Turning Off Dynamic Menus

Excel, starting with Excel 2000, employs a feature I refer to as "dynamic menus." This means that Excel keeps track of which menu options you use the most, and these are the options it presents you. If you want to see all the menu options, you need to hover the mouse pointer over a menu for a few seconds, or click on the down-pointing arrows at the bottom of any menu.

Dynamic menus can make it a bit easier to get to the choices you make most often, but there is a drawback: It is more difficult to see all the menu-based capabilities of Excel. If you want to turn off this feature (thereby making Excel's menus behave as they did in previous program versions), follow these steps:

1. Choose Customize from the Tools menu. Excel displays the Customize dialog box.
2. Make sure the Options tab is selected. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. Clear the check box to the left of the Menus Show Recently Used Commands First option. (In Excel 2003, select the Always Show Full Menus check box.)
4. Click on OK.

These steps won't work in Excel 2007, and there is no comparable configuration option. Why? Because Excel 2007 doesn't use menus; it uses the ribbon interface, instead.