My Options button has disappeared! Help!

[Guest]

In MS Word, under Tools, there's a selection called Options. Here you can set
preferences, e.g. spellcheck, blue background, loads of things.

Yesterday, it vanished. It's just not in the menu any more. This really
annoys me as I constantly change options.

I use Word 2003 SP2.

Please give me back my Options!

 

[Guest]

I've actually found the answer to this myself - thanks Bob I:


Tools, Customize, Commands, Scroll to Tools(select it), scroll in right
pane to "Options", left-drag to Menu bar on top of "tools", pause a
moment, when Dropdown opens release the button at the bottom of the menu.


Damn stupid design feature if you ask me. How can you lose a button?????

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Good question. Many manage to accidentally lose commands and buttons while
they're hunting for various hyphen/dash characters. It works like this:

Think: "Now where is the darn em dash? Maybe it's here..."

Press: Ctrl+Alt+dash

Think: "No, that didn't do it. It just turned the mouse pointer into a
black hyphen, rather than typing one. Hmmm... maybe the em dash is in Word
options..." forgetting that the mouse point is now a big black hyphen.

Choose: Tools - Options.

Think: "Hmmm... that's odd. Nothing happened. I'll try again..."

Choose: Tools...

Yell: "WHAT HAPPENED TO OPTIONS!? IT WAS THERE A MOMENT AGO!"

Here's what happened. When you press Ctrl+Alt+dash, it activates the
ToolsCustomizeRemoveMenuShortcut command. This turns the mouse pointer into
a heavy black dash. The very next menu command you choose gets removed from
the menu.

When the big black hyphen appears, it can be useful for removing files from
the Recent Files list, at the bottom of the File menu. However... it usually
is invoked accidentally, since relatively few users know about it. If it
shows up by accident, just press Escape to turn it off.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This is such a common occurrence that the process Herb describes is written
up (though not so colorfully) in
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/LostSymbol.htm.

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

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