Pet Peeve #1: 
Reorganization of Menu Bar Items and Toolbars in every new release of Office

Okay, truthfully, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this one. I do find one little area to be helpful, though, and that’s the Customize dialog box. You can get to it by right-clicking any toolbar and choosing Customize or by going to Tools on the menu and Customize. The Options tab has two important checkboxes under the heading Personalized Menus and Toolbars - Show Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows and Always Show full menus. It’s good to have both of these checked. Firstly, because if you grew up on older versions of Office like me, you’re used to the two toolbars displayed and you will be able to see all of the buttons this way. So if you were wondering where half your toolbar buttons went when you upgraded Office, now you know. I still have no clue why Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to combine them into one toolbar. Secondly, you know that menu bar choices are going to be switched around; it’s a constant in the universe that this will happen with all new versions. So to ensure that you are seeing absolutely everything you can see, you should always show full menus.

Pet Peeve #2: 
Office Assistant (depending on your Office version)

Clippy never told me anything I didn’t already know. While this isn’t an issue on Office XP (you get a task pane instead), those of you with older versions are probably still being annoyed by this little jerky animation every day. An easy way to turn him off (or at least sedate him) is to go into the Office Assistant options, and just deselect every possible command he can pop up for.

Pet Peeve #3: 
No Slide Layout button in PowerPoint

Okay, I’ve inserted a couple of new slides and maybe imported a picture or two. Now I want to change the layout of the slide, but there is no fast way to do this, other than going through Format, Slide Layout on the menu bar. Now in Office XP, you can click on the drop down title of the task pane and get to it, which is a little faster than going through the menu bar. However, if you prefer using buttons and toolbars, you can simply add the button to your formatting toolbar. Revisiting the Customize dialog box through the same methods mentioned earlier, you can this time click on the commands tab and choose Format in the left pane, then scroll down in the right pane until you see Slide Layout. From that point, you can click and drag the Slide Layout Item to the end of the Formatting toolbar, and drop it right next to New Slide. You will notice that it doesn’t show the text “Slide Layout” by default. No problem — just right-click the button itself, and choose Image and Text.

Pet Peeve #4: 
The general un-usefulness of the Relationships window in Access

It would be nice to be able to customize this view, but short of resizing and moving around your entities, there’s hopelessly little you can do here. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget those really descriptive error messages I see every once in awhile that display “Unspecified Error,” or my favorite, a totally blank dialog box with an OK button. There’s not a whole lot I can do about these (Microsoft denies the existence of these anomalies in their tech support website), but they are definitely on the list.

Pet Peeve #5:
The Drawing Canvas in Word

I can’t stand the drawing canvas!!! It magically appears in Word whenever you use a drawing tool. I just don’t see the benefit of using the darn thing! So I avoid it, and draw outside of it. You can always make any properties changes to your drawing later by right-clicking and choosing Format Autoshape.

If you have a personal pet peeve for any of the Office products, please write me and let me know! If I can’t help you overcome it, I can at least commiserate and publish it in a later article.