Menu bar missing in Outlook 2003

[Jim Dykes]

A user contacted me and said she did something to cause the menu bar to
dissappear in Outlook. I tried resetting the toolbars, and also tried
deleting outcdm.dat. The menu bar is still AWOL. Any other suggestions?

 

[Tom Miller]

A user contacted me and said she did something to cause the menu bar to

dissappear in Outlook. I tried resetting the toolbars, and also tried
deleting outcdm.dat. The menu bar is still AWOL. >Any other suggestions?

Maybe I'm not too clear on what the "menu bar" is but if you can get to the
view button, see what you have checked for display.

Hope this helps,

 

[Jim Dykes]

By the menu bar, I mean the toolbar with File, Edit, View, Go, etc. On the
machine in question, I am able to right click on the toolbars that are
visible to bring up a customize dialouge. My choices there are standard,
advanced, menu bar and web. I can check/uncheck all of these except menu. I
may just be missing it, but I don't see a view button. I'm familiar with the
view menu, but that's not accessible on the problem machine because the
entire toolbar is missing.

 

[Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]]

Using the right click option, select the Reset Toolbars option. If that doesn't work, close Outlook, find and rename outcmd.dat. Reopen Outlook and see if that fixes your problem.

--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact. All
unsolicited mail sent to my personal account will be deleted without
reading.

After furious head scratching, Jim Dykes asked:

| By the menu bar, I mean the toolbar with File, Edit, View, Go, etc.
| On the machine in question, I am able to right click on the toolbars
| that are visible to bring up a customize dialouge. My choices there
| are standard, advanced, menu bar and web. I can check/uncheck all of
| these except menu. I may just be missing it, but I don't see a view
| button. I'm familiar with the view menu, but that's not accessible
| on the problem machine because the entire toolbar is missing.
|
| "Tom Miller" wrote:
|
||| A user contacted me and said she did something to cause the menu
||| bar to dissappear in Outlook. I tried resetting the toolbars, and
||| also tried deleting outcdm.dat. The menu bar is still AWOL. >Any
||| other suggestions?
||
|| Maybe I'm not too clear on what the "menu bar" is but if you can get
|| to the view button, see what you have checked for display.
||
|| Hope this helps,
||
|| --
|| Tom Miller, Warning! I show flashes of Competence!! More at:
|| http://bccs.chatnfiles.com/ecard3.htm, International Webmasters
|| Assoc: www.iwanet.org, Owner: www.ChatNFiles.com bbs, Home of
|| 770,000+ downloads.
||
||
||
|| --
||

 

[Jim Dykes]

I already tried resetting the toolbars, which didn't work. I previously
deleted the outcmd.dat file (the post I read said to delete it rather than
rename it). That didn't help either. Just now I tried to find the
outcmd.dat on the problem computer but it doesn't appear to exist. I had
show hidden files and folders selected, and unchecked the boxes for hide
protected operating system files and hide extensions of known file types. I
also searched the entire hard drive for *.dat, but all that came up were
outform.dat and outlfldr.dat. Thanks for your help.

 

[Jim Dykes]

I was just on the computer in question helping the user with something else,
and the menu bar has returned. I'm not sure what I did to fix it, but it's
back (-:

 

[ChrisB]

I realise this is an old, old thread but it's still valid, and stil
valid for later versions of Office

I have just had to fix this same problem for a user and discovered tha
the menu bar had been dragged off the window and almost off th
screen... don't know if the original post was referring to the menu ba
for the main Outlook window or the "compose message" window, but eithe
way - also still valid

Whether the menu options (File, Edit, View,...) are visisble or not, yo
should always be able to access those menus by pressing their shortcu
keys (Alt+F, Alt+V, etc). In the current case, when I pressed Alt+V, th
menu popped up at the bottom right corner of the screen - well withou
the active window and just above the Systray clock. Sometimes when
toolbar does this you can grab one of its borders and drag it back t
where it belongs, but the menu bar doesn't really have a grab-able edg
(not that I can find, anyway). However when I pressed [Esc] to kill th
menu, I noticed a tiny edge of a minimised menu, maybe quarter of a
inch high and probably less than an eighth wide, peeking out at th
bottom corner of the screen. When I dragged this back onto the Compos
Message screen, it became the menu bar again and I was able to positio
it at the top of the window and 'Bingo' - sorted :cool

It just leaves me wondering why MS programmed this behaviour - I hav
never met anyone who deliberately moves toolbars out of the activ
window that they belong to and leaves them on the desktop. Why woul
anyone want to? Can't imagine what bizarre set of circumstances woul
make this desirable..