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A quick way to manually turn “view hidden” on and off is this keyboard toggle stroke:

(which is actually )

Interesting challenge! What I came up with isn’t perfect:

-build a 2-column table
-insert a 6-row table in each column.

It looks a little funny, but you’ve got control! (the attached document spells out the specifics of building this thing)

Judy

…that I can edit…

Editing California, what a trip! (there’s a science fiction movie plot in that idea somewhere…)

words appear to “disappear” behind column two or out the end of column one

Long shot — rows set to “exactly” some height or other?

QAT?

Yes, it’s the new 2007-speak. QAT (I say “cat”) is the “Quick Access Toolbar” (nothing quick about that name, is there?), and MOB (I say “mob”) is the Microsoft Office Button.

The QAT is slightly customizable — you can add commands and even macros to it. There isn’t the ability to modify button pictures, tho, and not all commands even have their own icons. Still, it’s worth reading up about and playing with.

And again, you can get your 2003 customizations, more or less, and even the 2003 menus, in the “Custom Toolbars” button, which can be placed on the QAT. There’s a picture of what I have in my 2007 Custom Toolbars button, mostly stuff from my old 2003 normal.dot, in this thread: http://bro.ws/772844L

… 10 years ago … I considered myself a bit of a master of this application …

Me too, and I go back even further — I was a “master” of Word for DOS 2.0 in the mid-80s. Back then it was truly possible to know EVERYTHING about the program, and that was very satisfying. 2007, on the other hand, should come with a coupon for cardiologist services.

I’ve been in 2007 (I like how that sounds, time-warp-wise) for a few months now, and it really stressed me out at first. But I’m finally getting the feel of the ribbon, and have better hunches about where to find things. And I’ve only just recently “said uncle” and decided to master this beast like I’d mastered the last. The new kids at Microsoft win, I give.

But it’s kind of a relief to have given in and accepted that this interface really is all we’ve got now (without a lot of VBA/XML tinkering); and It pays off down the line, when new versions come along, to know the history of the configuration-as-presented, don’t you think, from your experience with changing versions over the years?

…before I retired 10 years ago…

I am green with envy, re your retirement.

Judy

2. Is there anyway to make the Word 2007 interface look like the older 2003 interface with menus and drop-down menus, etc.?

I agree with Pam that it’s best to brace yourself and embrace the 2007 interface, but I know that in the beginning there just isn’t always time to hunt down what you need.

There is a button you can add to the QAT that will show custom toolbars that were built in Word 2003 (if the template holding the custom toolbars is running as a global template).

I wrote about it a bit in a thread on March 18, 2010 (this is the thread’s URL: http://bro.ws/772844L )

I haven’t heard if that QAT button trick has been tried by anyone else, but I’m still enjoying the quick access it gives me to a couple of my more obscure old buttons.

Judy

Thank you, Andrew, I will peruse and use this as soon as I get a chance! And I’ve obtained a copy of the faulty .dotm to play with, so I will be having a fun little Word “lab session” soon! I’ll post any interesting discoveries.

Well, good luck with your migration! It’s more like a dramatic emigration and a traumatic immigration, actually. Consider keeping at least one machine with Word 2002 on it, for sleuthing down the puzzles you’ll run across in 2007 (“now where did that behavior come from” queries).

We had a number of old Word 97 macros in a template, too, and they seemed to show up in, and mostly work fine in, the Add-Ins tab in Word 2007. Still, we hired someone to modernize our code and build us a ribbon tab of our own, and, altho the tab is wonderful, another result is that I, for one, no longer know how to tinker with the macro language. Sigh.

And we didn’t have to modify our styles template at all, just put an attachment button for it in our new tab area.

Judy

“I used to dream of the day when my computer would be as easy to use as my mobile phone. It has happened, I no longer know how to use my phone.” Bjorn Stroustrup, inventor of C++

This should do it:

Select the row and Convert Table to Text,

then select the text and Convert Text to Table with Table size/Number of columns = 1.

The how-to depends on your version of Word

a link to the post

This it? “Custom Toolbars – Word 2007,” Posted 2010-03-02 22:44: “This thread’s tiny URL: http://bro.ws/772844L”

Summary of that post: Custom toolbars from 2003 templates attached as globals seem to show up in the Add-Ins tab.

There is also a QAT-addable command that displays said old 2003 customized toolbars. Both the Add-Ins tab and the QAT button are pretty garbled in appearance, unless you still have 2003 available on another machine, where you can tinker around with your 2003 toolbars ’til you get things lined up like you want, which is a little tedious, actually. But worth it for nostalgia’s sake if nothing else. I’m very fond of some of those modified button images.

Garbled-looking appearance or no, this (2003 templates as global addins in 2007) is useful as a quick fix to losing your beloved 2003 macros the day they convert you to 2007 (and also to losing the ability to modify button images) until one has time to rebuild within the confines of 2007.

It may not be the “best” way, but I found a fun little loophole in 2007 that let me create a “pseudo” toolbar — I wrote about it in a post here in early March, entitled “Custom Toolbars – Word 2007”.

…change the configurations in the Grammar portion of Word Options (Proofing category) so that Word changes the number of spaces after a period from one to two or from two to one when you run the Grammar Checker.

Jan, using SpellCheck for this is so clever! That had never even occurred to me. And it seems to stop on all sentence terminators, but not on other “within the sentence” period-spaces. Love it, thanks!

Judy[/size][/font]

One option is to highlight just the newly added text, and then run SpellCheck (F7 key). It will only work through the highlighted text.

However, sometimes it does seem like SpellCheck resets itself on a whim, and rechecks all words; that is, if you have told it to ignore “nanoparticle” in the earlier, already-SpellChecked text, sometimes it will ask about “nanoparticle” again in the new text anyway.

SpellCheck is just a little bit unpredictable, in my opinion.

Yet another way (or is this the same thing that Jan said?):

I found that just placing my 2003 normal.dot in the Word Startup folder on my C drive made all of my old autotext entries visible and available in the 2007 bb thing.

The old normal, now that it is in Word Startup, is being run as a global template (view this in Developer Tab, Document Template), upon open.

Judy

Another thing to check is the language of your normal.sty, or any other styles that might affect text in text boxes, tho I make no promises that you’ll find anything there (sorry!).

Yes, I always found Word 2003’s compare utility to be illogical. What worked for me in 2003 (we’re in 2007 now, and it is more helpful about comparisons) was to:

1) open the revised document, the newest one
2) go to Tools-Compare and Merge Documents
3) at “File name” enter or select the original document, the old one
4) press Compare.

That’s what worked for me, anyway, if I’m not mistaken. Good luck!