Formating toolbar buttons Grayed out

[thedayislong]

Good morning all.

We've had a large database up and running in the office for a good few years
now. currently on Access 2000.

We recently moved to XP and to add some of the additional design utilities
(to acc2000) a complete reinstilation of office was required (following the
please insert disk two promt not recognising our oem disks)

Following the uninstall/complete reinstall (all modules)we now have the
following problem.
Collumn formating is fixed.
The formating buttons are all grayed out in design and form view (but
working for buttons and text boxes on different screens)

Problem is right formated column (number) merges with left formated column

I'm no expert at access but one of the other members of staff programmed the
whole thing from scratch (but is to shy to ask questions (english is her
second language) so feel free to get technical.

Any help would be most welcome
Thanks in advance

Thedayislong

 

[thedayislong]

Still have the above problem some help would be appreciated