File names in Work menu are too long

[lucymom58]

I'm having difficulty with the document file names that appear on
Word's Work menu. Most of them are fine - just the document's name.
But some of them appear with the entire path of where on my hard drive
they are located:

Hard Drive:Users:Momocuments:Correspondence:John:Business:John's
Letterhead

This occurs periodically on my Recently Used documents (bottom of File
menu). I've tried deleting the document from the Work menu and
re-adding it, but it doesn't change. Does anyone have a fix for this?
By the way, I've had this problem for several years, through numerous
versions of Word. I just haven't been able to figure out how to tweak
it.

I also wonder if there is a way to reorder the documents in the Work
menu (short of removing them and re-adding them one at a time)?

Thanks,

Eve

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Eve:

Sorry, there's no work-around to this. The Work menu is a very old and now
abandoned function that originally came from Word on the PC back in the DOS
days when file names were nice and short

The real answer is to use a combination of Favourites and Aliases and Recent
Items to replace the Word menu, then stop using it. But old habits die
hard: I still use the Word Menu for my favourite top three or four

The file name in the Work menu works in conjunction with the "Current
Folder" (another PC-sourced mechanism). In Word on OS X, "current folder"
doesn't work quite the same as it did in OS 9.

What happens is that if Word's current folder (normally updated to the
folder containing the document you most recently opened) is the same as the
folder containing the item on the Work Menu, only the file name will be
shown. If the document on the Work Menu is in a different folder, then the
entire path will appear.

Sorry: The cure for this one is for you (and I ...) to learn to stop using
the Work Menu

Cheers

I'm having difficulty with the document file names that appear on
Word's Work menu. Most of them are fine - just the document's name.
But some of them appear with the entire path of where on my hard drive
they are located:

Hard Drive:Users:Momocuments:Correspondence:John:Business:John's
Letterhead

This occurs periodically on my Recently Used documents (bottom of File
menu). I've tried deleting the document from the Work menu and
re-adding it, but it doesn't change. Does anyone have a fix for this?
By the way, I've had this problem for several years, through numerous
versions of Word. I just haven't been able to figure out how to tweak
it.

I also wonder if there is a way to reorder the documents in the Work
menu (short of removing them and re-adding them one at a time)?

Thanks,

Eve

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi John -

I fully agree with everything you said, with one possible
exception/addition/extension:

Sorry: The cure for this one is for you (and I ...) to learn to stop using
the Work Menu

Like you wrote, its behavior can't be modified, but I kinda like the Project
Gallery as an alternative to the ol' Work Menu.

Eve - If you haven't discovered this yet, you may want to take a look at
File>Project Gallery - Recent, as well as the settings available on its
Customize page.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

But I love the work menu....tho I also love my Favorites folder. Totally
different functions, however, at least for me.

I'm not totally sure, but I don't think my Work Menu names ever change. So,
if you open a document (to make its folder the current folder), and *then*
add it to the work menu, then you *might* be able to prevent the long names
showing up in the first place. However, opening something from the Work
menu does not appear to change the current folder--you'll need to navigate
directly to it via File | Open to set the current folder, then re-add it.

If anyone wants to take the time to test this, let us know. I haven't really
tested this--I just know that most of my filenames are short, and that they
don't vary as I switch open documents around, so I think it might work.
Documents on the desktop tend to have the full path, though--I suspect there
is no way around that.

Re-ordering documents--there might be a way to do it through VBA, but I
strongly doubt it's worth your trouble. Adding a document that is already
on there will jump it to the top, I just discovered.

Daiya

 

[Clive Huggan]

Hello Lucy,

Like Daiya, I like both the Work menu and Favourites. The reason I
particularly like the Work menu is that it's so accessible. So I put on it
reference documents for a current major project, the job control document on
which I record my billable time (*very* important, that!), and "Bend Word to
Your Will".

I never get the filepath when I put documents on the Work menu, unless they
are on an external drive.

The Work menu will change the file name of a file whose name you change in
the Finder.

Occasionally I change the order -- by removing the items
(Command-Option-hyphen) and putting them back again in the order I want. The
capability to sort them was lost after Word 5.1a, the last purely Mac
version of Word <deep nostalgic sigh>.

[Note: In OS 10.3 onwards, the Command-Option-hyphen keyboard shortcut
doesn¹t work. If like me you frequently add and remove Work menu items, go
to System Preferences -> Keyboard and mouse -> Keyboard shortcuts ->
Universal Access -> de-select the Zoom Out tickbox (or if you want to have a
keyboard shortcut for that command, assign another combination for Zoom
Out).]

I order things in the Favourites folder into broad categories by adding a
lower-case letter (e.g. "z" to less important files) and similarly insert
"boundary lines" in the Favourites folder by creating empty folders titled
(literally) "z~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~" <== [where "z" is the preceding
letter of the examples above].

Between the Work menu and the Favourites folder, I <ahem> never go near the
Project Gallery, John.

Isn't Word wonderful, the way it panders to our cherished idiosyncrasies?
;-)

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
==============