Quick Access Toolbar

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is a customizable toolbar that appears at the top of your screen in MS Office (Excel, Word, etc) versions 2007 and later.  In older versions, it was possible to create your own toolbar.

The toolbar allows you to add the commands that you use most frequently so that they always appear onscreen, regardless of what ribbon is showing.

Adding commands to the toolbar is very easy, it is the reverse of what the video below shows.  However, that is not what I wanted to discuss here.  Buttons are added and added to the toolbar without any rationalization, or thought about what is already on the toolbar.

This then leads to overpopulation of the toolbar.  As only symbols are now shown, if we are not totally familiar with the image we may have to hover the mouse button over a symbol to see its function.  Would it not be quicker to either find the function in the ribbons or use a shortcut?

Personally, I use the base keyboard shortcuts, so one of the first things I do with the Quick Access Toolbar is remove the buttons defaulted on the toolbar and I only add the buttons that I use regularly.  Just because I use a command does not mean that I will add it to the toolbar.

The video below shows how to remove unwanted commands.  If you have problems playing the video, watch it here on YouTube.