How do I make the WHOLE menu display always?

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Summary: Microsoft Office Applications attempt to show you only the most commonly used menu items. There's a simple setting if you always want to see them all.

A couple of versions ago, several Microsoft products introduced the concept of "smart menus" - menus that would display only the most common and most recently used items and hide the rest. The idea was to make the ever growing menus seem a little less daunting. The problem of course is that many functions and options were hard enough to find already, and hiding a bunch of menu items made that problem worse for many people.

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Short Format Menu

Full Format Menu

Smart menus in applications such as office work like this: when you first drop down the menu, it shows you the short form. There's a little downward pointing indicator at the bottom that indicates there are more items on the full version of the menu. (See the accompanying examples of Word 2003's Format menu above.) What most people don't realize is that a) if you wait a few seconds the full menu will be displayed, or b) if you click on that little downward pointing indicator the full menu will be displayed.

If, like me, you never want to see short menus again that's easily taken care of as well once you know where to look.

To turn off 'smart menus':

- Right click on any menubar or toolbar

- Click on Customize

- Click on the Options tab

- Make sure that "Always show full menus" is checked

- Click on OK or Close

Microsoft also has a Knowledgebase article on this topic here.

Article C1874 - December 28, 2003