How to configure WinWord and Excel toolbars in ELN Sections to expose standard Office menu functionality

How to configure WinWord and Excel toolbars in ELN Sections to expose standard Office menu functionality

Problem:

Users would like to have access to standard functions in MS Office applications (WinWord, Excel and PowerPoint) when using them inside of a E-Notebook section. Most of the standard functions can be exposed to the users as toolbar icons.

The attached document describes how to configure MS Office toolbars so that they will be available for E-Notebook users. Please note that there is a bug in the Adobe Acrobat 7 Plug-in for WinWord in versions below 7.0.5 that prevents WinWord from saving the Normal.dot file correctly. This results that any modification that you make to WinWord toolbar will not be saved (and the modified Office toolbar will not be visible in the WinWord section in E-Notebook).

This Adobe Acrobat bug has been documented by Microsoft (see the link in References). The workaround is to press SHIFT and select "File / Save All". This will force saving the normal.dot WinWord template.

According to the 2nd and 3rd reference cited below, this bug only affects Office 2002 (=Office XP) and Office 2003. This bug has been fixed in Acrobat 7.0.5, so users should upgrade their Acrobat Writer software to this version or higher. Upgrading in Acrobat Professional can be done using the "Help / Check for Upgrades ..." menu function.