Getting Rid of Custom Toolbars

Tom is having a problem with what gets loaded up in Word. When he starts the program, Word loads about 45 custom toolbars on my system. He has repeatedly deleted the toolbars, but they still show up. He wants to get rid of these toolbars once and for all.

There are two things you should try. The first is to find the Startup folder used by Word and see if there are add-ins or other files located within the folder. You can locate the Startup folder by following these steps:

1. Choose Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the Options dialog box.
2. Make sure the File Locations tab is selected.
3. In the list of File Types, choose Startup.
4. Click on Modify.

The resulting dialog box indicates the location of the Startup folder being used by Word. Once you have the location of the Startup folder, close Word and use Windows to examine the contents of that folder. Move any programs or templates out of the folder and then restart Word. If your unwanted toolbars are gone, you've found the solution to your problem—one of the files you moved was loading them.

If that does not fix your problem, or it only removes some of the toolbars, then the next best place to check is your Normal.dot template. Follow these general steps:

1. Locate the Normal.dot template and load it directly into Word.
2. Delete the unwanted toolbars.
3. Save the Normal.dot template.
4. Restart Word.

If you are using global templates in your version of Word other than Normal.dot, you may need to follow the same process with each of those templates. Once you've updated them all and restarted Word, the unwanted toolbars should be gone.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (3815) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.