How to add to the right-click popup menu (Word 2K SR1)

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I have figured out how to add new items to menus and menu bars, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to add an item to the menu that comes up when you right-click in Word. This is the one that has Cut, Copy. Paste, etc. in it. There are a couple of things I would like to add to this one. I am sure this is something just basic that I am missing. Any insight that anyone can provide is greatly appreciated. TIA

Ron M

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Ron,

You’re almost there – when you’re in the Customize dialog, click on the Toolbars tab, then scroll down and put a checkmark next to Shortcut Menus.

This will make a Shortcut Menus toolbar temporarily appear, which will contain three menu items: Text, Table, and Draw.

Click on one of these (Text is most relevant), and you’ll see a popup menu listing all the shortcut menus that are available (the shortcut menus are context-sensitive, so which one appears while you’re working in Word will differ depending on context) – there are over 50 of them!

Click on any one of these (the most generic one is probably “Text”), and you’ll see the contents of the popup menu.
Adding items to this popup menu is then done the same way that you would add items to a toolbar or other menu.

Depending on what you want to do, you may want to add the item to more than one shortcut menu (for example the one for Lists if you want your item to appear when you’re in autonumbered paragraphs, the one for Tables if you want it to appear when you’re working in tables etc.) Although it’s some extra work to set up, this is a great way to customize your Word environment, by adding functions particular to different types of work, to the popup menus that are available when doing that type of work.

When you’re done, just unclick the checkmark next to Shortcut Menus and click on Close to close the Customize dialog.

One last note: by default these customizations appear to be stored in your Normal.dot, so the next time you quit Word, you may get a prompt asking you if you want to save changes to the global template, Normal.dot. In this case, you would want to indicate Yes, if you want these changes to be retained for future Word sessions.

If you want to “localize” these changes to a particular custom template, rather than to Normal.dot, I believe you can do this by making the above customizations, while you have the particular custom template open – the “customization context” for those changes is then set to that template.
– Because Normal.dot is prone to damage and needing to be replaced, an advanced strategy would be to save these customizations to a custom global template which you place in your Startup directory.

Hope this helps,
Gary

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Hi Ron:

One additional suggestion to Gary’s excellent advice. When you do this in a custom template, make a toolbar first to house the commands that you will eventually drag over to a shortcut menu. e.g. I have a toolbar called “Macros on Shortcut Menus”. While you are using native commands, rather than macros, by placing them on a toolbar, you preserve them better. They can be copied to other templates, if you want. Customizations to menus can’t be copied between template. After you place these command on a toolar, just hold down the Ctrl key as you drag them to the appropriate shortcut menu.

Hope this helps.

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Ron,

One other item.

See this post where I answered a question on how to get something onto the table shortcut menu that was NOT available in the list of commands from the Customize dialog. This item indicates that you can drag something from an existing menu onto the shortcut menu of choice while in customize mode.

Fred

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Thanks for the help guys. I really appreciate the insight. Seasons Greetings to you all. This will give me something to do during the holidays . Gary, I actually did get to the shortcut menu bar, but that is where I got stumped by what do I do next . Thanks for helping me to straighten this out.

Ron M

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