Hello again and welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar which is a toolbar
that appears in the top left hand corner of the Excel 2013 window.
You can see it up there.
At the moment, you can see four or five commands.
There’s a command with a picture of a little diskette.
If you’re youngish you may not even know what a diskette is, but it’s a very old
and primitive device for saving computer files on.
There’s that sort of curvy arrow there which is an Undo Command.
There’s an arrow that curves the other which is a Redo Command, and then other commands
may or may not appear on this Quick Access Toolbar.
The Quick Access Toolbar by default has a number of commands.
The reason it’s there is to put commands that you use a lot such as Undo if you make
a good few mistakes like me, right at your fingertips.
The Undo button is there all the time.
It doesn’t matter which tab on the Ribbon I’ve got selected, although one of them
has the Undo Command on it.
I’ve always got the Undo Command on my Quick Access Toolbar.
It’s one that’s there all the time.
In the same I’ve got the Save Command there all the time.
So it’s a way of putting a small number of commands at your fingertips.
Now depending on your installation of Excel 2013, you may or may not see the same buttons
that I see here.
But at the right hand end there’s a sort of drop down arrow under a short hyphen character
and the screen tip there is Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
Click on that and you get this little Menu.
Now the Menu says the names of a number of commands, New down to Touch stroke mouse mode.
And these are the commands that by default can appear on the QAT, on the Quick Access
Toolbar.
The ones that are ticked are the ones that appear at the moment.
So I’ve got touch mouse mode which is the last one, the picture of the pointing finger
up there, then I’ve got a Redo, Undo, and Save.
If I wanted also, for instance, to have the Open Command, if I click on Open, I now see
I’ve got an Open button there as well.
And if I click that Menu again, I’ll see that Open is now ticked.
So if I wanted to remove the touch stroke mouse mode command, to remove it click it,
it’s no longer there.
So that is a very simple type of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar.
Another very simple type of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar, again we’ll
click on that Menu, the bottom command there “Show below the Ribbon will move the Quick
Access Toolbar to show below the Ribbon.”
Some people prefer to have it there because Quick Access you haven’t got to pass over
the Ribbon to get to it, its right above the working space.
So let’s select that, the Quick Access Toolbar is now there and it’s mostly readily available
to use directly from the worksheet that I’m working on at the time and again straightforward
to put it back to show above the Ribbon.
Now there is another level of customization of the Quick Access Toolbar and as I mentioned
in the previous section this will pretty much explain to you a lot about customizing the
Ribbon.
But let’s suppose that on the Quick Access Toolbar, you’d like to put a Command that
isn’t in this list.
Let’s suppose that you want to put a Font Size Command on to the Quick Access Toolbar.
It’s not in this list now so how do we add something to it which isn’t this list?
Well, if you go to More Commands it takes you into the Excel Options dialog and on to
the Quick Access Toolbar page.
The Quick Access Toolbar page is the one you use to customize the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now if I want to find the Font Size Command, in fact it’s pretty easy because it’s
there.
But if I wanted to find it there are commands in various categories.
The popular commands are shown by Default.
But there are various other categories of command, commands that are not on the Ribbon,
All Commands, Macro Commands, Commands from the Home tab, the Insert tab, and if you want
to put a particular command on there and as I’ve said already there are quite a few
to choose from, go to the tab or the category where you believe that command is and you
should be able to find it.
Now I’ve already seen the Font Size Command under Popular Commands.
So if I click on Popular Commands and then select Font Size and then click on Add, that
will now appear in the Quick Access Toolbar.
The other point about the Quick Access Toolbar is that you can make a specific version for
specific situations.
So for instance, you could setup a Quick Access Toolbar specifically for use with this document.
And if you had a document that’s maybe very particularly complicated or some unusual commands
or maybe one that you use a lot and you’d like to have all the commands that you use
on it at your fingertips, you can make a specific Quick Access Toolbar for a document.
For the moment I’m going to assume that I’m customizing the Quick Access Toolbar
for all documents, which is the default.
Click on OK and what I’ve now got added to my Quick Access Toolbar is a Font Size
Command.
And then, of course, all I have to do to remove that command again is to go back into the
Customization.
So click on More Commands, back into the Excel Options, select Font Size in the list on the
right in the Excel Options dialog on the Quick Access Toolbar page, that’s that one, and
then this Remove button becomes activated.
Click on Remove and it’s gone.
Note that within this dialog I can also change the order of the buttons.
So if I also wanted to say move the touch mouse mode button up a little, I could select
it and it would change its position in the list.
Click on OK, back to my Quick Access Toolbar, the font size has disappeared and the touch
stroke mouse mode button is moved to a different position.
So that’s really all I need to show you on the Quick Access Toolbar for now.
But I do want to show you one other thing related to that and we’ve used this touch
mouse mode button a couple of times to demonstrate the Quick Access Toolbar.
Let me just show you what that button does because it’s actually quite important.
I mentioned what it does earlier on and that is that with Excel 2013, it’s been made
much easier to use touch and one of the jobs that’s been done in Excel 2013 is to rearrange
the Ribbon and the groups and the buttons not so much in the order which is pretty much
as it was in 2010, but the way it’s been reengineered is that you can push a button,
in fact the touch stroke mouse mode button, to give yourself a bit more space for those
fat fingers.
So at the moment I’m actually in mouse mode.
Watch what happens if I push that button.
Go into touch mode which is the lower mode and there you are.
The Ribbon, everything’s spaced out even more.
Now, of course, that means the Ribbons using even more of your available space.
But if you’re using a touch device and you can’t get by with your fingers on the space
that’s available to you in the standard mode, then if you go into touch mode everything
is spaced out even more and you should find it all quite a bit easier.
Now in the final section in this little group I’m going to look at one other toolbar and
that’s the Mini toolbar.
So please join me for that.