What I did with Word

For word processing I use Microsoft Word 2002, which was the most recent version of Word when this computer was new (before that I used Word 2.0). The fact that Word allows comprehensive customisation of menus and toolbars etc is an important reason why I’ve never switched to a cheap non-Microsoft alternative, yet I must say that the customisation of Word 2002 was the most painful experience of customisation I have ever had.

The problem is that due to some bug of mind-bending stupidity, half the time that you add something new to the menus, something else is randomly erased when you save the template. The solution is to make sure you always keep a backup copy of the template, and don’t save over the backup until you’ve checked that everything that ought to be in the menus and toolbars is still there. So long as you’re conscientious about backing up the template you can achieve wonders through customisation; it’s getting there that’s painful.

Another problem (though a lesser one) is bloat. Every time you save the template it gets bigger, even when you haven’t actually added new information. For example, if you modify the description of a macro and then save the template, the template file will contain the old description as well as the new one, and if you’ve modified the description several times it will contain all of them (you can prove this with a text search). Moreover, I think the template file even retains information about deleted macros and so forth!

I do hope that more recent versions of Word are more reliable in the customisation stakes. But I should stop ranting and get to the point. I’ve been meaning for some time to make some of my Word customisations public, partly because it pleases me to share my settings with others and partly because it could come in handy one day for backup purposes. So here is a PDF file that shows my customised toolbars and menus and lists their contents. Browse it at your leisure.

Note that the menu and toolbar contents are extensively customised, bearing little resemblance to the defaults; I did not merely add and remove features but re-organised them into a hierarchy that I find more logical (detailed comparisons are left as an exercise for the reader) and sometimes created new and better icons. It should also be noted that I did all this customising back in 2003, and there may be some features I used back then that I don’t generally use now, and also some features I decided to leave on the menus even though I have never used them at all but thought that some day I might (these are marked in blue in the PDF file).

For the time being, I am not publishing aspects of Word customisation other than menus, toolbar and macros. That would be too much work.