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MS Word 2011 for Mac toolbar missing and cannot get back. tried disabling toolbars, deleting Normal.dotx to no avail. Sometimes just pops up for no reason. Also reinstalled Office. Any ideas please? Driving me nuts as cannot use shortcut icons

I have MS Word 2011 installed on my iMac running Lion. Have overcome the problem of the hidden Library but still unable to see toolbar with the shortcut icons such as Format paster. Have researched and tried deleting normal template. no joy. reinstalled Office. no joy. unchecked standard and formatting toolbars and rechecked and a blank line appears where toolbar icons should be. Sometimes they magically appear after a few minutes! Often not.


this is driving me nuts so please any ideas

Posted on Sep 11, 2011 9:19 AM

Reply
16 replies

Oct 25, 2011 4:31 PM in response to kernowguy

This works for me: To get the toolbar to display you have to go through a "ritual" every time you open a file for the first time:


- Open a file

- Select view menu

- Slide down to "Toolbars->", and UNCHECK the standard toolbar

- Select view menu, again

- Slide down to "Toolbars->", and CHECK the standard toolbar

-- you probably will get a blank standard tool bar at this point

- Either:

1) Select the "+" expand window button in the upper right or

2) Select the "-" minimize window button in the upper right and then expand the window to refresh



This is a very unacceptable, and apparently common, condition in a high priced application. When you select the standard formatting bar, you should get the standard formatting bar.

Mar 1, 2012 4:30 PM in response to Dual-G4-4Me

That's awesome G4 dude, thank you.


I've had this problem since upgrading to the latest release of word 2011. Thre used to b a losenge in the top right corner, when this dissappeared it lost the toolbar strip. Really frikkin' annoying it was. Thanks for the tip!


So can someone tell Microsoft about this problem? their forums are as useless as their desktop help files.


J

Apr 14, 2012 1:28 AM in response to kernowguy

This workaround did the trick for me. I have Office 2011 with Lion.


  1. Quit Word
  2. In the Finder's menu bar, select Go > Go to folder and type: ~/Library/Preferences/
  3. Locate the preference file com.microsoft.Word.plist
  4. Option drag it to the desktop (this will create a copy to fall back on)
  5. Open the original in a text editor
  6. Change the value of Show_HIToolbar from <false/> to <true/> (around line 362), save the file and test. (If it doesn't work, restore the original.)

Mar 7, 2013 10:32 AM in response to kernowguy

I struggled with this for 1/2 a day, but I found one thing that worked.

  1. I quit all Microsoft Office for Mac programs, including Word.
  2. I opened a Finder window.
  3. Clicked on Go > Go to Folder and typed: ~/Library/Preferences/
  4. Looked for a file named com.microsoft.Word.plist.
  5. I located the file and moved it to the desktop.
  6. Then when I restarted Word, the toolbars that I couldn't access reappeared.

Hope that works for you, too.

Good luck.

Feb 27, 2014 5:44 AM in response to rkaufmann87

Yup, same problems here with toolbars not working, disappearing, etc. Then I saw another contributor's suggestion about finding and revising the.plist file for Word (in the library folder). The .plist is just the personal preferences you set for an application. When I had problems long ago with Word, the support tech told me the file probably got gotten corrupted, so just drag it into the Trash. Word automatically generates a new preferences file with the default settings. Only problem is that you need to reset your preferences, but it works.

May 10, 2015 11:45 PM in response to rajshree san francisco

Closed all applications. Moved a back up copy of the plist to my desktop and deleted the one that was in Library/Preferences/. Restarted computer. Opened Word. The problem persists, and the work around remains, View > Toolbars > uncheck Standard, View > Toolbars > recheck Standard, click on any other window (word, your browser, anything), and return to the word document and the toolbar appears at the top of the doc. Workaround works, but how annoying.

MS Word 2011 for Mac toolbar missing and cannot get back. tried disabling toolbars, deleting Normal.dotx to no avail. Sometimes just pops up for no reason. Also reinstalled Office. Any ideas please? Driving me nuts as cannot use shortcut icons

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