Word 2011: Window status bar turns black

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
March 25th, 2013 • 4:23 pm

What is wrong with this picture?

word2011-blackstatusbar

Well, I think it’s rather obvious: the document window’s status bar (or whatever it’s called in Microsoft parlance) is a big blob of solid black instead of displaying the various bits of information (page number, word count, etc.) and controls that it is supposed to display.

Fortunately, resizing the window clears the problem:

word2011-blackstatusbar-gone

And so does minimizing and maximizing the window again.

But it’s a recurring problem that happens to every single one of my Word document windows if I leave them open long enough (usually overnight) in Word 2011. (I tend to work on several things simultaneously, so I often leave windows open in various applications, in the background, usually hidden.)

I find it hard to believe that no one else has noticed the problem or that it’s occurring on my machine exclusively, but who knows? A quick search online fails to return any substantial results. Then again, most Word 2011 users have probably given up on complaining about bugs in the software, since Microsoft itself obviously does not care enough to fix them. So the lack of results does not necessarily mean much.

Still, I find it more than annoying to have to manually resize multiple Word document windows every day just so that they display properly. (It also does not help that Word’s window management is broken in many other ways, including the fact that sometimes, currently open windows fail to show up in the Dock icon’s menu altogether, and then Word also refuses to respond to “Hide All” commands coming from other applications, and so on. And let’s not even mention what happens when you close a document window and reopen it.)

It is just one of the myriad of ways that Microsoft manages to make our everyday working life more irritating than it should be.


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