People who know Word 2007?

[ritaxis]

I have to use Word for certain purposes these days and I would love to know how to turn off the various annoyances. I finally figured out how to change most preferences, so I got it to stop substituting curly quotes, and to stop obscuring the screen with French dictionary entries whenever I move my cursor around (really), and to stop underlining all my sentences with green lines (most of which are identifications of grammar errors that are not errors and suggestions for unequivocably inappropriate word changes -- many instances of "he's," "she's," or "it's," for example, were suggested to be replaced with "am.")

But it's still doing some things that bug me. Currently the most annoying thing is this meaningless animation at the bottom of a screen, where a pencil is scribbling in a book as long as I am typing. I don't know what this is called, or what purpose it's supposed to serve, but it's highly distracting and annoying, and I want it gone. Do any of you know what I should do to get rid of it?


edit: thank you to hrj and frogs! A friend walked into the house and suggested I right-click on it and a context menu came up to turn it off -- it is indeed a spelling and grammar deal. I had turned these off several times before, in different contexts, because Word does not believe in keeping things simple, I guess. Now I can rattle away without that visual mosquito buzzing in my peripheral vision.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

As best I can figure, what the scribbling pen signifies is that the program is re-calculating your current word/page count and position. Notice that if you stop typing, it shows a static book and pencil, but if you begin typing new material (or deleting existing material) it scribbles for a while as you work then stops again after a slight lag.

I Googled (word "spelling and grammar status" remove icon) and turned up the following possibly helpful results (although theres some overlap in answers):

http://us.generation-nt.com/answer/spelling-grammar-status-icon-help-40167622.html

http://help.wugnet.com/office/Spelling-Grammar-Status-Icon-ftopict527617.html

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Word/microsoft.public.word.docmanagement/2005-01/2004.html

I've verified that if I go into preferences and uncheck "check spelling as you type" and "check grammar as you type" that the icon disappears. But from the answers on the various sites above, it seems that this doesn't work for everyone.

[frogs_of_war]

You could also move the window down a bit so the bottom is off the screen. The icon will still be there but you can't see it. That way keeps word count/page number from being a distraction too.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

From some of the answers I saw out there, the preferences may be tied in some way to the "template" the document is generated from. So it may be that you previously turned those features off in specific documents, but not in the template that generates new documents. But now we're getting into "things I would check out for troubleshooting" rather than "things I know".