Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Broken Word 2003 Shortcut for "Normal" View in Word 2007

At lunch today, I installed the Office 2007 release (obtained through my company's MSDN subscription), replacing my previous Office 2003 installation.

Per the online documentation and also a nice Jensen Harris (Microsoft) blog post, Office 2003 menu shortcut keys (e.g. Alt+F, S for File menu | Save) are supposed to work in Office 2007 as well.

When I fired up Word 2007 and opened a document, it put me in the "Print Layout" view. I'm accustomed to working in what was called "Normal" view in Word 2003, so I did Alt+V, N to try to switch to Normal view.

So far so good after the Alt+V -- Word 2007 even put up a nice little tooltip letting me know I had started typing a Word 2003 shortcut -- but subsequently pressing the N key had no effect.

I opened up the new "View" ribbon, and saw in the "Document Views" section that "Normal" was no longer present, but a new "Draft" view was available. I clicked that, and it put me in the equivalent of what "Normal" view was in Word 2003.

So "Normal" is apparently renamed to "Draft" in 2007... I switched back to "Print Layout" view (Alt+V, P did work), and then tried Alt+V, D to switch to "Draft" view -- it worked.

I fired up Word 2003 on my test machine to verify that Alt+V, D didn't work on that version. I expected it to have no effect... but Alt+V, D actually has a different function in Word 2003: hide/show the Document Map!

Consequently, the Alt+V, D shortcut for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2003 is essentially broken in Word 2007 as well (since it now has a different function than before). I couldn't find any alternative "Alt+V" shortcut in Word 2007 for Document Map, although the "new" Alt+W (View ribbon), V, M shortcut does work for "hide/show Document Map" in Word 2007.

Posted by at 11/15/2006
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7 comments:

  1. Thank you! How to get back to normal view has been driving me crazy!
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  2. As we are just getting 2007 in our office, (no comment)-- many thanks for figuring this out. Even when you try to use the Help to "view Normal" there is nothing there!
    ReplyDelete
  3. And thanks from yet another confused user! Seeing all those differently sized bits of pages on my screen has been driving me NUTS!

    :)
    Michael
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  4. Well.. THAT was weird. It worked ONCE and I came back and posted my comment. But when I went back a bit later and did the same thing... the whole document just showed up as a single column - a 10 page long page without any visible breaks.

    ::sigh::

    :/
    Michael
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  5. OK! THIS seems to be the final answer, as posted on uk.answers.yahoo.com by a "poebassm" :

    Every document you create in Word is based on the Normal template. Any changes you make to this template will be applied to all new documents in Word. Unlike earlier versions of Microsoft Word, it is easy to make changes to the Normal template in Word 2007.

    To change Word 2007’s default template, follow these steps:

    Click the Office button

    Select Open

    In the Open dialog box, click Templates

    Double-click the Normal template

    The Normal template will open so you can edit it. Make changes as you would to any Word document. Keep in mind, though, that any changes you make will be applied to all new documents.

    When you’re done making changes to the Normal template, click Save on the Quick Access toolbar.

    Note: If you are using Word’s compatibility mode, you may have two Normal templates on your computer. Edit the Normal.dotm template.

    Source(s):
    http://wordprocessing.about.com/od/micro…

    :)
    Michael
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  6. Sorry Anonymous / Michael - I just don't see the connection between the Normal template and the View / Normal feature in Word 2003.

    I think that Jon has the right idea - it's just that View / Draft defaults you to a 10% zoom. When amending the zoom %age, clearly 'Page width' and so on won't work, as you're not in page-view. But 100% works, and gets you back to a Word-2003 Normal view.

    So, View / Draft; then View / Zoom / 100%.

    Trust that helps

    Peter C.
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  7. Just moving from Word 2003 to Word 2007 at my office this month. Thanks for the help.
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