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I use Word 2010 with the Navigation Pane on the left side of the screen and the Styles Pane (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S) on the right side of the screen. Whenever I open Word, I have to set this up manually. How can I make Word use my prefered pane layout when it starts?

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I believe they keep the view on a per-file basis, which means that if you open Normal.dotx, open up your panes, and save it, that should make it default. – digitxp Aug 17 '11 at 1:31
Thanks! Nice idea, but no go. The Styles Pane settings seems to replicate any Word windows that are currently open, but if none are open, it reverts to the default "don't show". I've noticed printer settings (selected printer, duplex, etc.) replicate to new windows in the same way. – Hand-E-Food Aug 17 '11 at 1:47
Admitidly, learning that key combination while typing this question already helps immensely... :-) – Hand-E-Food Aug 17 '11 at 1:49
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If you name macros AutoNew and AutoOpen it will fire everytime you open a new or existing document.

To open a dialog box it is just Dialongs(wdDialogBoxName).Show.

The tricky part is hunting down the name of that dialog box. If it even is a dialogbox object. . .

edit

I found that little turd. It's a Task Pane.

Application.TaskPanes(wdTaskPaneFormatting).Visible = True

Put that into two macros and it should fire when you open a doc.

edit2

For future reference, seeing as this question comes up a lot (Mail Merge Pane is a popular request), you can hunt down the name of the object through the Keyboard Customizer and it will list them by object name. Then you just Search for it in the Macro Editor's Object Browser.

You can also use this technique in Visual Studios to write BomB macros.

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Oh geez... Thanks, that answers my question. Adding a macro is going to cause me more havoc than convinience in the long run, but I like the elegence of your solution. :-) – Hand-E-Food Aug 17 '11 at 22:56
Just rename it to turn it off. – surfasb Aug 18 '11 at 5:18
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