Undo Redo Lost

[John]

Word 2000, Windows XP Home

Occasionally I find that Undo and Redo on the Menu Bar>Edit disappear.
All that is there is Repeat. Then I waste 30 min. trying to get it back
and end up deleting Normal.dot to "fix" the problem.

What's up? This is like the third time it's happened in as many months
and I don't remember it doing this previously.

TIA

John

 

[Jay Freedman]

Word 2000, Windows XP Home

Occasionally I find that Undo and Redo on the Menu Bar>Edit disappear.
All that is there is Repeat. Then I waste 30 min. trying to get it
back and end up deleting Normal.dot to "fix" the problem.

What's up? This is like the third time it's happened in as many months
and I don't remember it doing this previously.

Hi John,

"Repeat" is the menu equivalent of the Redo button on the toolbar, so that
hasn't gone missing. I don't recall the Word 2000 behavior -- I have only
Word 2003 here, but I think it's the same -- if there isn't anything to
undo, the top item on the Edit menu should be "Can't Undo" and it should be
grayed out.

I have a theory about why Undo might be disappearing. If you press
Ctrl+Alt+minus (maybe when you meant to press Ctrl+Shift+minus to insert a
nonbreaking hyphen), the cursor becomes a big minus sign -- that's the
Remove Menu Item function. You think "oops" and go to click Edit > Undo, and
that deletes the Undo item from the menu. Watch carefully for that big minus
sign, and if you didn't mean to invoke it, press Esc to get rid of it. Only
then can you safely click any menu item.

To get your menu back to normal, you don't have to delete Normal.dot --
although it works, it also kills off a lot of other customizations at the
same time. Instead, see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/RestoreMenuCmd.htm.

 

[John]

Jay Freedman wrote:

I have a theory about why Undo might be disappearing. If you press
Ctrl+Alt+minus (maybe when you meant to press Ctrl+Shift+minus to insert a
nonbreaking hyphen), the cursor becomes a big minus sign -- that's the
Remove Menu Item function. You think "oops" and go to click Edit > Undo, and
that deletes the Undo item from the menu. Watch carefully for that big minus
sign, and if you didn't mean to invoke it, press Esc to get rid of it. Only
then can you safely click any menu item.

That's it!!!!! I remember that big minus sign and, just as you
said, went to Edit>Undo.

I wanted Ctrl+Alt+Num - for an Em dash.

Thanks.

John