Office Annoyances

It's not often that I get frustrated by something that a computer does, but this is one of those times.

I'm trying to get my office "toolbars" set up how I want. Specifically, I'm trying to get rid of the Adobe PDF Maker and DeltaView toolbars. I'm trying to do this for Word, PowerPoint and Outlook at the moment.

The way that these apps are "supposed" to work is that you make a change and close the app and the change sticks. At most you might have to save the changed setup as the default global template, but no, when add-ins are involved they override any changes that a user might make, which is hella annoying!

I don't see a particularly useful fix to this situation at the moment either.

Here's an answer to the Outlook problem:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;827305

Although it still doesn't save the placement of the toolbars. It keeps popping the email toolbar above the To: From: Subj: entry bar. I hope that the Office team realizes how annoying this is. It's right up there with Windows' inability to remember where I last put a window for a specific application or how one application can steal window focus while you are working on another application.

The interface should be consistent and intuitive. That means it does what you tell it to do every time.

Comments

[Arcterex]

If it's any help this happens on the mac as well. Pisses me off, especially since on the mac the toolbars are separate from the document so the extra little PDF toolbar kicks things down even worse. Bah. Wonder if it's office's fault or Adobe's though? If you ask the office team for the source I'm sure it'd be a pretty easy patch though :)

[Alex Scoble]

I would have to say that it's a behavioral problem with Office and not the fault of the 3rd parties.

As far as the source, hehe, I'm not holding my breath. Not that I could do much with it anyhow, other than give it to someone like you and say please fix?

[KC Lemson]

You might try looking for and deleting any instances of outcmd.dat on your machine and restarting outlook. This often resets the toolbars to a known good state...

[shane]

USe tools-templates and add ins- menu to get rid of the annoying toolbars

[Alex Scoble]

Unfortunately, our Document Management System (WORLDOX) prevents us from accessing the Templates and AddIns menu.

[Roman Menyhart]

Dear all,

just wandered accidentaly over this page of yours and remembered... :)

Office: http://www.openoffice.org (download, stick to it for about a week, painfully relearning things just a bit the other way, then enjoy it)

Outlook: http://mozilla.org (Thunderbird)
Internet Explorer: http://mozilla.org (Firefox)

After a few months of using the above, you'll wonder how could you ever do without them ;)

Roman

[Rene]

hi,

mac users have a look at this:
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/08/03/204240.php

René

[Scott Shultis]

Adobe has instructions on how to get rid of PDFMaker... it's supposed to get rid of the toolbar.

I haven't closed everything and reopened yet, but here's hoping

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328399.html

[Scott Shultis]

Adobe has instructions on how to get rid of PDFMaker... it's supposed to get rid of the toolbar.

I haven't closed everything and reopened yet, but here's hoping

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/328399.html