Help with Mac Office 08

[phexac]

In all Windows versions of Office, the entire interface of individual office programs, such as Word or Excel, are contained within the same window. In Mac Office, there is a separate tab for every subset of functions that is outside of the main window. For example, when I have a document open, there is the main Word window, then there is a format palette tab in some other place on the screen, then there is objects palette, etc. I have a 24" 1920x1200 screen, and this results in my office programs scattered all over the screen.

This is extremely annoying when I have a lot of windows open because Mac windows are all gray, and the little palettes tend to blend in and become hard to quickly find. Is there a way to make those palettes contained withing the main program window a la all the Windows programs?

Thanks.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: phexac
In all Windows versions of Office, the entire interface of individual office programs, such as Word or Excel, are contained within the same window. In Mac Office, there is a separate tab for every subset of functions that is outside of the main window. For example, when I have a document open, there is the main Word window, then there is a format palette tab in some other place on the screen, then there is objects palette, etc. I have a 24" 1920x1200 screen, and this results in my office programs scattered all over the screen.

This is extremely annoying when I have a lot of windows open because Mac windows are all gray, and the little palettes tend to blend in and become hard to quickly find. Is there a way to make those palettes contained withing the main program window a la all the Windows programs?

Thanks.

To the best of my knowledge there is no way to get them to 'dock' back to the main window. I know that in other Apple applications (applications made by Apple), such as Pages, those extra palletes only show up when you call upon their features. So the color pallete come up when you need to change colors, they are not persistent. Unfortunately, Microsoft likes to break OS X design conventions when they make Office, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was no way to effectively get rid of the palletes.

 

[randomlinh]

if you right click on the toolbar area (the save/open/print/etc icons) most of the floating toolbar you can list there. then just uncheck everything under "Toolbar" in the View menu.

Unfortunately, you can't easily move entire toolbars, they take their own row (I think.. if someone can correct me, I'd be glad to know how). But you can customize them individually. Actually, I wonder if there's an entire custom toolbar you can create yourself... i need to look into that