Customizing Word (97/2000) with the “Schneider Options” – Version : 1/24/2001

These are the customizations that I make for Word – you can pick and choose which ones you wish to use. These are mostly geared to the laptop version, but, for faculty, these many also apply to the desktop computers in our offices.

First – Get rid of the Paperclip (Office Assistant)!!! (Desktop/Laptop)

I choose to remove the paperclip animation – I find it intrusive and annoying .. your mileage may vary. You should take a look at it if you haven’t seen it though, you might find it useful if you are not as comfortable with Word. Once you become a “Power User” – you will want to get rid of it! Here are the steps :

A)If the Office Assistant (paperclip) is not already showing, go to the HELP menu and select “Show the Office Assistant”.

B)Right click on the Paperclip and select OPTIONS.

C)Uncheck the Use the Office Assistant! (Whew!)

D)Just to be safe – go to the TOOLS > OPTIONS > GENERAL tab and uncheck the “Provide feedback with animation” choice.

E)[Turning the Assistant off in step B will take care of the other Office prog]rams, but in Excel, you will have to go to Tools > Options > Edit to uncheck the “Provide feedback with animation”.

Where are all the menu items and toolbars that I’m used to seeing? (Laptop only?)

Word 2000 tries to simplify the menus, showing only the most recently used ones, and a shortened list – I prefer to see all the items! This will also make the toolbars look more like Word 97. I would suggest going to the TOOLS menu and go to CUSTOMIZE – under the OPTIONS tab, uncheck the first two items (“Standard and Formatting toolbars share one row” and “Menus show recently used commands first”). Your toolbars and menus should now look “normal” again!

Make WORD2000 compatible with WORD97(Laptop only, at the moment)

If you have an LTU Techbook, you will have Word2000 on the laptop, but Word97 on your office computer. Can they talk to each other? Sort of … here is the easiest way, for the moment, to make this a smooth transition. Let’s limit the Word2000 to the features of Word97 (many of us, myself included, are barely using all the 97 features anyway!).

Go to the TOOLS menu and select OPTIONS and then the SAVE tab. At the bottom you should see the choice to “Disable features not supported by Word 97” – check that box. Now, all the files you create should be able to be read by Word 97 with no trouble.

AUTORECOVERY – if WORD or NT Crashes(Desktop/Laptop)

While we are on that OPTIONS- SAVE tab .. let’s make sure that the AutoRecover is enabled (you can change the time to a shorter time or longer time if you want). When this is enabled, if Word crashes before you save a file (or if the power shuts down) – the next time you load Word, it should bring back what it had in memory before the crash (it periodically saves to a file).

[Make sure you see the note in the next section about the AutoRecover location for the Desktop machine.]

Setting locations for Word to look for the files.(Desktop/Laptop)

Word will default to directories like “My Documents” when you tell it to go look for a file – but what if you want to override that and place files somewhere else (such as in different folders for different courses). You could just create folders under “My Documents” .. or you might want them somewhere else. We need to tell Word where to find them. Here is an example where we will change the default location, and create the folder if necessary (obviously, if you have already created the folder, you can skip that particular step).

A) Open the TOOLS menu, and select OPTIONS.

B)Select the FILE LOCATIONS tab and highlight the “Documents” line.

C)Click the MODIFY button.

D)You have a dialog box that pops up directing you to choose the new location. For this example, I pointed to the E: drive, and then chose the “Create New Folder” icon, as shown. This let me create a folder called MyWord. Once you say ok, you can see that the location window gets updated as shown.

E)Modifying AutoRecover directory (DESKTOP ONLY) While we are at it .. if you set the autorecovery previously, you should change the location for your desktop computer’s AutoRecover location (the default is to store it on the server itself, but we don’t have the privilege for that .. so it doesn’t work!). Change it to a local drive for you (on the desktop computer, the best place would be the D: drive – you pick, or create, the subdirectory you want).

Those are most of the crucial changes that I always make to WORD so that I can use it more productively – if you have any questions about these steps (or I have made a – gasp – mistake!), please let me know!!

Scott Schneider