Get Rid of Annoying Short Menus in PowerPoint

Change the Options in PowerPoint to Always Show Full Menus

Ever since the release of PowerPoint 2000, one feature has irked me immensely in all the Microsoft Office products -- the short menus. Microsoft has again taken the liberty of deciding for me. Don't you hate it when they do that?

The short menus were designed with a drop down arrow button that would extend the menu to show all the features in that menu. Once you had selected an item in the extended menu, that Microsoft product (PowerPoint, Word, Excel or Access) then figured "Gee, I guess she uses this feature more than we thought. Let's now put it higher in the list." The next time you accessed this same menu, the feature you had used earlier would now be visible in the short menu.

The negative aspects of this feature are that -

1. Maybe you use this feature a lot, but your colleague does not. Then when you proceed to help that other person -- perhaps over the phone -- she gets flustered because the feature is not visible to her. She must first click the button to extend the menu.
   
   
2. When you are trying to find some particular feature in PowerPoint, it is really annoying to have to keep making those extra clicks just to find the feature you are looking for. Not a big deal on the grand scheme of things, but when you use a mouse all day at your computer job, these extra clicks can also contribute to repetitive stress injury.

The good news is that there is an easy fix for this problem.

Steps

1. In PowerPoint, select Tools > Customize.
2. On the Options tab, click in the box beside Always Show Full Menus
3. Click on OK.

From now on, each menu will show a complete list of all features contained within that particular menu.