Word 2000 toolbar weirdness (9.0.3821 SR-1)

[phs3]

(I know, the answer is "So? We know it's weird!")

Seriously: a co-worker's mother is visiting from Europe, and bought a laptop. Her vision is limited, so her daughter spent a long time customizing the Standard and Formatting toolbars to update the icons to be more colorful -- on the theory that when Mom calls from Europe to ask how to Print, it will be easier to say "Look for the bright-green icon" than to try to describe it otherwise.

Anyway, after spending several hours on this, she saved the document. Word ground for a long time, then closed -- and when she reopened it, her customization was gone!

We spent a bunch of time looking for it (she had also added a toolbar, which was named distinctively, so I figured we might be able to find it), to no avail (we searched for that string in recently modified files, etc.).

Eventually she redid it, then called me to do the Save. I noticed that when I went into the Save As dialog, most of the toolbar buttons in that dialog were blanked out, though I could hover on them and get tooltips, so they were still there. I got a wild hare, and *copied* her custom buttons to a new toolbar, then did a Copy/Paste for each button on that toolbar, in place, *then* closed the document, and lo! the customizations stuck.

All I can think is that she irritated Word by changing built-in buttons on a built-in toolbar, yet I (think I) redid the same process here, and the customization stuck.

Does this sound like a known issue anyone has seen?

...phsiii

[Gary Frieder]

It's difficult to tell what happened exactly. One perhaps key thing that's left out of the description is: where were these toolbar customizations saved to?

By default, if you don't specify where these customizations are to be saved to, Word is going to save them in Normal.dot (you can see this in the bottom of the Customize dialog). Having a specific document open while you do these customizations is a bit of red herring, because unless you specify that you want to save the customizations to that document, the customizations will be saved to Normal.dot.

Under "normal" conditions, one wouldn't expect the customizations to have disappeared if they were saved to Normal.dot. One possible explanation for them disappearing: somehow the existing Normal.dot (to which all of the customizations had been saved) was somehow damaged beyond repair when Word crashed - and when you reopened Word, Word automatically created a brand-new clean Normal.dot (minus your customizations of course!).

I'm not sure whether that scenario can happen, but it does point out the need to: 1) always keep a backup of your Normal.dot, if you are saving customizations to it 2) consider storing toolbar customizations in a global template, rather than Normal.dot; this is considered better practice because Normal.dot is so prone to being damaged.

As to why it worked the second time around, again not sure, but possibly that time, Normal.dot did not get damaged and so the customizations were saved to it as expected.

Gary

[Charles Kenyon]

Your language ("Word ground for a long time") makes me suspect that she saved the document to a floppy - from Word. If so, that is a big part of the problem. Never - ever - ever - EVER save a document to a floppy from Word.

Also, the customizations would normally be stored in a template rather than a document, specifically a global template. Your co-worker may want to take a look at and <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.addbalance.com/word/movetotemplate.htm> Copying / Moving Customizations .

Hope this helps.

[LMorgan923]

Charles -

You wrote "Your language ("Word ground for a long time") makes me suspect that she saved the document to a floppy - from Word. If so, that is a big part of the problem. Never - ever - ever - EVER save a document to a floppy from Word."

Now that's a new one for me - I hadn't heard that before. This is not something I do very often, but I would like to know why this is a problem. Your posts are always so informative, and I'd love to know what's behind this statement in case one of our users has a problem with it. Thanks.

Lee Morgan