How to Customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Microsoft Excel 2016
During this Microsoft Excel 2016 training tutorial video, we will show you where to find the Quick Access toolbar, its various buttons, and how to add and remove buttons according to your own preference and usage. You will also learn how to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in the Excel Options, as well as how to reset it to its default setting.
Video Transcript
In this section we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar which is a toolbar I’ve pointed out a couple of times before. It’s in the top left hand corner of the main window and it’s used as the name implies for quick access to a small number of commands.
Now by default you will see a small selection of commands displayed there. Let me just hover over the ones here. There’s a Save, an Undo Underline. Now the reason it says Undo Underline is because the last thing that I did on this sheet was to underline something and therefore to do an Undo that’s the thing I would be undoing. In fact if I click on the little dropdown to the right there it’s got a list of the last few things that I’ve done. So I can either Undo one of them or I could go back and Undo more than one of them. It’s not highlighted at the moment but there is a Redo button which will be available if I’ve undone something I’ll be given the option to redo it if I change my mind. There’s then the Touch/Mouse Mode button that we’ve used earlier in the course and then a couple of other buttons.
If I click on the dropdown at the right it gives me a list of the available buttons. And the ones that are ticked are the ones that are currently visible. If I wanted to say show an Open button as a Quick Access button, if I just click on Open that’s available. If I decided that I wasn’t going to be regularly switching between Touch and Mouse Mode I could make the Touch/Mouse Mode button invisible as well.
So that’s a very simple way of customizing what’s shown in the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now if we go back to that menu you notice at the bottom there is a command there, Show Below the Ribbon. Some people prefer to have the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon. One of the reasons is that if you’re doing something where you’ve set up some Quick Access Commands rather than have to move the cursor across the Ribbon to get at your commands putting the Quick Access Toolbar just above the workbook, the worksheet that you’re working on, makes it a slightly less onerous task going up to the commands. Let me just show you what happens. Show Below the Toolbar puts the Quick Access Toolbar there. And then when you’re working on a worksheet you can very quickly and easily get to the Quick Access Toolbar. And of course it’s very straightforward to put it back above the Ribbon again.
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Another very simple customization, let me click on that again, is to go down to where it says More Commands. And you may recall me saying in the previous section that I’ll give you a very quick demonstration of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar. It’ll give you some clues about customization of the main Ribbon.
Now at the moment if you look on the right you can see the commands that are currently shown: Save, Undo, Redo, Quick Print, Print Preview, and Print Open. One thing you can do is to change the sequence of those. So supposing I wanted to put Open to the right of Save. If I select Open and use this little up arrow here, Move Up, put it into the position to the right of Save, that’s below it in the list there, click on OK. If you look at the Quick Access Toolbar now you can see that Open is to the right of Save. So you can change the sequence of the commands like that.
And the other thing you can very easily do is to add a Command to it.
So let’s suppose that I wanted to add the Command to make something Bold to that. If I look at the list on the left which has a list of popular commands I can look for the one I want which is the Bold command. I can’t see it there so let me just look down at, I know it’s on the Home Tab and in fact there it is, Bold. If I select Bold and click on Add it’ll actually be added to the Quick Access Toolbar. So let me click OK and as you can see I’ve now got a Bold command on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now that’s a very straightforward example of customization. If you feel like trying to customize the Ribbon I’ll leave that to you at the moment.
After you’ve been using Excel 2016 for a while and particularly if you’re going to do some kind of routine repetitive jobs it’s a good idea to take a look at what’s on the Quick Access Toolbar and work out if a little bit of customization there may help you to do the job that you’re trying to do.
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And just one or two other very quick points here. If you are customizing the Quick Access Toolbar or in fact if you’re customizing the Ribbon there is a Reset button on each page in Excel Options. So if it all goes horribly wrong or you want to go back to where it used to be there is a Reset button, Reset Default Settings. And in the case of the Quick Access Toolbar you can actually associate a specific Quick Access Toolbar layout with a specific document. So if you’d worked out which commands you need to work on a particular document and you want to set the Quick Access Toolbar up in that way just for that document if you look above the list on the right you’ve got two options there For All Documents or just for in this case the document that’s currently open which is Demo 1.xlsx. So if I made this selection here for a customization every time I open that document my Quick Access Toolbar will take on that custom layout.
So that’s it on the Quick Access Toolbar. I’ll see you in the next section.
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!
