Several more alternatives to customize your Winword 97
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): Although VisiCalc has always been considered the killer application that sparked the personal computer revolution, the fact is that the large majority of us use our PCs and Macs for word processing, for churning out pages after pages of documents.
And, when we talk about a word processing program nowadays, the fact is that the majority of users now have Microsoft Word.
Whether you are working on the manuscript of a book, a management report or a business letter, you normally want to have as large a working space as you can on your screen.
There are a couple of ways to achieve this. First, you can change to the "Full Screen" mode (click on View, and then Full screen). This is a step that I have always recommended to notebook users. In this mode, you will have the entire screen for your workspace. You will not be able to see the menu bar, but no need to worry as it's still there at your fingertip.
Just press Alt-F to invoke the File menu, Alt-E for the Edit menu, etc. Or, if you're a mouse lover, just throw the mouse cursor to the top edge of the screen and the menu bar will show.
Unfortunately, after Office 97 is installed, the screen is usually a bit cluttered with icon bars -- the bars that hold tool icons -- that you rarely use. Normally, when you run Winword 97 for the first time, you will have the Standard and the Format icon bars on the top screen. You will also have the ruler bar and the horizontal scroll bar.
This leaves you with a somewhat limited space to work with. Your luck is even worse if your PC still uses the basic 640 x 480 VGA screen resolution. You may end up with only 10 or so lines on the screen at any given time. Moving around your text will require a lot of scrolling.
Actually, you can easily cover the entire screen with these bars, as Winword 97 has 13 predefined icon bars. Just turn all of them on, and you will have no space left for typing. To do this, simply place the cursor anywhere on any icon bar, and click the mouse right button. A menu will pop up, showing you all the available icon bars. This is the fastest way to increase or decrease the clutter on your screen.
Customize
The good thing is that you can also create your custom icon bar and copy only icons that you normally use onto it. Let's explore how this can be done.
First, invoke the icon bar menu once again. On the bottom there is the Customize command, and you click that one on. In the Customize dialog box that appears, which you can see on the top left in the accompanying picture, you click on the New button. This will invoke yet another dialog box where you can give the new custom bar a name. For example, I named my custom icon bar "My Favorite", as I would be placing only my favorite icons on it.
You can also specify in which style sheet this new icon bar should appear. As most of us will be working with the Normal style sheet, we may just as well leave the word Normal that is already there. If you want to use this bar only for the document that is opened at the moment, you have to scroll down one step to the name of that file. Click on OK, and the new icon bar will appear in a floating palette form. All you have to do now is fill this blank bar.
This is a really straightforward procedure, as it involves only the simple drag and drop technique. As most of you are certainly Solitaire-veterans, I'm sure you'll be good at this, too. Just invoke the icon bar menu and click on Customize again. In the dialog box that appears, click on the Command tab. This tab gives you all the list of all available commands in Winword 97, broken down by groups such as File, Edit, AutoShape, Macros and Built-in Menu.
You can even access the list of all commands in the All Commands area. You select the group in the box on the left, and the box on the right will contain all the commands belonging to the group selected on the left. If you find a command that you like and want it to be added to the new bar, click and drag it onto the bar just as you would click and drag the cards in Solitaire.
As an illustration, on "My Favorite" custom icon bar I placed icons representing the commands to change the font, make the characters bold or italics, change the color of the text, change the alignment, add a table and place a smiley face on the page. These are the commands that I normally need, so I can close all the other icon bars and leave only My Favorite to serve me. You can see My Favorite icon bar at the bottom of the screen in the picture.
You can even drag and drop menu items from the menu bar. This will give you more space, as you can combine the menu bar with your custom icon bar. Of course, space for the icons will be very limited, so you have to be more selective with the icons.
Animated
While you are at it, you can also change the way the menus unfold when you click on the menu item with your mouse. Get the Customize dialog box again, and go to the Options tab. Change Menu animations from None to Random, Unfold or Slide. With the Slide option selected, each time you click on a menu command, the menu list will show a sliding motion, which will give your Winword an added elegance.
However, be careful not to do this to somebody else's PC without explaining what you are doing and what the result will be. I once turned on this feature on a friend's PC, and she complained to me afterwards that her machine had become "excruciatingly sluggish" after I tinkered with it. Oh oh.