Microsoft loves Thumbnail view which Sucks

I use the Document Map feature of Word all the time as we work on quite large documents at work. I have Word set up so the document map is always shown. A couple of days ago, however, I opened up the Thumbnail sidebar also present in Word. I quickly decided that, for my purposes, the thumbnail sidebar was useless and changed back to the document map instead. Incredibly annoyingly, now Word opened the thumbnail view every time I started Word, no matter how many times I changed to the document map.

For those who find themselves in a similar situation, let me save you some grief. First, some bad news: you must delete all of Word’s settings to get the document map to appear instead of the thumbnail view, in Word 2003 at least.

The good news is that this procedure is not hard to do. In Word 2003, navigate to the following registry key (using regedit):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Data

From this key, delete the Settings value. This will delete all your Word settings (most of them, anyway, Word stores its settings in various places). It is, however, the only way I’ve found to remove the horrendous thumbnail sidebar and reinstate the document map to its rightful place.