Hi John

Apologies for misreading your original post, if I understand you it's not
dynamic menus you want to fix, it's dynamic toolbars?

From various MVP articles I've read in the past (and please VBA gods help me
out here), it might be possible to attain the desired result by changing the
commandbar priority for each toolbar using VBA.

The control.priority settings (if i remember correctly), dictate whether or
not buttons can be dropped off the toolbar as the screen resizes and the
toolbar runs out of space.

Maybe one of the nice VBA gods reading these posts can come up with an
appropriate bit of code that could be inserted into an AutoExec or AutoOpen
or AutoNew macro?

Hope this at least points you in the right direction

Alex

"John Swire" wrote:

Hi Al, thanks for taking the time to try and help me. Your advice, though
promising, did not solve my problem.

"Al" wrote:

Hi John

All you need to do is:
1. Right click a toolbar
2. Select Customize from the toolbars list
Result: Customize dialog is displayed

3. Click the Options tab
4. Uncheck the radio buttons in the 'Personalized Menus and Toolbars' section

The options here a

Show standard and formatting toolbars on two rows - which I already had
unchecked, because I like to maximise the screen space given to the document
I am editing, and minimise the space given to Word's UI.

Always show full menus - I keep this checked because I don't like the
'cut-off' menus. Unchecking it would not solve my problem. Unchecking it and
clearing my usage data does not correct my problem, either.

Neither of these really addresses my problem which is this: I don't like
personalised toolbars, but if any toolbar runs off the screen, it becomes a
personalised toolbar however you have it configured. Under Word 2000, the
simpler (and context preserving) mechanic of placing all the buttons which
would have otherwise fallen off the screen (or outside the window) due to
their location in the dropdown.

Really I am just looking for a way of compelling Word 2003 to function in a
similar way to the way it has done in previous versions, so that I don't have
continually have menu items jumping to and fro between the dropdown and the
visible toolbar. they may well settle down as more usage data is applied, but
they are likely to result in an illogical order, (for example right align and
justify become divorced from centre and left align, where they really belong,
even though I don't use them very often)

If you take a toolbar in Word 2000 and progressively push it off the right
hand side of the screen, you see the icons disappear in the order they leave
the screen. If you do the same in 2003, you see them disappear in an almost
random order, determined by how many times they have been clicked. I think
that the first behaviour is actually the more intuitive.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to help me, but I'm rapidly coming to the
conclusion that this is simply new default behaviour which I am going to have
to learn to live with - I can't reasonably revert to Office 2000, my
preference, because all of my colleagues are now on 2003.