Adobe Acrobat 6

[Martine Smith]

As a company we use lots of macros within our Word
templates, which have buttons allocated on the toolbar.
We have loaded Adobe Acrobat 6 and the macro buttons have
disappeared. We have taken Acrobat off and they have
reappeared - so we know for sure that the problem is
caused by Acrobat. However, if we then do
view/toolbars/customise - without actually doing anything
except opening this option the macros buttons appear
again.

We would like the macro buttons to be on top all the time
within a template - any advice?

 

[Jezebel]

Acrobat 6 has an infuriating and irresponsible design flaw. The Acrobat
add-in adds its own toolbar and menu --- but before doing so it RESETs the
existing toolbars and menus, discarding any other customisations that might
be there already.

I was able to work around it for my purposes by putting the menu and toolbar
customisations into an add-in of my own, then re-naming my add-in so that it
loads after Acrobat. Word appears to load the add-ins in the start-up folder
in reverse alphabetical order.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't have that problem here.

 

[Jezebel]

Strange. I just had a discussion in another forum about exactly this
problem. In my case I was able to pin it down precisely by putting breaks in
the AutoExec code and watch what was going on: Word opens with the menus and
toolbars of normal.dot. Then my add-in, with its additional toobars and
menu. Then Acrobat -- the menus were reset and the Acrobat menu added. Just
as the OP describes.

Is there a setting somewhere?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Beats me, but I have very highly customized Standard and Formatting
toolbars, plus a couple of other add-ins loading; the Acrobat add-in loads
last and doesn't seem to affect any of the other settings.

 

[Jezebel]

Are the customizations in the add-ins or in your normal.dot? Not sure why
this would make a difference, but there's clearly some kind of competitive
customization contexts going on. How do you determine the order in which
your add-ins load?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

My customizations are in Normal.dot. The add-ins are DataPrompter.dot,
TaskPaneController.dot, and PDFMaker.dot. That is the order in which they
are listed in Tools | Templates and Add-ins, and I suspect that's the order
in which they load. I know that DataPrompter adds its menu before Acrobat
does. I don't know about TaskPaneController because it just adds a menu item
to the Tools menu. At some point someone figured out the order in which
add-ins load, but I forget whether it was supposedly alphabetical or reverse
alpha.