Make Mini Formatting Toolbar Stop Popping Up in Word 2007
One of the biggest new changes in Office 2007 is the new mini toolbar that pops up when you highlight text and either right-click or move your mouse up.
If you find the mini toolbar enhancement distracting, you’ll be glad to know you can disable it from automatically popping up when you select text.
Click the Office Button in the upper left hand corner and select “Word Options” from the resulting menu to get to the Word Options dialog.
In this dialog, select Popular and uncheck the “Show Mini Toolbar on selection” option.
You can still get access to the Mini Toolbar by right clicking the highlighted text or anywhere on your document… it’s not possible to disable that.

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THANK YOU!!!! I’ve been trying to get rid of that thing for ages!
@ Jeff Bridges your certainly welcome! Now that I am one year into Office 2007 I actually rely on mini toolbar all the time now without thinking about it. Unless I am in Office 2003 and I think … “hey where did that go? oh … yeah”.
It IS possible to tun off the Mini Toolbar when right-clicking, but you have to edit the registry to do it:
Run Regedit.exe from Start->Run and go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars\Word
Right-click in the right-hand panel, select New and DWORD Value – name it AllowMenuFloaties and leave the value set to 0.
The entry for Word under Toolbars might not exist unless you’ve already de-selected the option to ‘Show Mini Toolbar on selection’ as per the main article above (this writes a DWORD called AllowSelectionFloaties and sets the value to 0).
This also works for Excel as well, in the Excel folder under Toolbars.