Thanks for the clarification!
Unfortunately this is an issue which only seems to affect "some" users
"some" times on "some" systems. Worst of all it doesn't seem to be something
that can be induced, and if you can't *cause* it, it's particularly
difficult to diagnose & if it can't be diagnosed it can't be fixed. It does
seem to be more prevalent (maybe even exclusive) on the Intel Macs which
suggests that Rosetta may be involved. But like I say, nobody has yet been
able to narrow it down to Apple/MS, Hdw/sftw, Rosetta, haxies, or some
combination of all the above. My unit is a PPC & I've been using 2004 since
it first shipped without having experienced this *at all* [knock wood].
One thing that may help is to repair permissions, and haxies (3rd party
"helper" utilities) have been associated with the phenomenon as well.
Replacing the respective .plist files can also be effective, but in your
case - since all Office apps are involved - I tend to think it's *not*
Office-specific.
Please see the inline comments as well:
Hi Bob,
many thanks for your quick response and sorry for my wording last time
but sometimes emotions just kick in
.
No problem - it's just that some seem to think they have MS by the collar in
here, rather than just a bunch of working stiffs like themselves who are
just trying to assist them as best we can
To be more specific here is my
environment:
MacBook/2GB
Max OS X 10.4.10
Word 10.3.5. 070413
I am not referring to the formatting palette but to the toolbars. I
usually have 4 Toolbars on my display: Menu Bar, Standard, Formatting
and Review. In order to maximize the amount of text on the screen I
prefer to have the toolbars beside the main window so I resize them to
be vertically. After some time of work the icons in the toolbars
disappear. The toolbar just turns **white**, sometimes partially,
sometimes completely. So if I want to save some work using the save
icon,
I realize you're just stating this as an example, but just in case you
aren't aware of it, you might want to use Command+S to save as you work &
avoid leaving the keyboard altogether
I have to move the mouse pointer across the whole toolbar to
make the icons reappear icon by icon and to find the save icon.
I also tried the resize triangle in the lower right corner of the
toolbar. Clicking on it ALL icons on the tooolbar disappeared and the
toolbar turned white completely.
This is a completely new wrinkle - I haven't heard reference to that before.
Funny enough, after resizing the toolbar to be horizontal and klicking
the resize triangle in the lower right corner, the icons no longer
disappear.
Nor this - more testimony to the fact that every reported instance exhibits
a different set of symptoms.
Another interesting fact is that I have selected "Menu Bar" as one of
my displayed toolbars but the Menu Bar is displayed only when the
"Customize Toolbars" dialog is open. This seems a but funny to me but
I dont care because I use the standard menu on top of the screen.
The "standard menu" you refer to is generated by OS X and cannot be directly
customized. In the Customize dialog you're provided with Word's "internal"
model on which the OS bases its menu bar. The internal model you can modify
& the changes you make are then presented to OS X for you
Maybe my problem has been solved by resizing the toolbars, lets see
what happens next. My feeling is that there *is* a hard to detect
bug.
I sure wish you well - I'll keep my fingers crossed, but I won't hold my
breath
Even in *some* cases where it has "seemed" to be cured a future OS
X or Office update has been known to resurrect it.
The problem of disappearing icons also happens in Excel and
Powerpoint.
Thanks, Robert
Robert
Good Luck |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac
