TOOLBARS | Word Annoyances: How to Fix the Most ANNOYING Things about Your Favorite Word Processor

MENUS

Display Full Menus

The Annoyance:

I just installed Word 2000/XP/2003, and the menus have shrunk in the wash. Why do I have to click the button with the two little arrows to get the rest of the menu?

The Fix:

To make Word display the full menu immediately just this once, double-click the menu name . To make Word always display the full menus, use one of the following options.

In Word 2003 or Word XP, choose Tools Customize, click the Options tab, and check the "Always show full menus box.
In Word 2000, choose Tools Customize, click the Options tab, and uncheck the "Menus show recently used commands first box.

Prevent Menu Items from Changing Position

The Annoyance:

Every time I open a menu, the wretched items have shifted position! How do I turn off St. Vitus's Dance?

The Fix:

Choose Tools Customize, and then click the Options tab. In Word 2003 or Word XP, check the "Always show full menus box. In Word 2000, uncheck the "Menus show recently used commands first" box.

Microsoft calls this feature "personalized" menus, but most people call it a menace . Word starts you off with its default set of menu itemsthose that the Microsoft focus groups used the most. As you use menu items, Word keeps score and migrates your most frequently used menu items to the top of each menu so that you can find them more easily.

The other Office applications do this as well, and you quell this behavior in all of them using this technique. Your choice for personalized menus applies in all the Office applications, not just the one in which you're applying the setting, so you can't use full menus in Word but use personalized menus in Excel and PowerPoint (not that you would normally want to).

Cut Menus Down to Size

The Annoyance:

Half the commands on the menus are useless to me. I'd like to get rid of them to clear out the clutter.

The Fix:

Once you've worked out which commands you need, you can strip the menus down to size. There's a quick way of removing a command from a menu that you can use to knock out the occasional offender, but if you plan to reconfigure several menus, you should use a more formal method.

The quick way of removing a menu command is to press Ctrl+Alt+- (that's the hyphen key). Word turns the mouse pointer into a thick horizontal bar. Click the menu containing the offending command so that the menu opens. Click your victim, and it'll disappear.

The more formal method of removing a menu command is to use the Customize dialog box:

Open a document based on the template you want to change.
Choose Tools Customize and click the Commands tab. Make sure that the "Save in drop-down list shows the document or template you want to affect. If you want the change to affect all documents, choose Normal.dot .
Click the menu that contains the command, drag the command into the document area, and drop it.
Click the Close button.
Shift-click the File menu and choose Save All. If Word prompts you to save changes to Normal.dot , click the Yes button.

Tip: You can easily replace any item you remove from a menu or a toolbar. Start by choosing Tools

Customize, clicking the Commands tab, and selecting the document or template in the "Save in drop-down list. To replace a single item, drag the command to the appropriate menu or toolbar. To reset a menu, right-click it and choose Reset from the shortcut menu. To reset a toolbar, select it on the Toolbars tab and click the Reset button.

Create a Work Menu

The Annoyance:

There are a handful of documents that I need to be able to open easily. Sometimes they appear on the Most Recently Used list on the File menu, but I work with many other documents, so they're not always there.

The Fix:

Microsoft provides a Work menu (see Figure 1-9) that you can add to the menu bar so that you can keep up to nine documents readily available.

Figure 1-9. Add the Work menu to the menu bar (or to a convenient toolbar) for quick access to the documents you use most often.

To add the Work menu to the menu bar, choose Tools Customize, click the Commands tab, and make sure that the "Save in drop-down list shows the document or template you want to affect. (Usually, Normal.dot is the best choice.) Select the Built-in Menus item, and drag the Work menu to the menu bar or a toolbar you always keep open. Shift-click the File menu and choose Save All. If Word prompts you to save changes to Normal.dot , click the Yes button.

To add the current document to the Work menu, choose Work Add to Work Menu. To remove a document, press Ctrl+Alt+-, click the Work menu, and then click the document you want to remove.