Taming Word XP

[Larry]

Office XP was recently forced onto my users. Is there
methods or techniques I can instruct my clients on how to
disable most, if not all of the XP "features" and have it
behave like Word 2000?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

See http://home.zebra.net/~sbarnhill/CustomizingWord2002.htm. You'll
possibly also want the Task Pane Controller from
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/ShowTaskPane.htm (though if you want
it to stay off, that's more an issue in Word 2003).

 

[Guest]

Thanks, that helped some. How does one completely and
entirely disable:
1. All of the task panes
2. The so-called "Smart Tags"
3. The "baloons" in track changes

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

1. Well, you can't entirely get away from task panes, and you don't
necessarily want to, but the article I pointed you to tells how to
substitute the File New dialog for the New Document task pane and the Format
Style dialog for the Styles and Formatting task pane. It also pointed you to
an article that tells how to avoid the Mail Merge Wizard (another task
pane).

2. Smart Tags can be removed using the Smart Tags tab of Tools | AutoCorrect
Options, and I thought I had turned this feature off for the entire app in
Word 2002. Now in Word 2003, I'm finding that every legacy document I open
acquires Smart Tags again, and they have to be explicitly deleted for each
specific document. Arrgghh!

3. Turning off balloons on the Track Changes tab of Tools | Options (as I
believe was discussed in the article) should be effective (they aren't
displayed in Normal view in any case).