Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Customizing The Quick Access Toolbar in Microsoft Excel, Word, and Powerpoint”.
In this microsoft office tutorial, i’m going to show you a great option that you have that enables you to customize Excel PowerPoint and Word so that they work the way you would like them to, and this deals with what we call the quick access toolbar it’s here In the upper left corner right above the tabs and the purpose of the quick access, toolbar deals directly with the tabs and the ribbons. The idea behind the tabs and the ribbons that modern versions of Office have is that the user can simply choose the action that they want to take, whether it’s insert or change the page layout or add a formula. Look at the data review, etc and then, as they click on what they would like to accomplish, the ribbon changes to give you most of the options that you have that are related to the tab that you clicked on and then home is a list of some Of the most commonly used tools and options in Microsoft Office, so that’s the idea behind the tabs and the ribbons, but the downside to the tabs in the ribbons is, let’s say, there’s an option that you use all the time. But it’s stuck over here on the review tab or on the data tab. You may have to click data and go to that data ribbon every two minutes or so, and that can really slow you down and so.
For that reason, Microsoft developed the quick access toolbar here in the upper left corner and it’s there not just in Microsoft Excel, but it’s also in PowerPoint there. It is, and it’s in Microsoft Word there. It is jumping back now to excel. Let’S look at what it can do by default.
It simply has a Save button. This is a quick save. So if you just want to save your work as you do it every so often you can just click that save symbol and it saves your spreadsheet or your presentation or your Word document now. Next to that we have an undo button and a redo button.
So at any point, if I make a mistake that I regret, I can just go up to the undo button, click it and undo that mistake, there’s also a redo button in the quick access toolbar and then there’s this strange-looking symbol here. What this is. This is the way for you to customize the quick access toolbar and for me, this is where the real power of the quick access toolbar is found, because you can click there.
You can add additional buttons to that quick access toolbar, one of the best things to add in my opinion, is right at the top new. If you click on that now, you have a button that you can click with one click. You have a new spreadsheet in this case, and you can do the same with PowerPoint, as you can see, and also with Microsoft. Word now think about how much time that saves you typically if you wanted to create a new spreadsheet you’d, have to go here to file and you get the backstage view and then you’d have to click new, and then you would have to select blank workbook or A template, that’s like three or four steps that you’re saved. If you just add this new document button to your quick access toolbar, then you can just click it. One step you’re ready to go another good one to add, is open to open documents that you’ve worked on in the past.
If you have your email set up with Outlook or a similar tool, you can add an email button to email, a spreadsheet or a document. There’S Quick Print print preview and print spelling, which I think actually would be pretty useful in my Excel spreadsheets, but also think about that for Microsoft Word to have a button that you can just click without having to go to the review tab to do. Spelling and grammar’, why not just add a spelling and grammar button to the quick access toolbar and you can just click it and it goes directly there if you’re a student.
I think this is a must just add that spelling and grammar’ right now to your quick access, toolbar and, of course, that would also be useful in PowerPoint back in Excel, though, let’s look quickly at the other options, I could add a sort, ascending or sort descending Button which would be used fairly often and then for mobile devices. You could switch between Mouse mode and touch mode. Now, if you look at powerpoints quick access, toolbar, it does have slightly different options and you can see that it already has start from the beginning selected.
That’S a nice button to have, instead of always having to go down here to start the slideshow. Why not go up here and click this start from the beginning, slideshow button? So that’s a good one to have checked and to leave checked. But if you change your mind, you can uncheck any of these options.
The rest of these options look pretty similar to what just showed in Microsoft, Excel. Let’S jump over to word and look at the quick access options that you have by default. In addition to the ones we already looked at in Excel, there’s draw table which would be very useful to me and it looks like that’s about it. Everything else is pretty similar to Microsoft, Excel but notice at the bottom of this list. It says more commands and it says, show below the ribbon.
Let’S look at show below the ribbon. First, it’s really easy. It’S just what it sounds like if I click this button.
Instead of my quick access toolbar showing up here in the upper left, it will just move it down below this ribbon. So, let’s try that I’ll, just click show below the ribbon it pops down and then to put it back up, there’s the button that I need to click and then I’ll just change it to show above the ribbon. Okay. Now, let’s look at the last option in the quick access, toolbar options that I haven’t talked about and that’s more commands, and this is really powerful when you click that button. It gives you a list of a whole bunch of tools, buttons options that you can add to the quick access toolbar, many more than those that are listed when you just click this button here in the upper left, you can see, I could add a center button. A calculate Now button a conditional, formatting button and insert pictures button Merchant Center, and I could go on and on there’s all sorts of wonderful buttons that would be very useful to most people the hardest part of this might be limiting yourself. You don’t want to overdo it and just put every single option and button that you’d like to use on the quick access toolbar, but definitely put a few there.
Those that you think will speed up your workflow and help you use Excel more effectively and efficiently. A couple that I would recommend our first autosum it’s here toward the bottom. It just says some, but it’s Auto sum, so you can just click that and then click Add and it adds it to the quick access toolbar.
Not yet. But when I click OK, it will be added to the bar so that way I’ll be able to, with a click of a button, do an autosum to add up numbers in a column and then a second one that I do recommend is pivot table. I’Ve been using pivot tables a lot lately and if you haven’t watched my tutorial on this already, you really need to do that, but I would like to add a pivot table button so that very quickly I can access the options for creating a pivot table so That looks pretty good to me. I’M happy with this list, but if I did want to remove any these, all I would have to do is click on it and then click remove and it’s gone. I’M gon na add that back in now I want you to notice that this list of commands that I’ve gone through to find out what I could add to the quick access toolbar. This is only a list of the popular commands. If I click here at the top, I could go to all commands and then you can see just the exhaustive list that you have available to choose from it’s massive and way too many really for me to comprehend. At this point, I could also go up here to the top and switch from commands to macros or to the formulas tab or to the review tab, there’s just so many different command types to choose from so really for most people. I recommend that you start with popular commands and then, as you get more familiar with Excel, you can delve into the others all right, I’m gon na click, OK and notice what it did to my quick access toolbar.
It now has those custom buttons that I wanted added and they’re there. Let’S look now at PowerPoint. It works the same way, but I’m just gon na go down to more commands and ones that I recommend our add animation so I’ll.
Add that animation, pane might also be a good option. To add. Bring forward is a great one when you’re working with images or really any visual element, it’s nice to be able to bring items forward and then also send backward. So I would add both of those to the quick access toolbar and then I would also add a new slide button so that, instead of having to click new slide every time, let’s say I’m on a different tab, all I would have to do is go up Here and click new slide, so I’m really happy with this PowerPoint quick access toolbar. Finally, let’s look at Microsoft Word and some options for the word: quick access, toolbar I’ll, go down to more commands and again, please remember that we’re only really looking mostly at the popular commands, there’s so much more that you can add through the quick access toolbar, but In Word, I would like to add see multiple pages I’ll just click add and then also paragraph settings. I find myself constantly thinking about and changing and adjusting paragraph settings and it would be nice to just have that at the click of a button.
So here’s my word quick access, toolbar. Let’S say I want to see two pages of this document at once. I click it and it gives me the multiple page view and I can go up to paragraph settings and it opens up with the alignment and the indentation and the spacing and all of those features. So, in summary, I just love the quick access toolbar in Excel PowerPoint and Word. I think it’s a wonderful way for us to customize these powerful programs so that they work better for each of us and it is also available in Microsoft, Publisher. So if you’re, a publisher user check it out there as well thanks for watching this tutorial, I hope you found it to be useful.
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