Babeled

Microsoft Excel 2003 or prior versions come equipped with a decent standard toolbar that is easily customizable.  Customizing your Excel toolbar can reduce time to complete many tasks by making options that normally require navigating several drop-down and pop-up menus available at one click of your mouse.  This certainly does not replace hot keys in terms of speed if you are used to using those, but if you are not, toolbar customization is a great graphic way of making things quicker and easier.

First thing is first: Excel has many toolbars

The various toolbars in Excel range from everyday use like the formatting toolbar to situational use such as picture or pivot table toolbars, which only become meaningful when there is a corresponding picture or pivot table.  To see the list of available toolbars in your version of Excel, go to View > Toolbars > and expand the list.  Everyone may have a slightly different number of toolbars depending on the other software and add-ins that you may have installed, but there should be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty toolbars.  More than likely, you have the “Standard” and “Formatting” toolbars selected as active.  These two toolbars have the most common functionality needed within the program.  Your toolbar selection will determine solely on the activities you perform most in Excel.  For instance, if you frequently use Visual Basic then it would be helpful to select the Visual Basic toolbar.  Also, I find having the Web toolbar equipped when working on a shared network is very useful because you can copy the URL to make hyperlinks in e-mails or other Microsoft office documents to reduce cluttering up e-mail with file attachments.

Each Toolbar is customizable

Every toolbar has the “Add or remove buttons” feature.  This allows you to bring in different icons on the toolbar that you are working with that may be more relevant to your activities.  Customizing each toolbar is typically where you will achieve the most time-savings because this is the part where you locate all of the odd-ball tasks that you perform that take too many clicks of the mouse for your taste (such as pasting special > values).  Adding buttons is very easy to do.  Click on the black arrow that points downward on the right edge of the toolbar you are trying to customize.  Then select Add or Remove buttons, and then customize (see image below).

From this menu you can choose from a wide variety of specialty buttons to put on the toolbars.  Once you have clicked on Customize, the menu depicted in the image below should appear.  If you click on the Commands tab you will see that the available buttons are organized based on the Excel menu under which the task would normally be found.

A favorite toolbar button of mine that is never on your standard toolbar is Select Visible cells.  This is an important button when you are trying to copy and paste data that has a filter on it, or when there are hidden rows and columns between the visible data that you want to copy.  Practice customizing your toolbar by adding the Select Visible cells button to your toolbar.  Follow these steps:

• Click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the formatting toolbar (first image)
• Go to > Add or Remove Buttons > Customize (first image)
• Once in the Customize window, select the Commands tab (second image)
• Select Edit from the categories box
• Scroll down the list of button options in the Commands section on the right of the menu, ensuring that you are in the Edit category
• Select Visible cells should be down near the bottom (view image below)
• Click on Select Visible cells and drag the icon to the toolbar in the location where you want the button

There are many commands in the list, I recommend just browsing through the command list for each category and selecting those buttons that perform functions you use while deleting buttons from the toolbar that you never or rarely utilize.

Interested in learning more? …check out the tutorials page for more Microsoft Excel techniques.