do know where all that stuff is, but I didn't want to change
any of the settings unless that were my only option, because I don't want to
get rid of *all* the autocorrect/autotext -- just around 70% of it (the
specific medically-related stuff).

2. It's absolutely possible that I missed it last night, but I just looked
again in "customize," in all the areas I was in last night with the
toolbar/button changes, and I don't see any mention of an option to save or
not save in normal.dot. I've seen that option in other areas -- for example,
in Styles, when you're making a new one -- but I don't see that in
button/toolbar change areas. That's why it was relatively easy for me to be
surprised that those changes were connected to normal.dot. Forgive me -- as
I said, I just didn't know the full significance of normal.dot.

Too, if there is a way to save toolbar settings in a particular document,
I'd sort of be into that, actually. Can you tell me where the option is to
save such changes in a doc other than normal.dot?

And no, I have no software conflicting with saving stuff to normal.dot,
thank God. If I had, I would have run into problems long before now, because
I add/delete stuff from macros and custom.dic all the time, in the course of
work. But it's great to keep in mind, for future troubleshooting.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I suggest you read “Normal.dot Template—Explainedâ€
http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID=151
and http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/WhatTemplatesStore.htm
But note that AutoCorrect entries (except formatted ones) are NOT stored in
Normal.dot. They are stored in .acl files, one for each language, and used
by all Office apps.

--
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]

Thanks again, Suzanne -- that second article is especially helpful. And
w/r/t where a/c settings are stored, I know now that I didn't notice they
were still there when I changed the template location path because I was so
freaked out I didn't test any.

This info does, though, lead me right back to my original complaint -- about
how there is no easy way to toggle back & forth between, say, subsets of a/c
settings. The post I read in this forum, from about a year ago, was written
by someone in a legal office, who wanted Word to have a function that would
allow you to save several sets of a/c settings based on what type of doc you
wanted to create. He wanted a legal set and then a less specified set for
non-legal types of docs. It seems just as logical as having, for instance,
20 different versions of English built in, with separate a/c settings (which
are customizable, as we know) available for each. It doesn't seem too
difficult, then, for MS to build a limited number of "empty" "language"
options, not for languages based on geography, for for specialties such as
law or medicine. If there were 5 per Word account, I think that would be
plenty for any one user. They'd be in the dropdown along with the other
languages, only you'd have the option of choosing your base language (so you
could still access spellcheck and grammar, etc.), plus whatever a/c settings
you'd add after that.

Does that make sense?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I agree that having separate sets of AutoCorrect entries would be helpful.
As it is, you can do this with AutoText, which can be saved in specific
templates.

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

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all may benefit.