One of the easiest ways to save time in Word 2013 is to customize the Quick
Access Toolbar. By default,
this displays above our Ribbon tabs and includes Save, Undo,
and Redo. But we can make this much more useful.
There are three different ways to customize the Quick Access Toolbar.
One of them is to look for this arrow or drop-down at the right hand side.
Click it, and here you have some common actions such as creating a new document.
We can repeat this and you'll notice that the actions that are displayed on the
Quick Access Toolbar have a check mark in front of them.
Pick others that are useful to you.
Now, this drop-down also includes More Commands,
which is one way for us to get into a dialog box for customizing the Quick
Access Toolbar. But before we do that,
let's look at a second approach for customizing this very handy tool.
We can add tools as we find them. For instance, here under the View tab,
we have different ways to look at our documents. One Page, for instance.
We'll simply right-click on that and then choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar and
repeat those for actions that we use frequently.
This means that we don't have to go to the View tab to change the view of our
document.
Now Word remembers what you add to the Quick Access Toolbar so you don't have to
come back and repeat these actions, although you can customize it at any time.
One thing that you might want to change is to put that Quick Access Toolbar
below the Ribbon. Now why would that be helpful? Well,
first this makes it faster for us to get to these actions.
Currently the Quick Access Toolbar is also sharing space with our title bar and
specifically the document name and windows management tools.
If we move this below the Ribbon,
we have the full width of our screen for any of these tools.
To do this,
we either move to the Quick Access Toolbar or the Ribbon and just right-click,
here's the option show Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon.
You can always put it back if you change your mind. So let's look at that
third way to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. As we saw,
we could either go to that little drop-down arrow and pick More Commands or
right-click on the toolbar or the Ribbon.
And here is Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
Another technique would actually be to go to the File tab, pick Options,
and here is one of the categories or tabs, Quick Access Toolbar.
So this gives us a full range of options for customizing this Quick Access
Toolbar.
At the right hand side we see the actions that are currently added to it.
Now we might want to rearrange these. For instance,
we can select some of our file management tools like New and then use the arrows
on the right hand side here to move it up or down this,
we'll put it at the far left hand side so we can keep those file management
tools together.
Next,
we can add additional commands from different groupings here we see Popular
Commands from here.
I'll scroll down and look for Save As,
something we do frequently in Word 2013.
Select it and either double-click or choose Add.
Then I can take this and move it to a more appropriate spot.
Other commands are found in the drop-down. For instance,
there were about 200 commands that are not in the Ribbon.
These are considered to be less common, less popular,
but they might include things that you're used to using quite frequently or we
can go to All Commands.
Other actions that are found in specific tabs can also be accessed from here.
Let's look at All Commands.
Now I'm searching for the Close button.
We can either just drag down through here or clicking to the list and type a
letter C. Now I still have to scroll a bit,
but that might make it faster for things that are further down in the alphabet.
However you get to it.
Here is Close and I'm going to double-click,
add it to the Quick Access Toolbar and just re-position it a little bit in my
sequence and we can continue.
Keep in mind we can come back and customize this so that it has all the tools we
want, or we can remove things that we might've thought we're going to use more
frequently than we actually did.
When you're done choose OK.
And here's your new Quick Access Toolbar.