MS Office: For Command Shortcuts at your Fingertips, Customize the Quick Access Toolbar

How often in Word or Excel, do you look for a quick way of opening a new file, saving your current file under a different name or previewing your document before printing?

All these commands, and more, are available to you after your customize the Quick Access Toolbar.  This is the small line of icons on the top left of your screen whenever you open an MS Office program.

Your Quick Access Toolbar will look different than mine.  This is my custom toolbar from MS Word.  To customize yours, click on the drop-down arrow at the end of the icons.  This will give you the Quick Access Toolbar Menu.  Click on More Commands to get all your choices.

This will open the Quick Access Toolbar Menu, listing the “Popular Commands” by default.  I always switch to “All Commands.”  This gives you all available commands in alphabetical order.

For Word, my shortcuts are always:  New, Open, Save, Save As, Close, Undo, Redo, Quick Print, and Preview and Print.  I use a separator, a small vertical line, between the file icons and the rest.  Once you add your shorctus, use the up and down arrows on the right to move each icon where you want it.  Click OK when you are finished.

Do this for each MS Office program.  For Excel, I use these shortcuts:

From left to right:  New, Open, Save, Save As, Close, separator, Undo, Redo, Fill Down, Fill Right, Paste Value, separator, Quick Print, Preview and Print.

Customize with your favorites – or if you always forget where a command is, put it here.  If you use more than one computer, you will have to customize each program on each computer separately.  I haven’t figured out how to share the toolbars yet.  Let me know if you know that trick!