MS Word — add context menu item

I wanted to add the menu item “Edit/Paste Special/Unformatted text” to the right-click context menu in Word 2000 (why I still use Word 2000 is another discussion all together).

I found this post  by Gary Frieder of http://www.customofficedev.com/ posted at http://windowssecrets.com which described the process of adding to the context menu, and then a comment further down told how to add a macro (such as one to paste text unformatted) to that same context menu.

Here are the steps Gary Frieder describes:

  1. Go to Tools > Customize.
  2. In the Customize dialog, click on the Toolbars tab, then scroll down until you can see the listing for “Shortcut Menus”.
  3. Click a checkmark next to this listing, and you will see a Shortcut Menus toolbar appear.
  4. This toolbar will have three menus: Text, Table and Draw.
  5. Click on the one for Text, and you will see a listing of all of the text-context shortcut menus – there are quite a lot of them. Word uses internal “contextual” rules to determine which menu is appropriate to display at a given moment.
  6. The most frequently-seen one of these is “Text”.
  7. Click on “Text” and you will see the shortcut menu pop up.
  8. You can now customize this like any other menu:
  9. With the Text shortcut menu displaying, click on the Commands tab in the Customize dialog.
  10. Click on Edit in the Categories list.
  11. Then scroll down the Commands list until you locate Paste Special.
  12. You can just click and drag this command from the Commands list, onto your shortcut menu.

And here’s the quote about creating and adding a macro:

Thanks a million, Gary. Worked like a charm. A couple of months ago, I made a little macro (my first ever) for “Paste Special > unformatted text” so I wouldn’t have to click “unformatted text” everytime. I had also created a my own toolbar icon for it.

When I followed your directions but instead of dragging Paste Special from the commands list, I dragged my little macro icon onto the context menu and it works perfectly!

Thanks to the pros!!