As the most-used application in the world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Word presents challenges by the day for millions. While the program mostly works as expected, the word processor also consistently puzzles even veteran users with unexpected behavior. Read on to learn how to solve some of the more common annoyances with Word.
Q: When I close Microsoft Word, the program often asks me whether I want to save changes to normal.dot, even though I didn’t make any changes. How can I get rid of this prompt?
A: Normal.dot, as you probably know, is the default style sheet that is applied to every new document that you create in Word. If you — or an add-in program — makes changes to Word’s built-in styles or other settings that are stored in the normal.dot style sheet, you will be prompted before closing Word.
There are several ways to prevent this prompt from appearing. First, check your Word add-ins and remove anything you don’t use. Press Alt-T, followed by I in any version of Word to bring up the Templates and Add-ins dialog box, where you can see add-ins.
If you never modify the template in any way, you can turn off the prompt entirely from Word’s Options menu. When you do so, any changes made by you or an add-in will be saved to normal.dot automatically. In Word 2003, the “Prompt to save Normal template” check box is in the Save tab. In Word 2007 and 2010, the check box is located in the Options panel under Advanced.
Q: My office finally upgraded to Word 2007. How can I get the menu bar back in Word 2007 and other applications?
A: Almost everyone who upgrades from Office 2003 to Office 2007 or 2010 bucks at the new ribbon bar, which makes you relearn processes for performing…