What is the Work Menu?
The Work menu is a great but virtually undocumented feature in MS Word. It has been around since early versions of Word, but few people know about it. It is like having a “Favorites” menu, just for Word, letting you list documents that you want to keep on a menu. Like the Favorites menu, items in the Work menu are shortcuts to an actual document stored somewhere on your computer or network.
The Work menu is great but is virtually undocumented and seems to be a hold-over from earlier versions of Word. It may predate templates. It is like having another “Favorites” menu, just for Word, letting you list documents that you want to keep on a menu. Unlike the regular Favorites menu, it does not allow sub-menus of documents nor can you re-order documents (except by adding them again to the menu, in which case they move to the top of the list). Also, like the Favorites menu, items in the Work menu are merely shortcuts to an actual document. Moving or deleting the document doesn’t change the shortcut, just makes in unable to work. There is a temptation to use the Work menu to open documents that have been useful in the past, make changes to those documents, and then use Save As… to save the changed document under a new name. This is a poor use of the Work menu! If you are considering doing this, look into templates. That is their job and they are superior in all ways to reusing
