Page 29 - Excel Timesaving Techniques for Dummies

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Technique 2: Customizing the Excel Menus and Toolbars
To ensure that all the buttons on both the Standard Toolbars and Menus
and Formatting toolbars are always displayed, follow
these steps: Made to Order

1. Choose View➪Toolbars➪Customize to open the When the software engineers at Microsoft put
Customize dialog box.
together the Excel toolbars and menus, they tried
2. Select the Options tab in the Customize dialog to select the buttons and options that most users
box, as shown in Figure 2-1. need most of the time. Of course, you may very well
not be “most users” when it comes to using Excel
3. Select the Show Standard and Formatting
Toolbars on Two Rows check box and then and wish that they had included command options
click the Close button. that currently aren’t there and left out others that
you rarely use.

The good news is that you can easily make the pro-
gram more efficient by customizing any of the existing
toolbars and pull-down menus so that they consist of
just the options you use in the order in which you’d
like to see them.
To customize a built-in Excel toolbar, you follow
these steps:
1. Choose View➪Toolbars➪Customize to open
the Customize dialog box.
2. If the toolbar you want to customize is not
already displayed on the screen, select the
Toolbars tab in the Customize dialog box
and then select that toolbar’s check box.
3. To add a new button to the toolbar now
displayed, select the Commands tab in the
Customize dialog box and then select the
• Figure 2-1: Forcing Excel to display the Standard and desired command category in the Categories
Formatting toolbars on two rows.
list box. Scroll to the command’s icon in the
Commands list box and then drag the icon
To get Excel to display all of a menu’s options from the Customize dialog box to its new
the moment you open it, select the Always place on the toolbar.
Show Full Menus check box on the Options
tab of the Customize dialog box. This stops You can release the mouse button as soon as
the program from shortchanging you on how the box with the + (plus) appears on the mouse
many options you see when you first open a pointer. Excel indicates where the new button
particular menu. (Menus don’t show all their will be inserted on the toolbar by displaying
options until the menus are open for several the bold I-beam-type indicator on the toolbar.
moments — moments that often seem like a
lifetime.)