J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Make Your Office Button Flash

File this under "useless Office tricks." Robert Martim explains how to make your Excel 2007 Office button flash.

In Office 2007, Microsoft introduced what is widely known as the "Office Button". This is a button that functions in the same way as the old "File" menu, which gives you tools to work with the file such as Save As, Print, etc.

Have you ever wondered why the Microsoft Office Button flashes? Or how to make it flash again?

The first thing to know is that the Button flashes for discoverability reasons, that is, it flashes with the implicit and silent message: "Hey, I am here! Click me!". Once you have "discovered" the Office Button, it will stop flashing in all of the Office applications.

He has a 2:20 video that describes a registry tweak to reset the Office button as if you'd never clicked it. The video can be summarized:

1. Start regedit.exe
2. Click HKEY_CURRENT_USER
3. Traverse the registry tree to Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\General
4. Double-click OfficeMenuDiscovered and change the value to 0

The next time you start an Office 2007 app, the Office button will be flashing -- until you click it.