Office 2003: Paste Options button does not appear

S

Stele

Hi all,

I've a problem whereby the Paste Options button does not automatically
appear when I paste something. The funny thing is, it doesn't work in all my
Office applications except Excel. In all cases, I made sure that the Show
Paste Option button was activated (and in fact tried deactivating and
reactivating it). My other PC has no such problems and both have identical
Office installations (I set both up myself). Uninstalling and reinstalling
Office, or repairing it, doesn't work either.

As a bit of background info, I had Office XP installed previously. I
uninstalled it and rebooted the PC before installing Office 2003. At first I
thought that perhaps remnants of XP might be causing problems, but then
remembered that the other (problem-free) PC went through exactly the same
thing, so I'm stumped.

Is there anyway I can really scrub Office 2003 from my PC (from registry
etc) so I can do a really clean reinstallation? I found that after
reinstalling Office 2003 the normal way (uninstall, reboot, reinstall), all
my settings etc were intact, which means it was anything but a clean
installation.

Thanks!
 
H

Herb Tyson [MVP]

I've found the Paste Options button to be a bit stodgy from time to time.
It's integrated with the Smart Tags feature, which I don't care for, and
each time I try to otherwise tame smart tags, the Paste Options button
disappears, and I have to jump through a few hoops when I notice it missing
again. Try the following in Word and see if this brings the Paste Options
button back to life for you.

1. Choose Tools - Options - View, and make sure Smart Tags is checked (just
for kicks, enable Screen Tips as well).

2. Choose Tools - AutoCorrect Options - Smart Tags tab. Ensure that Label
text with smart tags is checked, and that Show smart tag action buttons is
checked. Now, in that tab, click Recheck Document.

Now, paste something into the current document window and see if you get now
get the paste option button.
 
S

Stele

Hi there,

Thanks for your advice... but nope, no effect. Even tried various
permutations and combinations of the steps you mentioned (turning some on
while others off and vice versa) and even opening fresh new docs to try out
but to no avail. Still no paste option button. By the way, I had all the
options you mentioned already turned on, but just to make sure, I turned them
off then went through your suggestions.

After some intense scouring, I came across several articles/forums
indicating that Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional's Office 2003 plugin has a
notorious habit of screwing things up in Office - most notably preventing
changes to Normal.dot after installing Acrobat. Again, although this might be
a reason (I've got Acrobat 7 Pro installed too and had the same problems with
Normal.dot), my other PC doesn't seem to have such issues. Argh.

Thanks lots anyway! :)

Stele
 
H

Herb Tyson [MVP]

I have Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro, as well. So, I'd be reluctant to believe that
that's the culprit in this case.

A while back, I had a difficult time getting the Paste Options buttons to
appear, and nothing I've mentioned worked. I created a new Windows XP user
login, and found that the Paste Options buttons did indeed work in that
pristine new user environment.

Two things not mentioned yet are possible registry corruption and normal.dot
corruption. Note that, as you discovered, reinstalling Office doesn't affect
a number of settings, since Office is designed to conserve existing
setup/user data. You might take a look here, in particular at renaming
normal.dot and deleting the Data key from the registry:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/ProbsOpeningWord.htm
 
T

tocker

The Paste Options button does not initially appear.
Try This
Copy selected cells
Paste to the new selected location
The paste option button now appears in the lower right hand area
 
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