Word 2000 in a Nutshell

Chapter 3. Customizing Word

Word is something like the Swiss Army knife of document creation products. It boasts a lot of functionality for doing almost anything, from basic typing and formatting to indexing, creating tables, charts, pictures, web pages, and even serving as its own little programming platform. As soon as you fire up Word and poke through the interface, the abundance of menus, toolbars, and commands reflects this functionality. Many of Word’s functions are used quite frequently, others less frequently, and still others not at all. Fortunately, Word lets you customize almost every facet of its menus and toolbars, and even some of its basic operations, to suit your style.

Customization is a pretty big topic and encompasses a lot of the actions taken in Word. Creating custom themes and styles, recording macros to automate tasks, turning off the Office Assistant, and creating AutoText entries are all ways to customize the Word environment. These actions are all covered in this book. This chapter is mainly concerned with two of Word’s more intricate and powerful commands:

Tools → Options

This command opens a dialog containing ten separate tabs for setting options ranging from what components of a document are visible onscreen, to what components print, to how Word handles spelling and grammar checking. The first section of this chapter details all of the options on the Tools → Options tabs, what those settings affect, and how to implement them. Many of the settings ...