Editing Style List in Menu

[Franz]

Hi all,

Okay, some might think this a minor gripe, and I've not found any
information about it here or elsewhere, but it's important to me.

I use a laptop all day and my vertical screen space is at a premium,
so I have consolidated all my most-used commands in one toolbar. (Love
that! This seems better implemented in Word 2011. Thanks, MS.) One of
those commands is the Style command. The trouble is that the list of
styles that drops down contains God-only-knows how many weird styles
that are NOT in my active styles list. Again, I've purposefully pared
down that list in my to my eight or ten most-used styles. Here the
list includes dozens and dozens of grid and shading styles I will
never use and that are totally unimportant to me. Note: this list does
not include *all* styles; it just seems to add the grid and shading
styles to my in-use styles.

So, my question is: Can I--and, if so, *how* can I--modify the drop
down list so that it displays only my active styles? (And of course
I'm curious if this is a bug or for what strange reason the Word
developers thought I'd want all the grid and shading styles to display
here.)

Thanks for any advice,

Franz

 

[Patty Winter]

Okay, some might think this a minor gripe, and I've not found any
information about it here or elsewhere, but it's important to me.

It's been annoying me since I got Office 2011 a couple of months
ago, too.

So, my question is: Can I--and, if so, *how* can I--modify the drop
down list so that it displays only my active styles?

I just went looking in Word Help, and found a way to do this.
I searched for "styles menu" and the best hit I got was "See
where styles are applied in a document." (Which is a nifty
feature I hadn't run into before.) Follow the instructions
there for viewing the Styles tab of the Toolbox. You can
then select which styles to display.


Patty

 

[Franz]

Patty et al.,

Patty, thanks so much! Somehow I never got around to fixing this issue until today (I'm avoiding grading papers). I would *never* have figured out this fix without following your trail. MS sure buried it. But you dug it up and I really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Franz

 

[Patty Winter]

Patty, thanks so much! Somehow I never got around to fixing this issue
until today (I'm avoiding grading papers). I would *never* have figured
out this fix without following your trail. MS sure buried it. But you
dug it up and I really appreciate it.

You're welcome, Franz!

Now if anyone can figure out how to make this setting "stick" between
documents, I'd appreciate it! Is it part of the "Normal" template and
if I save that properly, future new documents will only display the
in-use styles?


Patty

 

[robinboast]

Dear all,

This has been a major anoyance for me as well, so thank you all for pointing me in the right direction. However, I too was tired of changing it each and every time, but I found a fix that sticks.

It is indeed the "Normal" template that has to be changed and here is how you do it in Word 2011.

1. Go to /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/, and then open Normal.dotm

2. Change the dropdown menu in the Styles tab of the Toolbox.

3. Save the file, but you will have to save it as a .dotm file with a different name as Word won't let you save to a template that is open.

4. Then go back to /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/ and rename the existing Normal.dotm file to something else (e.g. Normal_orig.dotm).

5. Rename your new .dotm file to "Normal.dotm".

If you don't find your new .dotm file in the User Templates, don't worry. It is probably in the My Templates folder, which is in User Templates, so just move it into User Templates and then rename it.

This works a treat!

Best

 

[dotheDVDeed1]

Thank you Patty--I'll try and glue that hair back on now.