Too many icons
I recently installed Office 2000 on my new PC and everything is working fine. But I noticed that the button bar was filling up with icons of my opened Office documents. I went to the old PC and started Office 97, opened three documents, and only one Word 98 icon appeared in the button bar. Is there something wrong with my setup? I often have five to six documents open at a time, working between them and, with other support programs open while working in Office 2000, the button bar is becoming congested even on a 19in monitor. To the best of my understanding, each icon that was 'open' represented a separate Office 2000 activity. I found this out by printing the wrong document several times while trying to change from one to another.
What you're seeing here is the difference between Word 97, which is an MDI (Multiple Document Interface) application, and Word 2000, which is an SDI (Single Document Interface) application. When you use Word 97, all the open documents are stored within Word, and you switch between them using mouse clicks, menu commands or keystrokes, depending on the method you find easiest. As Word 97 opens each document, maximised within the Word environment, most people used the Window menu to switch between documents.
Unfortunately, the Microsoft Technical Support lines used to get swamped with calls from people who would open a new document (which opened maximised, thus covering any previously opened documents), demanding to know where their other document had gone. So in a bid to stamp this out, Microsoft decided to place each Word document in Word 2000 in what is effectively, a complete new shell of the Word user interface, as each one is, to all intents, a separate application window - you get an icon on the toolbar for each document you keep open.
Microsoft has probably had more complaints about this change than it ever got before, asking where documents had gone. As a result, in Word XP you can now choose either SDI or MDI format. For the benefit of anyone who's just bought/upgraded to Office XP, the way to switch back to MDI format with the single icon on the taskbar and all documents in the same shell (SDI is the default) is as follows:
1 From the Tools menu, choose Options and make sure the View tab is selected.
2 On the top line of checkboxes in the 'Show' frame, find one labelled 'Windows in taskbar'.
Click in that to clear it and you'll switch back to the MDI style of document management.
Not tried it, bed time now, but maybe right?
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Uno 1.0ie Start. Standard.
