Getting Rid of the Task Pane on Startup

When Joy starts Word, the Word Help task pane appears at the right side of the program window. (Sometimes it is the Getting Started task pane, but usually it is the Word Help task pane.) Joy doesn't want a task pane to appear when she first starts Word and she's tried of closing it every time. She wonders how she can get rid of the task pane so that it doesn't appear when she first starts the program.

Don't like the task pane? You can get rid of it by following these steps:

1. Choose Options from the Tools menu. Word displays the Options dialog box.
2. Make sure the View tab is displayed. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The View tab of the Options dialog box.

3. Clear the Startup Task Pane checkbox.
4. Click OK.

If this doesn't fix the problem, it may be due to a setting in the Registry.

1. Exit Word.
2. Start your favorite Registry editor.
3. Locate the following data key. (This data key, as shown below, is for Word 2003. If you are using a different version of Word, the 11 portion of the key will be different.)

     HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\General

4. Look for a value named DoNotDismissFileNewTaskPane. If you find it, delete it. (Just right-click on it and choose Delete.)
5. Close the Registry editor.
6. Restart Word.

If you continue to have problems with the task pane (or you don't like to manually edit the Registry), you'll find additional help in this page on the MVP site:

http://wordmvp.com/faqs/customization/ShowTaskPane.htm

The page discusses the Task Pane Controller add-in, which makes it easy to change the Registry entry that controls whether the task pane is displayed at startup. The macro used by the add-in need be run only once, and you should uninstall the add-in after using it.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8833) applies to Microsoft Word 2002 and 2003.