Floating Menus

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 13, 2019)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

Word uses quite a few "secondary" menu levels. For instance, if you look at the main menus (File, Edit, View, etc.), you can see that some menu items have a small right-pointing triangle at their right edge. When you hover the mouse over these items, a secondary menu appears.

Word allows you to "tear off" some of these menus so that they float. You can also do this with some pull-down lists on the toolbars. You can tell when this is possible by the presence of a thick bar at the top of the secondary menu or at the top of the pull-down list. For instance, if you select AutoText from the Insert menu, you will see a secondary menu that has one of these thick bars. Likewise, if you click on the down-arrow next to the Font Color tool (on the Formatting toolbar), you will see a thick bar at the top of the resulting menu. Move the mouse over the bar, click and drag it away, and the menu becomes a toolbar.

Actually, this technique is simply a different way to display a toolbar. The menus and toolbars in Word are very closely related. For instance, when you follow the above process to "tear off" the AutoText secondary menu, you can then choose Toolbars from the View menu, and see that the AutoText toolbar is selected—this is the one you just displayed.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1211) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Inserting Text with a Macro

Need to have your macro insert a bit of text into your document? It's easy to do using the TypeText method.

Discover More

Cropping Graphics

Excel makes it easy to place a graphic in a worksheet. Once there, you may want to chop off a side (or two) of the ...

Discover More

Self-Adjusting Column Widths

It is important to understand how column widths relate to the margins you may have set in your document. The reason is ...

Discover More

The First and Last Word on Word! Bestselling For Dummies author Dan Gookin puts his usual fun and friendly candor back to work to show you how to navigate Word 2019. Spend more time working and less time trying to figure it all out! Check out Word 2019 For Dummies today!

More WordTips (menu)

Animated Menus

Want to get a bit fancy with how the Word interface behaves? You can configure Word so that its menus don't just appear, ...

Discover More

Custom Menu Stays, but Options Disappear

It can be disconcerting when a custom menu you've used for years suddenly loses all the options it previously contained. ...

Discover More

Deleting Menu Items

Want to get rid of some menu options so that they can't be selected? It's easy to do when customizing Word by using these ...

Discover More

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

Notify me about new comments ONLY FOR THIS TIP

Notify me about new comments ANYWHERE ON THIS SITE

Hide my email address

What is two minus 0?

2024-05-01 13:44:16

Rebecca Larsen

This is great information. I have a floating "font" that I can't get rid of. I am not sure how it got there. {[fig]}

2022-03-05 15:29:44

Michael Bath

is this function still available in Office/Outlook 365?

2021-08-25 12:38:45

Marie Alm

Hello - I just tried your suggestion but the thick bar is not present on either the Auto Text or the Font Color. Is there a different way to get floating menus? In particular, I would like to have the Crop and the Size & Position items near where I'm working on the page (usually at the bottom) instead of up at the top. When I'm editing 400 items in a 120 page document, the extra hand and wrist motion is significant.
I use MS Office Professional Plus 2016.
Thanks.

This Site

Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.