Office 2007 is a great software suite, but it can be a little overwhelming to try and remember where all the different tools and features are located. If you’re like most people, you may find it helpful to have a context menu in your toolbar so that you can quickly access the tools you need without having to search through the menus. To add a context menu to your toolbar, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Office 2007 application and click on the File tab.
  2. In the left pane, click on the Options button.
  3. In the Options dialog box, click on the General tab.
  4. On the General tab, click on the Add New Item button.
  5. In the Add New Item dialog box, type Cmd+F5 in the text field and click on OK.
  6. Click on OK again to close the Options dialog box and return to your file browser window.

In case you aren’t sure what I mean, just right-click on the desktop and choose New from the context menu, and you’ll see Microsoft Office Word Document in the list, which creates a blank .docx file.

We can add the old item back to the list with a simple registry hack.

Manual Registry Hack

The “New” items are stored under the file type definition, under a ShellNew key. In order to create a blank document, you have to add a key named Nullfile to the right-hand side.

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key for the .doc extension:

Simply create a new string value on the right-hand side and name it Nullfile. You might have to wait a few minutes before it shows up in the New list, or you can always log out and back in.

You can do the same for the .xls file extension for Excel 97-2003 documents by browsing down to this key, and create the same Nullfile value on the right-hand side.

For Powerpoint 97-2003 you can browse down to the following key, creating the value again like before.

You should see the items on the right-hand side now, but if you don’t you may have to wait a few minutes or log out and back in.

Downloadable Registry Hack

You can simply download, extract, and then double-click on one of the included files to add the information into the registry. Each file is named according to the document type. There’s also included files to remove them as well.

Download AddOffice2003DocumentsToNewMenu Registry Hack