How to Use the Mini Toolbar and Contextual Menu in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, we will take a look at what is a contextual menu and a mini toolbar. We will also demonstrate how to make a smaller version of a mini toolbar appear, as well as how to enable the touch version of the mini toolbar and contextual menu.
Video Transcript
In this very short section we’re going to take a look at Mini Toolbars and Contextual Menus.
Now apart from using the Ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar there are various other ways of accessing commands that are relevant to a particular situation or a particular action. And typically in a situation you may call up what’s called a Contextual Menu. Now it’s called Contextual because what’s on it is in the context of what’s going on at that time.
So looking at this Demo 1 workbook here, for example, if I right click on it up comes a Contextual Menu. It has commands on it which Excel thinks are the most likely ones that I’m going to want to use at that time: Cut, Copy, Paste Options, and so on. Note also the Smart Lookup there.
And then above the Contextual Menu there is a Mini Toolbar which gives me one click access to some of the things that I might want to do. So for example, I may want to switch off Bold. Well there’s a simple button there, a Bold button. Click on that and the text Hello There is no longer bold.
So that’s the Contextual Menu and a Mini Toolbar.
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Now there is another version of that available. Let’s take a quick look at that.
If I want to select the text Hello and as you’ll see later on that is quite different from selecting the whole cell that the word Hello is in. That is the cell J10. If I click to the right of Hello in the Formula Bar and then go back and hover over the cell you will see that I can click in and the cursor is now flashing in the cell. If I now click with the mouse, drag across the word Hello and release the mouse button I’ve made a selection within a cell, in this case the word Hello. And what comes up is an even minier toolbar, a tiny little mini toolbar, a toolbar on select. And some people like those, some people don’t. In fact some people don’t like toolbars in general because they tend to get in the way of things. But that’s another way of bringing up a little mini toolbar that you can use in some situations, for instance to just quickly be able to make something Bold or Italic or change the color of some text.
Now here’s a little exercise for you to do. It’s not one of the sort of proper exercises on the course. But look at Excel Options and see if you can find the option to disable that feature. So that if you make a selection like that, a word within a cell, you don’t automatically get a Mini Toolbar popping up. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you can make a selection so that you do get it and then disable it. And then if you want to keep it you can enable it again afterwards. So that’s a little exercise for you to do.
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Now the next thing I’m going to do is a little bit of touch. So I’m going to go up and switch into Touch Mode and I’m going to tap on the Hello cell again to select it. So tap with my finger. That’s a straightforward selection. Note that I get a Mini Toolbar. Now if you don’t see that when you tap just tap and hold and you’ll get that Mini Toolbar. And having got the Mini Toolbar all you need to do is to tap on the dropdown on the right and that brings up the Contextual Menu for touch use.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
