Controlling Automatic Interface Changes

Each Office application includes hundreds of customization options. Because Office uses shared program code to display toolbars and menus, the techniques for customizing these elements are absolutely consistent from one application to another.

Just as in Office 2000, the single most controversial customization option is the personalized menus and toolbars feature. Unlike other Windows programs in which toolbars and pull-down menus are fixed, Office menus and toolbars change from day to day. Unless you specifically disable this feature, each Office program monitors your usage patterns and "personalizes" menus and toolbars. The idea is to reduce clutter in each menu by showing you only the choices you use regularly, rather than potentially confusing you with a long menu that contains many choices. In practice, however, personalized menus can add confusion by causing menu choices to disappear and reappear, seemingly at random—especially for expert users who know an application's menus inside and out.

You can configure the precise way that personalized menus and toolbars behave, and if you don't like this feature, you can disable it completely. This section explains how the process works, and how you can take charge of it.

How Personalized Toolbars and Menus Work

When you first begin working with an Office XP application, the personalized menus option is enabled. When you click any item on the menu bar, you'll see only a subset of the choices available under that menu. (You might see short versions of cascading menus as well.) If the choice you want isn't on the short menu, force the full menus to appear by using any of the following three techniques:

• Click the chevron character at the bottom of the short menu.

• Leave the short menu open for more than three seconds without making a selection.

• Click a specific menu item twice in a row; the first click displays the short menu, and the second expands it to the full menu.

Don't confuse the grayed-out choices on a menu with hidden choices. As in all Windows applications, grayed-out menu choices mean that an option is unavailable in the current context; Office applications use 3D effects to display the difference between visible and hidden menu choices.

Office uses an extraordinarily complex algorithm that examines usage patterns over time to define which buttons appear on short toolbars. In general, personalized menus and toolbars follow these rules:

• When you first install Office XP, you see a default short selection for pull-down menus in each application. If you leave the Standard and Formatting toolbars on a single row, you'll see a default short selection for each of these toolbars as well.

• Default menu items remain visible for at least six different application sessions on six different days in which you use other items on the same menu. If you use Excel every day, but you use the Data menu only once a month, for example, it might be six months or more before the default choices on that menu change.

• Each time you use a hidden menu item or toolbar button, it is promoted to the list of visible entries. In the case of toolbar buttons, Office might hide a button to make room for the newly promoted button.

• Menu items remain visible for at least three different sessions on three different days after you use them.

• The more you use a menu item, the longer it stays around. If you work on a complex PowerPoint presentation for several weeks and regularly use the Action Buttons choice on the Slide Show menu, that option will remain visible for much longer than if you clicked it one day as an experiment.

• Office never changes the order of items on toolbars and menus (although you can use customization options to do so). When an Office application promotes a menu choice or makes a toolbar button visible, it appears in the exact same position (relative to other menu choices) as when you display full menus.

Disabling On-the-Fly Interface Changes

If you're an Office expert, you'll probably find this constant shifting of menus and toolbars more confusing than helpful. If that's the case, you can disable personalized menus and toolbars. Select Tools, Customize, click the Options tab, and check both boxes in the Personalized Menus and Toolbars section, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Restoring Default Menus and Toolbars

You might be one of the rare expert users who actually prefers personalized menus. Or maybe you're setting up Office for a novice user and you feel this option will make her work easier. To restore personalized menus and toolbars to their default settings, select Tools, Customize, click the Options tab, and click the Reset My Usage Data button. Then clear both check boxes in the Personalized Menus and Toolbars section.

You also can select this option if you shift a machine from one user to another without setting up a new user profile or after a training session in which users explore a large number of features they're unlikely to use regularly.