curious QAT behavior

[grammatim]

In earlier versions of Word, when your document was narrower than
usual (for instance with documents open side by side for comparison),
and icons that no longer fit on the toolbars were in the down-arrow at
the right, when you used one of those, it replaced another icon in the
visible part of the toolbar.

But with the QAT in 2007, such buttons simply stay inside the runover
bin, no matter how often you use them.

Isn't that odd?

 

[Cheryl Flanders]

There are two small dots on the far right of the QAT. Hover your
mouse over the dots and you see "More Controls" in the pop-out tip
box. Left click and hold down on the mouse button and you see all
icons on the QAT.

Cheryl

 

[Jay Freedman]

In earlier versions of Word, when your document was narrower than
usual (for instance with documents open side by side for comparison),
and icons that no longer fit on the toolbars were in the down-arrow at
the right, when you used one of those, it replaced another icon in the
visible part of the toolbar.

But with the QAT in 2007, such buttons simply stay inside the runover
bin, no matter how often you use them.

Isn't that odd?

I think that's by design. One of the things Microsoft learned (sometimes the
hard way, as in the God-awful "personalized menus" in previous Office versions)
is that people don't understand menus and buttons that change by themselves on
the basis of usage. A major tenet of the Office 2007 design is that nothing ever
moves unless the user tells it to -- that's one reason there is so little
customization ability.

If you find that you've added a button to the QAT and you're using it
frequently, go back into the Customize dialog, select that button in the
right-hand list, and click the up arrow button to the right of the list to move
the button up toward the beginning.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

The behavior you describe for previous versions was the case only if you had
adaptive menus enabled, I believe. The QAT is not adaptive. The whole idea
of the Ribbon was to be consistent--everything always in the same place
(which is why it was made so difficult for users to modify it), and this
extends to the QAT as well. You can rearrange buttons on the QAT to move
your most frequently used ones toward the left end.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[grammatim]

I didn't consciously enable adaptive menus ... but usually I don't use
half-width windows, and my QAT buttons are arranged in a logical order
and so that confusable ones (an awful lot of them are a white square
with some tiny image inside) generally aren't side by side.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Adaptive menus were enabled by default in Word 2000 and above.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

I didn't consciously enable adaptive menus ... but usually I don't use
half-width windows, and my QAT buttons are arranged in a logical order
and so that confusable ones (an awful lot of them are a white square
with some tiny image inside) generally aren't side by side.