I was trying to customise the Word 2008 toolbar to position the
formatting palette on the right. As far as I can see there is no
flexible space available. Is this the case?
Hi Steve,
You can do it, but you first you have to fix what I consider some bad design
decisions in the Office 2008 interface.
In Office 2008 Microsoft adopted a new attitude toward toolbars. In all
previous versions of Office, toolbars were at the application level. If you
closed a document window, your toolbars remained. Not matter what document
was opened, only things relating to the document appeared in the document
window. This is the right way to do it IMHO.
Office 2008 is to following the crowd to be trendy, chique and look like web
2.0 applications and web browsers. The same controls are duplicated over and
over in each document. What a waste of screen space! But the look and feel
is now consistent (consistently bad IMHO) in more and more applications.
Thankfully, for those of us who want a clean look with sensible behavior,
the Mac version of Office 2008 lets you customize things. We can make the
interface work the way I think it¹s supposed to. (Incidentally, Windows
Office 2007 users are simply screwed in this regard, so thank Apple and
MacBU for making and following the Apple user interface guidelines. We still
have menus and still have customizable toolbars.)
So let¹s get started on undoing all this messy garbage they put into the
document windows.
First, go to View > Customize Menus and Toolbars. A box will open on the
screen. We¹re going to make a new toolbar that will behave like the old,
dockable, resizable toolbars did. Click the New button and give the new
toolbar a name; for example: My Standard. Then click the OK button.
A new, very small toolbar will then appear on the screen. It will be a very
small box and you will have to look for it, but it¹s there.
Now drag each command, one by one, from the Standard toolbar to your new
toolbar. While you¹re at it you can arrange the commands in any order on
your new toolbar. If there¹s a command you never use you can drag it off
into the air and let go (like when you get rid of a dock icon) and then it
goes away (no fancy poof, though). If you click on the Commands button in
the Customize box you can add any command you want to to your new toolbar.
If you right-click or control-click on a command choose Properties. Then you
can change the icon for the command (you can paste new icon pictures in if
you want) and whether or not to have a group dividing line to the left of
the command button on your toolbar.
Now we can get rid of the big gray space that¹s left by clicking on Toolbars
and Menus tab in the Customize box and uncheck the Standard checkbox. If you
ever want to restore the controls that were removed from the standard
toolbar you can click on the word Standard in the Customize box and click
the Reset button. Doing so will not affect your new toolbar.
Once you have your new standard toolbar set up, click the OK button in the
Customize box and there it is! You can dock it at the top of the Excel
window, resize it, have it floating or dock to the bottom or sides just like
in all previous versions of Excel.
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
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