Planting the Clipboard Toolbar

Word 2000 introduced a new feature called the Clipboard toolbar. In reality, this tool is not specific to Word, nor is it a true toolbar. The Clipboard toolbar presents up to 12 items that were recently copied to the Clipboard. You can pick and choose which of these you want to paste at any given time. It works across Office applications.

I say that the Clipboard toolbar is not a true toolbar because it doesn't work the same as other toolbars. You can dock a normal toolbar someplace along a window border in Word, and the program remembers from one session to another exactly where you want the toolbar displayed. The Clipboard toolbar has a mind of its own, and pops up whenever it wants to. It always pops up as a floating toolbar, and always seems to be in the way. This can be very annoying.

There are a couple of ways around this problem. The first is to not wait for the Clipboard toolbar to decide to display itself. Instead, choose Toolbars from the View menu, and then choose Clipboard. The Clipboard toolbar appears, and you can dock it to whatever position you want on your window. The toolbar will then stay in that position for the remainder of your Word session. You will, however, need to go through the same steps the next time you use Word--you can't get around Word's lack of memory in relation to your placement of the toolbar.

The other option is to simply turn off the toolbar so that the Clipboard toolbar never automatically shows up again. In other words, only you can manually display the toolbar--it won't just pop up on its own. This is done by making a change to a Registry value. If you decide to pursue this route, the normal cautions apply--you must be careful when editing the Registry. If you mess up, you can really mess up your system, perhaps even making it unbootable. If you feel cautiously adventurous, you can follow these steps:

1. Close Word. You don't need it open to perform any of these steps.
2. Click on the Start button. Windows displays the Start menu.
3. Choose Run from the Start menu. Windows displays the Run dialog box. (Click here to see a related figure.)
4. In the Open field, enter the name regedit.
5. Click on OK. The regedit (Registry Editor) program is started.
6. You want to find and select the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\General key.
7. Choose New from the Edit menu, and then DWORD Value from the resulting submenu. The Registry Editor adds New Value #1 at the bottom of the values shown in the right pane of the Registry Editor.
8. Change the name of the new value to AcbControl, and make sure it is selected.
9. The default value of AcbControl should be 0. With this value, the Clipboard toolbar is triggered and displayed as normal. To change the value, choose Modify from the Edit menu. Registry Editor displays the Edit DWORD Value dialog box.
10. Change the value to 1 and click on OK. This value turns off the triggering mechanism used to display the Clipboard toolbar automatically.
11. Close the Registry Editor.