In PowerPoint, when you customize your toolbars, they–get this–they stay customized.
In Word, the customization is saved, not to the toolbars, but to the document template. I work for a large company, and the document template is a universal thing that resides on a server where all employees can access it, so I can’t hardly save my customizations to it.
Does anyone know of a way around this? Is there a way to save customized toolbars to my one local toolbars, like in PowerPoint?
I don’t have an answer since I don’t use these products. However, one minor comment: you might get better answers to your question if you didn’t insult the product. You’re likely to get the best answers from Microsoft employees, certified developers and trainers, and they might not bother to help someone who prefaces their question with an attack on the company. Personally, I wouldn’t spend time answering questions about the products and languages I have expertise in if they were posed in this manner.
If no one on SDMB has an answer for you, there are lots of Microsoft forums on Usenet such as microsoft.public.powerpoint which have lots of experts, but I’d recommend a little more tact.
I like questions like this
“microsoft sucks! they suck! but umm… can someone help me… I’m actually too dumb to figure out a peice of software that is created to be easy enough for children to be able to use”
Sorry, I should have recommended forums like comp.os.ms-windows.apps.word-proc and microsoft.public.word.general since the problem is with Word, not Powerpoint.
Not to mention that we’d need more information to help you–such as what version of Office you’re using.
There’s usually a “template” type of document that covers the default case. In Word, for example, a document with the ending .dot instead of .doc is a template.
From Word XP help:
[quote]
[ul][li]…[]In the Make toolbar available to box, select which template or document to make the toolbar available in, and then click OK.[]…[/ul][/li][/quote]
Perhaps this step was omitted when you customized the toolbar?
Since this is GQ, I’ll leave out the comment I might otherwise make about the thread title.
Changes to toolbars are in the Normal.dot file. See if this is resident on your system. If it is, modify and save in the same place.
If it isn’t, you would have the option after modifying the tool bar to Save In {document name}. You could make your own template, resident on your system, and open it when needed. This is opposed to using the Microsoft Office Toolbar - you’d just double click on the template you’ve saved (on your desktop or personal directory). Remember to Save As so you don’t overwrite your template.
Hmm. does this mean that I can’t do what I need to do? It seems to.
I can’t make changes to the template, as I said above, because it’s a universal template used by everyone in the office. And I can’t keep my own version of the template just to modify the toolbars, because the universal template is occasionally altered and updated, and keeping the two versions parallel would become a nightmare.
So the answer to my question–Can I permanently customize my Word toolbars, like I can in PowerPoint, so that the toolbars remain constant regardless of what document is open?–is no?
I’ll echo this, since I am a Microsoft employee, in fact a PowerPoint Developer.
Cerowyn has the answer - steer towards your local normal.dot.
PPT handles their toolbar storage code differently from Word, for reasons I don’t feel like getting into. Feel free to think it’s b/c we suck.
Can you change your toolbar, then lose your changes every time you close? Then you don’t have access to Normal.dot. My above statement of having your own template resident on your system, that you open specifically, holds.
If you can’t change your toolbar AT ALL, then you’re basically out of luck. You don’t have access necessary and your IT people have changed the way Word opens (what options are available to you).
Also, the mods might leave the question open.