If you ever open Entourage and want to create a new item, you may notice that all the buttons in the toolbar are missing. You may perhaps know that the latest version of Entourage, Entourage 2008, allows you to customise the toolbar, and you may also have been told on the Entourage newsgroup that you should right-click the toolbar and choose the "Customize Toolbar" option from the contextual menu to restore any missing buttons. That sounds like solid advice, but the only problem is: there is no toolbar to right-click!
If this is the case, you have encountered a poorly documented feature in Mac OS X that can be highly useful once you know how to use it. And what is even better: you can solve this problem in just one click!
If you ever open Entourage and want to create a new item, you may notice that all the buttons in the toolbar are missing. You may perhaps know that the latest version of Entourage, Entourage 2008, allows you to customise the toolbar, and you may also have been told on the Entourage newsgroup that you should right-click the toolbar and choose the "Customize Toolbar" option from the contextual menu to restore any missing buttons. That sounds like solid advice, but the only problem is: there is no toolbar to right-click!
If this is the case, you have encountered a poorly documented feature in Mac OS X that can be highly useful once you know how to use it. And what is even better: you can solve this problem in just one click!
Have a look at the screenshot below.
Do you notice the tiny oval button in the upper right corner? This button is part of the Mac OS X user interface, and you can find it in many applications, among them Apple's iWork suite. This button has a very specific purpose: it hides the toolbar with just one click, thus allowing you to get rid of the toolbar when you do not need it. This feature is also part of Microsoft Office 2008, and that is also the explanation for what you can see in Entourage. You must have clicked the button at some point, without noticing it, and it is now hiding your toolbar, as you have inadvertently instructed it to do. One click on that button is enough to restore the toolbar. There you are: your problem, solved in one mouse click!
For those of you intrigued by the possibilities of this mystery button: there is another, even more poorly documented feature related to the toolbar. As you may know, you can customise the toolbar in many different ways ("Icon and Text", "Icon Only", "Text Only", and all of them can be combined with "Use Small Size"). If you hold down the Cmd or Apple key while clicking this button, the toolbar will cycle through all the possible display modes, one after the other.
