Recently one of my subscribers wrote to me complaining that she was having a “weird” problem with MS Word. Boy! Have I heard that before!
She told me that she had created macros and assigned them to a toolbar in MS Word. She did this on her computer at home and liked them so much that she decided to take them to her office as well. She transferred her macros by copying her Normal.dot file. But to her dismay, her custom toolbar buttons did not make the trip! The buttons did show up on her work computer but they were blank, with no pictures. And to confound the issue, she could not create any custom toolbar buttons on her work computer!
MS Word stores your macros in template files. If you store your macros in the Normal.dot template and then copy that template to another machine witht he same version of MS Word, those same macros are available on that machine as well.
Changes to your toolbars are also stored in templates. Custom icons (such as buttons), however, are not stored in templates. They are stored in the Registry, so they are not easily transferred from one computer to another.
To remedy this problem, I advised her that she could copy her Normal.dot file to her work computer and reset the toolbar completely using the Customize feature found by clicking on Tools | Cutomize | Toolbars tab. She could then try to add the buttons from scratch and then customize the icons. If this did not work for her, it may be because she didn’t have the proper permissions on her work computer to write to the Registry. In that event, she should check with the IT Administrator of her company for assistance.
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