Reading Pane (Pain!)

[Lenny]

I have customized my 'normal.dot' to fit my working environment. Two of the
things I did was deselect "Allow starting in Reading Layout" and
"Automatically create drawing canvas...". My Outlook editor is Word.

Why then do these two items keep cropping back up? I generally don't notice
that it has slipped down the slippery slope until I open someone's email and
it opens in reading layout. (why did Microsoft think this was a great
idea?). If I open my normal .dot to investigate, the items are re-checked.

Do Microsoft updates have anything to do with these items resetting? Other
customizations like macros are there and unchanged... any ideas on how to
make these two annoyances go away permanently?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Add-ins are more often the culprit when settings such as this are changed or
not saved.

 

[Lenny]

Suzanne: for the uninitiated of us, can you describe what type of add-in
and/or what add-ins are in the Word environment? Other than macros or a
simple vb routine, I don't recall bringinig in any add-ins to my
documents.....

My thanks, Lenny

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/CheckIfAddinsInstalled.htm.

 

[Graham Mayor]

As Suzanne indicates add-ins are usually blamed for this type of issue, but
having had the problem occur when no add-ins are installed, I suspect it is
just one possibility. I fear that Word 2003 is simply prone to minor
corruption of the settings key in the registry (where these settings are
stored) brought upon by some (as yet) unidentified factor.

The individual settings that corrupt do not appear consistent either which
makes it difficult to apply a panacea; however the best approach if you are
plagued with this issue is to correct the errant settings with an autonew
and an autoopen macro in normal.dot, so at least it starts out right. Using
Outlook as e-mail editor only adds to the difficulties. I would suggest that
you use Outlook's own quite competent editor.

The code required to fix these two issues is

With Options
.AllowReadingMode = False
.AutoCreateNewDrawings = False
End With

See the section on automacros at http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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