Persistent Reviewing Toolbar Display

Subscriber Carl Emmerson wrote about a problem he was having with getting the Reviewing toolbar to remain on his screen whenever he restarted Word. It seems that he is able to get all his other toolbars to remain on the screen, but not the Reviewing toolbar.

The Reviewing toolbar is a handy toolbar if you work with others on documents or if you do editing for others. The behavior described by Carl is only exhibited in Word 2000's implementation of the toolbar. In other versions of Word (including Word 2002), when you display the Reviewing toolbar it remains on the screen. In Word 2000, it only remains on the screen for the current document. In other words, if you display the toolbar and open another document, the Reviewing toolbar is not displayed for the newly opened document. It does, however, reappear if you switch back to the previous document.

Another quirk of the Reviewing toolbar in Word 2000 is that if the toolbar was visible when you last exited Word, then it will be visible when you next start Word. Of course, the Reviewing toolbar being visible is unlikely, given the behavior described in the previous paragraph. Microsoft describes this behavior in the following Knowledge Base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q232400

If the toolbar doesn't really display when you start Word 2000, and you know it was visible the last time you exited the program, then it is possible that something has gotten messed up in Word. The first likely culprit is a file called Word.pip. This file contains, among other things, settings that help Word remember where various windows and toolbars are located. There are two versions of this file on any Word 2000 system: one in the program directory where Word was installed, and another in your profile directory. If you use Windows' search capability, you should be able to easily locate both files. Once you locate both of them, delete the Word.pip file in your profile directory. If you searched and found two files, the one in your profile directory is the newer of the two.

Another possibility is that the Registry data key that Word uses to maintain configuration information has somehow become corrupted. Assuming you are using Word 2000, you can use your favorite Registry editor to delete the following data value:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Word\Data\Toolbars

If you are using Word 2000 and you want the Reviewing toolbar to behave as it does in every other version of Word--you want it to be open for all documents once you open it--you are pretty much out of luck. You can, however, create a quick macro that will open the toolbar for you. This macro can be assigned to a toolbar button, but the value of such a macro is limited since it is almost as easy to right-click in the toolbars area and simply choose Reviewing. Be that as it may, this macro will display the Reviewing toolbar:

Sub ShowReviewing()
    CommandBars("Reviewing").Visible = True
End Sub

Another option is to set up the macro as an AutoExec or AutoNew macro, so that it runs whenever you start Word or whenever you create a document based on a particular template.