Word - Adobe Acrobat menubar add-ins missing in second template

Asked By DeanH

10-Mar-10 05:23 AM

Word 2003 SP2 on XP SP2
I have professional version of Acrobat which I wish to see the Menubar
buttons for Adobe PDF and Acrobat Comments.
These two menus appear in my Normal.dot but not in my External.dot template.
Up to 2 days ago these menus did appear in the External.dot and have done
for sometime, not sure what may have changed in my settings to cancel these
menus.
I have tried to get them to reappear by Customizing the toolbars, I even
unloaded and reinstalled Acrobat from scratch but they just wont appear in
the second template. At one piont I did have them appearing but they were
greyed out and would not work.
What am I missing? I have also asked Adobe but no response yet.
Any help will be gratefully recieved.
DeanH

10-Mar-10 06:02 AM

The Acrobat add-in provides its own toolbar. It is thus independent of Word
and its normal template. You can, however store toolbar settings with
individual templates and so if you open the External.dot template then from
View > Toolbars check the Adobe PDF Maker toolbar. Type a character in the
text space, delete it then save the template, the toolbar setting should
remain. The Acrobat menus are a different issue. With the template open, in
Tools > Customize you can drag the menu options off the menu bar, and save
the template without them, but I do not see any way of putting them back
apart from creating a new template starting from the normal template..

--
Graham Mayor -  Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org

10-Mar-10 08:31 AM

Hi Graham.
As you may have suspected, it is not the Toolbar that I am dealing with but
the Menubar buttons.
As you say, I cannot find anyway to transfer these between templates, maybe
it is a register function?
Anyway I have recreated a new version of the external.dot from the
normal.dot, used the Organiser to repopulate the styles/Autotext/macros from
a copy of the old external.dot. Bit of a pain but it did not take long.
Be interesting if Adobe come back with a solution, or if someone else jumps
in here with something they have found in the past.
All the best and many thanks
DeanH

11-Mar-10 05:31 PM

I suspect you have VBA code in your External.dot that that leaves
CustomizationContext to something other than it should. This could happen if
you, e.g., make changes to toolbars etc. via code.

It could explain the missing menus and I have seen it in a number of
situations. If ??? after your External.dot is loaded, the CustomizationContext
is set to e.g. External.dot, that would most likely cause the Acrobat menus
to disappear.

Try this:
After starting Word (and when the menus are missing), go to the VBE
(Alt+F11). In the Immediate window, type:
?CustomizationContext
and press Enter.

What is displayed as the result?

If the result is NOT the template attached to the active document (if a
document is open) or the Normal template if no documents are open, you should
find where in your code you change the CustomizationContext. After that code,
insert e.g. the following to reset CustomizationContext to ???neutral???:

'Reset CustomizationContext
If Documents.Count > 0 Then
CustomizationContext = ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate
Else
CustomizationContext = NormalTemplate
End If

And insert that piece of code after each and every piece of code where the
CustomizationContext has been changed.

For more details, see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537165.aspx

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg - Microsoft MVP (Word)
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word

12-Mar-10 02:41 AM

Hi Lene. Many thanks for the response, below are answers to your questions:
1. I do not use code to customise toolbars/menubars. I am not a 'big' code
writer and have never even heard of CustomizationContext, let alone use it in
any code.
2. Normal.dot is displayed after the Immediate query. Is this correct for a
External.dot based document?

Thanks
DeanH

12-Mar-10 09:37 AM

I may not be able to explain in more detail but I will try:

I have included some questions below. You do not necessarily need to answer
the question but they may help you checking things.

As you can see from the article
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa537165.aspx (link also included in
my previous post), customization conflicts may arise. Note especially point 4
below the heading ???Conflicting Customizations???.

Normally, CustomizationContext would be the template attached to the active
document.

If the active document is based on External.dot and if it is still attached
to that template, the CustomizationContext is supposed to be External.dot.
Since it is not, it could be because a) your document is actually no longer
attached to External.dot (check in Tools > Templates and Add-Ins) or b)
because something (e.g. code in your External.dot or in another location such
as Normal.dot or an add-in) has changed the CustomizationContext.

In External.dot, did you add any custom menus to the Menu Bar? In that case,
the Adobe menus and your menu(s) may conflict.

When making customizations ??? via the user interface or via code ??? it is very
important to make sure that the customizations are saved in the correct
context. When making the customizations via the user interface, you must
always be very careful to select the appropriate template or document from
the ???Save in???/???Save changes in??? or ???Make toolbar available to??? list in the
Customization dialog box.
Do you have add-ins installed? In that case, did you install something new
around the time when the problem with the missing menus occurred?

Does your code in External.dot or in Normal.dot contain any AutoMacros, e.i.
AutoNew, AutoOpen, AutoExec, AutoClose? In that case, you should check
whether that code contains anything that changes the CustomizationContext.

Also note the explanation below the heading ???A Word of Caution About
Design-Time Customizations??? in the above mentioned article:
Quote: ???For best results, it is important to create design-time
customizations on a non-customized instance of Word. That is, no add-ins
should be loaded and the default global template (Normal.dot) should be a
fresh copy generated by Word containing no modifications by the developer.???

This is especially important if you change the built-in Menu Bar or
toolbars. If you add all customizations to a custom toolbar, it is easier to
make sure that you don???t conflict with anything else and this also makes it
more unlikely that add-ins outside your control would make any harm to your
customizations.

--
Regards
Lene Fredborg - Microsoft MVP (Word)
DocTools - Denmark
www.thedoctools.com
Document automation - add-ins, macros and templates for Microsoft Word