 Office personalised menus
Friday, 18 August 2006
Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of “improved usability” and after the pesky “office assistant” and the distracting “auto spelling and grammar checker”, the “personalized menus” introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before they use any of it’s components.
I think that the idea behind “personalized menus” was that as menu options stop getting used, they could eventually just disappear, thereby reducing any perceived potential menu clutter. That’s the theory anyway. In practise, it contravenes one of the primary guidelines of user interface design:
Don’t surprise the user by having controls or widgets appear and disappear, depending on whatever “mode” the application is in. Enable and disable those controls or widgets, by all means, but don’t make them appear and disappear entirely.
To turn off the “Personalized Menus and Toolbars” feature and display only full menus in your Office programs, follow these steps:
- Launch Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access or Outlook.
- Select the View > Toolbars > Customize menu.
- Select the Options tab and check the Always show full menus check box.
Keep in mind that doing this in any Office program affects all of the other Office programs too.
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