Word 2003 custom Menus change and disappear

[Laura]

Does anyone have a fool proof method for stabilizing custom menus (on the
menu bar) in Word?

I have a menu in a global template that should always show, as well as
document templates that each contain a menu I want to appear only when
someone is in a document created from that template.

The problem SEEMS to stem from OTHER people's software -- the menus will be
there but then they disappear, or multiple copies appear or the menu is
suddenly empty or has the name for one menu with choices for another menu on
it.

Note: Custom TOOLBARS seem stable, it is just the MENU that is problematic.

I have been fighting this for years and have done a lot of research but so
far everything I try has a hiccup at some point. The programming is all VBA
in Word .dot templates.

So far I have tried:
- Using tools, customize to create the menus w/in the appropriate templates
-- works great on my computer, but menus disappear/duplicate constantly on
about 80% of my clients.

- Programmatically creating the menus -- this is good for the global
template menu -- at first -- but somewhere through the day it gets trashed.
I can't get the template specific menus to behave. They constantly disappear.

- Write an event handler to delete and then recreate all menus and display
as (Tried with the "Document change" or "WIndow Activate" event for the Word
application) -- this seemed to work at first but suddenly the problems
returned. I did not want to just "show" the menus per the event handler
because they would suddenly have the wrong buttons or be empty part way
through the day. (Maybe I am not writing it right.)

Has anyone else had this struggle? It happens to me so much I am surprised
I can't find more postings about it. PLEASE HELP!!!!! Thanks so much.

 

[Jonathan West]

Hi Laura

The great culprit in this is usually the PDFMaker add-in supplied by Adobe
as part of Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately, each of the last several versions
of Acrobat has found a different way to completely mess up other people's
menus on the menu bar. I would dearly love to find the person(s) responsible
at Adobe and shake them warmly by the throat!

Nothing is foolproof, but here are some tricks to avoid the worst of the
depredations of PDFMaker.

1. Don't position your menu at the end of the menu bar. Put it before the
Help menu. PDFMaker particularly seems to think of the last item on the menu
bar as its property if it isn't the Help menu.

2. Have your add-in check that the menus are right in your AutoExec macro
and in the DocumentBeforeClose event of Word's application object, and reset
them if necessary. PDFMaker in Acrobat 8 seems to reset its menus every time
a document is closed. Quite why it chooses this particular occasion is one
of the mysteries of life.

3. Give your your menus a specific Tag property so you can at least identify
your menus and work on them.

4. Always set the Application.CustomizationContext property to your add-in
before making any changes, and set it back to NormalTemplate after.

5. If you don't want you (or your users) forever to be prompted to save
changes to your add-in, set the Saved property to False immediately after
making changes to the menu.

6. Be aware that if the user is using Word as his Outlook email editor, and
creates or reads an email before creating or opening a regular Word
document, your add-in will load, but AutoExec will not run when the add-in
is loaded. Have AutoExec set a flag on completion. Have every macro in your
add-in check the value of the flag when it starts, and run AutoExec if the
flag has not been set.


--
Regards
Jonathan West - Word MVP
www.intelligentdocuments.co.uk
Please reply to the newsgroup

 

[Laura]

Jonathon,

Thanks you SOOOO much, I will try these things.

Regarding the customization context -- I have had some weird problems with
this in the past, but I'll give it another go and see.

Not making it the last item on the toolbar is a HUGELY helpful tip -- this
is where I put my template specific menus, and they disappear the most.
Adobe is indeed often the culprit. But my clients are mostly law firms and
they also use document management systems which intercept a lot of Word
events and seem to trash the toolbars too.

Laura

 

[Jonathan West]

5. If you don't want you (or your users) forever to be prompted to save
changes to your add-in, set the Saved property to False immediately after
making changes to the menu.

Sorry, that should be "set the Saved property to *True* immediately after"!