Hello Raymond,
Something you said:
It only happens with the formatting toolbar
has given me an idea. It may work, but even if it doesn't solve your
problem it will not be wasted effort.
Seasoned users of Word developing long documents often don¹t leave the
default toolbars open; instead they create new personal toolbars that
contain the buttons they want ‹ most or many of them being copies of buttons
on the default toolbars.
There are two major advantages to this. First, you can easily transfer your
personal toolbars to another template or document at some future date.
That¹s important because, unfortunately, Word does not permit you to copy to
a different template any default toolbars that you have customized. So when
you become comfortable with creating your own templates for special
purposes, if you have modified the default Standard, Formatting and other
toolbars you will be unable to take advantage of the modification work you
have done on them.
The second major advantage to creating new personal toolbars is that ‹ even
if you configure your documents to minimise corruption ‹ customizing and
editing of commands, keystrokes and toolbars will, in time, corrupt the
Normal template. If/when your Normal template becomes corrupted, you will
have to re-configure the default toolbars from scratch, whereas it¹s easy to
copy your personal toolbars over from a bad template using the Organizer.
In your case, *if* it's true that only the formatting toolbar has the
"disappearing buttons" problem and that customized ones don't, you would
solve your problem at the same time as you derived the other benefits of
customized toolbars.
For a fuller discussion, including the steps involved in creating the new
toolbars, see the notes on the way I use Word for the Mac, titled "Bend Word
to Your Will", which are available as a free download from the Word MVPs'
website (
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Bend/BendWord.htm). It starts with
the heading "Buttons, transferring between toolbars" on page 43.
If you try this, please let us know how you fare; it will be valuable
feedback.
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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