Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now one aspect of using the Ribbon is that not all commands are visible all of the time.
And to some extent when you’re working on a presentation, maybe quite a complex presentation,
you can spend quite a bit of time just flicking between the tabs and choosing the commands
and groups that you need to use.
Some of the things you do in PowerPoint tend to be done quite a bit.
For example, if you want to regularly save your work, you need access to a command to
save your work.
And if you’re like me and you tend to make a good few mistakes when you’re working
one of the features of PowerPoint 2013 is the ability to undo and I like access to a
very straightforward button I can push to undo something.
Now that’s really what the Quick Access Toolbar is for, quick access.
You choose a few commands, the ones that you use very frequently, and you have them available
on this little bar at the top left hand corner of the screen.
So let’s take a closer look at this Quick Access Toolbar.
At the right hand end of the bar, there’s a little drop down arrow with a little bar
over it.
If I click on that, the screen tip says Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
Click and what you see is a list of commands and these are the commands that by default
are available to show on the Quick Access Toolbar.
And you’ll see that some of them are ticked and some of them are not ticked.
The ones that are ticked are Save, Undo, Redo, Start from beginning, and Touch/Mouse Mode,
and basically what this means is that they’re the ones you can see at the moment.
So each of them has an icon; so that one’s Save, that one’s Undo, that’s Redo, that’s
Start from beginning, that’s Touch/Mouse Mode.
We used that button a little bit earlier on in the course.
If I wanted to show one of the others such as, for instance, Quick Print, if I click
to check it, note the screen tip says Add to Quick Access Toolbar, then that will appear
on the Quick Access Toolbar.
So check there.
I’ve now got a Quick Print button and I get the screen tip, of course, when I hover
over it.
And basically that’s how you choose which buttons, which commands to show at any time
and which ones to keep hidden.
Now in fact you’re not restricted to the list of commands that we just saw on that
menu.
Let me click on that drop down again and this time I’m going to choose More commands,
click, and that takes me into yet another page of the PowerPoint options.
In this case, the page is the one that we use to customize the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now I am very quickly going to show you how to do this.
It’s actually quite straightforward, although there are quite a few additional features
that you might use perhaps a little bit further on in your use of PowerPoint 2013.
On the right we have a list of the commands that are currently shown.
If I wanted to add a command, let’s suppose that I’m always making text bold and I keep
having to go back to the Home tab to find the Bold button.
Let’s suppose I want to add the Bold button to the Quick Access Toolbar.
On the left is a list of what are currently selected, the popular commands, and Bold isn’t
one of them.
But if I click on All commands and let me just scroll down, B, B, B, B, there we are,
Bold, and select that.
I can say Add and Bold now appears on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Note that not only does it appear there but there are a couple of arrows on the right.
Currently the move up is enabled, the move down is disabled.
I can actually decide where I want it.
Say, I wanted it between Redo and Start from beginning, click on OK, and now notice on
the Quick Access Toolbar that I have a Bold button.
It’s currently disabled because I’ve got nothing selected.
But if I were to go to one of these other slides, select some text, Bold is enabled.
Click to make that text bold.
That shows you how easily you can use one of the commands on the Quick Access Toolbar.
So the way that I would recommend that you use the Quick Access Toolbar is that maybe
you customize it a little when you first use PowerPoint and then as your use progresses,
you may find that it suits you to have a different combination of buttons on the Quick Access
Toolbar.
It’s sometimes the case that you may want to put something there temporarily while you’re
doing a particular job.
And although we don’t cover programming on this course, it’s sometimes the case
that access to programs bespoke software that you use via the Quick Access Toolbar can be
a real time saver.
Just two other things about the Quick Access Toolbar.
There was one other option on the drop down here, right at the bottom, Show below the
Ribbon.
This is very much a case of personal preference, but some people prefer to have it below the
Ribbon.
It’s a bit less of a reach I suppose than going right up to the top of the screen, you
can just click there to access the commonly used commands that you’ve got on the Quick
Access Toolbar.
I’m going to put it back because I’m quite happy to have it in its conventional position
at the top.
And the other thing is if you’ve got a button, in this case the Bold button, and you don’t
want it on there anymore, click, go to More commands, select it in the list on the right,
click on Remove, click on OK, and bold has now gone from the Quick Access Toolbar.
So customizing it is straightforward both in terms of adding buttons and removing buttons.
That’s the Quick Access Toolbar.
In the next section, we’re going to take a quick look at mini toolbars.
I’ll see you then.