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 |:)

"John Swire" wrote:

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.