The other day, I ran across a hidden Word gem that I’ve never seen before. It’s an extra menu you can include to access documents you use often. Most people know about the “recently used documents” list at the bottom of the File menu. By default, this menu is set to show the last 4 documents you opened. You can change this number up to a maximum of 9 by choosing Tools|Options. In the General tab, make sure there’s a checkmark next to Recently used file list and change the entry to a higher number.
Okay, that’s sort of a side tip to my main tip, which is about the little-known Work menu. You can add this menu for those documents you access frequently, but that tend to fall off your recently used documents list. For example, I have a little Weekly Planning Form that I print out every Monday. There’s no way it’s still on my recently used documents list after a whole week. If I add the Work menu, I can put that file on it and still get to it quickly.
To add the menu, follow these steps:
1. Choose Tools|Customize.
2. In the Commands tab, under Categories, click Built-in menus.
3. Under Commands, scroll down and at the bottom you’ll find Work.
4. Drag the Work menu to your menu bar.
Now you have a new menu with one item that somewhat cryptically says “Add to Work menu.” To add a file, open the file you want first. Then Choose Work|Add to Work menu. Now you’ll see your file listed in the menu. To access your file, you now can just choose the file name from the Work menu.
Getting a file off the Work menu is a little less intuitive, but it is possible. To delete a file, you need to press Ctrl+Alt+ – (that’s the hyphen/minus sign). Your cursor turns into a big black minus sign. Now click the Work menu to open it and then click the file in the list you want to remove.
This last step is actually kind of dangerous because if you click incorrectly you can remove the wrong thing. Whatever you do, do NOT do what I did. While my cursor was a minus sign, I actually clicked on the Customize menu. It disappeared. The bad news is that if you have no Customize menu item, you can’t restore the Customize menu item. It’s a rather nasty Catch-22.
Because I did such an incredibly dumb thing, I had to take drastic action. Here’s what you can do if you find yourself in such a predicament. Determine where your Normal.dot template is located by choosing Tools|Options. In the File Locations tab, you can see where your templates are on your hard disk. Then choose File|Exit to get out of Word.
Now using Windows Explorer, go to your templates folder and rename Normal.dot to Normal-old.dot. Open Word and it will reappear with its default version of the Normal template, which includes all the menus. If you need styles or macros from the old template you can use the Organizer to load them into your new Normal.dot.