Customizing the Word Interface
At this point, I have a functional template. It conforms to the MLA page setup guidelines, has styles for applying the correct formatting, and even includes some boilerplate text to help the user get started. I could stop here, but there are a few more possible tweaks that might help users.
Customizing the Word interface can often help accomplish two goals related to working with templates:
It can make it easier for people to access the features they ought to be using.
It can make it more difficult for people to access the features they shouldn’t be using.
Chapter 3 covers how to customize existing menus and toolbars and how to create new ones, so look there for the procedural details. Here, I want to show you some of the things I would do with my MLA template. Hopefully, seeing some of my decisions will point you in the right direction when you’re thinking about how to design a template of your own.
The first thing I want to do is trim down Word’s menus and toolbars. They have functions all over them that will never be used in an MLA-based paper, so why let them clutter things up? Here’s a list of the changes I made to my template’s menus:
On the File menu, I removed the web commands (Preview Web Page and Save As Web Page) because they’re not required in the context in which the template will be used. I also removed the Page Setup command because I don’t want people tweaking the page layout settings. Users can change their paper source from the Print ...
Get Word 2000 in a Nutshell now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
