Yes, I work on an old laptop with Word 2003. When my Word docs open, two things are happening at the bottom of the screen which I do not like. Hopefully, someone knows a trick to display my Word document properly: a) The very bottom of the Word doc frame is cut off by the Taskbar. This includes the little icons which allow one to veiew their document in different “modes”, like as an outline. More importantly, the page count is hidden. This is important to me as I am working on a lengthy document. b) There should be a box that fills in with green boxes (representing 0% -100%) indicating that my document is saving when I hit “Save”. Ok, I can live without this, but like Pavlov’s dog…it’s positive reinforement for me to see this!
How can I get these little creature comforts back? And, no, double-clicking on the blue bar at the top of screen does not help. …could the Taskbar be to blame?
I think you’re missing the page count because the status bar isn’t displayed. To bring it back, click on the Tools menu and then Options. Select the View tab and underneath Show enable the status bar.
I’m not sure which Windows you’re using, but in some versions there’s an autohide for the task bar so it will disappear off the bottom of the screen when you’re mouse isn’t down there. If that’s not a fix, you there are three modes you can run any Windows program in Maximized, minimized, and “sizeable”. If you do it in the latter, you should be able to size the program so it it fills all the screen just down to the task bar.
Sometimes Windows vs. Office gets confused about the screen size with vs. without the taskbar. This seems to happen especially if you use the auto-hiding taskbar in XP.
A reboot ought to cure the issue. Another trick is to un-maximize the Word window, then quit Word. Resize the screen and then resize it back to the size you like. Then restart Word & maximize its window. Note that resizing the screen will mess up all your desktop icons. So if you have them carefully arranged somehow that disruption may cause you a lot of heartburn.
You should also note that the taskbar does not “belong” at the bottom of the screen, you can move it to the top or one side. I found Windows far more tolerable with the taskbar on the left, and I think it would be even better with a wide-aspect monitor.
I keep my taskbar on the left side of wide-aspect monitors. Most wide monitors are unnaturally too wide versus the shape of whatever you’re working on. So spending the precious vertical space on the taskbar is IMO silly.