I want to stab Microsoft Word in the face!!!!!

[esper]

Help me out. This is pissing me off severely.

Hoping to one day be an author with at least one of my books in every home in the country (OMPTIMISM IS FOR LOSERS!!!) I spend a good deal of time in Microsoft Word. I'd love to get into something else, but I'm so used to Word that I just can't adjust to the look and feel, however similar, of things like Lotus or OpenOffice or Works or any of the other commonly-used word processing applications available for Windows.

However, as is the case with all Microsoft-made products, four howler monkeys and a macaque of dubious parentage and unconventional eating habits created the program (I just accidentally typed "problem") by hurling their own feces at each other, and the code was then derived by a team of experts by staring at the aftermath of their Bowel Royale (see what I did there?). I'm hoping someone is on hand who knows how to translate said fecal matter turned code and can give me a hand with something, and possibly, in addition to giving me a hand in stopping it, could possibly explain why it's happening in the first place.

I normally have my Formatting and Word Count toolbars open, although I often open others and then close them as needed. However, a couple months ago, I opened the Annotate toolbar, and then closed it. Now, every time I open Word, it's open in it's own toolbar which I then have to close in order to give myself a nicely sized and comparatively uncluttered workspace.

How do I get rid of it for good, and what is the reason it tortures me so? I know it sounds petty, but after a couple months, having to close it every time I open Word, which is on average around 10-15 times a day, is really starting to peeve me. I'd leave it open, but it's starting to really grate on me for little reasons, such as reducing the amount of page space I have to view, creating a distractingly cluttered workspace, and causing my page scrolling to have less time before it jumps a whole page.

Assistance would be so appreciated.

[Chicky]

Have you tried dragging the tool bar onto the page so it's no longer linked to the other toolbars and THEN closing it?

might work.

[Neil Dnuma]

What about messing with the settings under View/Toolbars/Customize...?

[esper]

Tried Neil's. I'll look into Chicky's. Anyone have any idea why everything else retains its settings as default when the frigging annotate toolbar reverts every time?

EDIT: Tried both for about 20 minutes. The customization settings revert to their current undesired default after the program is shut off, and all Chicky's idea did was make it pop up in the middle of the page next time I started Word. I temporarily fixed the problem by increasing my resolution so I could fit it on an already-existing toolbar, but now I have to work on what is an essentially an unfamiliar workspace, which isn't good when you work on a program so often.

Does anyone have any idea how to alter Word's configuration file???

[CodeJunkie]

Try these:

http://search.techrepublic.com.com/search/microsoft+word+and+toolbar.html?&c=1&s=0&m=20&o=0&i=0=0
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-11192-0.html?forumID=42hreadID=162190

[esper]

If I didn't already know about the preexisting state of Microsoft's suckage, I would say that my problem is getting downright creepy. On those sites you linked (thanks, BTW) I came across four perfectly good, albeit entirely dissimilar, suggestions.


They all failed. Something is severely screwed up here. Oh well, I guess I can live with the clutter and the smaller screen. Hey, if I have to do that, I might just as well switch applications. Thanks anyways, all, but there's nothing you can do against pure crap.

[Traveler]

Esper,

Here is what I recommend:

Word keeps all UI settings in a file called Normal.dot under

Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

Rename this file to something else (like Normal.bak) - this will trigger Word to create a new default toolbar layout the next time you run it (everything is reset to default.) Customize the toolbar the way you want it - open necessary toolbars, add/remove/move around buttons (and/or draw new button images if you need any) and then close Word - this will save the new layout in Normal.dot (Word creates this file if it's not there.)

Go back to the above folder and make a copy of this file (back it up) and then make the file read-only. This way Word will not be able to change any UI settings, since it won't be able to write the file. (If you want to change the UI, you'll have to clear the read-only flag on the file, too.)

Burn your backup file onto a CD - this way, you can easily restore it later, even if you reinstall your computer. This is how I use the same toolbar layout in Word since ~1995. (This method may not work with Office 2007, since the UI changed drastically there.)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I use Word quite extensively for the same reasons as you, but I pretty much use none of the advanced features aside from word count and spelling check since I made a novel template with the proper formatting setup for me already.  Might be worth doing if you don't want to screw around with formatting every time.