My mom is on a very tight deadline to finish the second edition of her book (2 volumes, over 1300 pages) and her laptop crapped out on her. They sent a replacement and she’s reinstalling everything, but she is having a problem with Word–the program she needs the most.
When she clicks into her document, the whole toolbar at the top goes away. You know, where it lets you choose the font and all the other options. That whole thing just goes POOF as soon as she isn’t actively using it. WHERE IS THAT SETTING?!!? Heeeeelp! Thanks in advance.
I just opened my copy of Word 2007. That is by design. The new Word has tabs across the top - Home Insert Page Layout References, etc.
The format font features are located on the Home tab, just select the Home tab whenever you need to do any font formatting.
If it drives you too crazy, you can right click the very top left hand corner of Word (near the Save button) and select Customize Quick Access Toolbar. Then, you can add your most commonly used buttons to the top toolbar (where they will be accessible no matter which tab is selected).
She may just have the ribbon minimized. IIRC (I’m not on a machine that has O2k7 on it), there’s a dropdown arrow at the right of the Quick Access Toolbar. Click that, and there should be a menu option to show/hide the ribbon.
The interface for Office 2007 had changed dramatically, although all of the functionality remains. For someone working under a tight deadline, I can understand the frustration. In the short term, I recommend downloading OpenOffice and working with that. It’s 100% compatible with MS office *.doc formats, and the user interface is virtually identical to Word2003.
There are reasons to recommend Office 2007, but since time is the critical issue, i think this is your mom’s quickest solution. OpenOffice is free, and you can download & install in about 15 minutes.