Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

630 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

Note: When you open a Word document in which someone has embedded a homemade toolbar, a

dialog box offers a word of caution. It lets you know that the toolbar could conceivably contain a macro

virus (see page 566).

Redesigning Your Menus

Not only can you build your own toolbars in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, you can

also twist and shape the menus of these programs to suit your schemes. You can add

and remove menu items from the various menus, and you can even move the menus

themselves so that they appear in different places on the menu bar.

More than one Excel owner, for example, has found happiness by stripping out over

half of the default commands that he found he never used. Conversely, you’re miss-

ing out in Word if you don’t add commands to the menus that you usually have to

trigger by burrowing through nested dialog boxes.

As noted earlier, choosing Tools→Customize doesn’t just open the Customize dia-

log box. It also opens a strange-looking duplicate menu bar just beneath the real

one. If you click a menu name on this Menu Bar “toolbar,” the menu opens, reveal-

ing all of the commands in that menu.

Adding a command

To add a command to a menu, choose Tools→Customize, and click the Commands

tab. Find the command that you want to add (by clicking the appropriate category

on the left side first, for example). Then drag the command out of the Commands

list and straight onto the name of the desired menu (on the duplicate menu bar), as

shown in figure 17-3.

Note: Excel has two menu bars—a Worksheet Menu Bar and a Chart Menu Bar. They’re listed individually

in the Customize dialog box’s Toolbars tab. That’s because Excel’s Data menu changes into a Chart menu

when a chart is selected. These menu bars are independent, so if you make changes to the Insert menu

item on the Chart Menu Bar toolbar, those changes won’t be reflected in the Insert menu item on the

Worksheet Menu Bar.

As you drag your command over the duplicate menu, the menu opens automati-

cally. As you drag down the menu, a line shows you where the new command will

appear when you release the mouse.

Tip: You can even rename your newly installed menu command: Open the duplicate menu bar, then

double-click your command to open the Command Properties dialog box. Type the new name and press

Return.

Customizing

Your Toolbars

chapter 17: customizing office 631

Removing a menu command

Suppose that you never use the Dictionary command in Excel’s Tools menu; the

only word you need to know is “Profit.”

Getting rid of a menu command—whether you put it on the menu or not—is easy.

Choose Tools→Customize to summon the strange duplicate menu bar shown in

Figure 17-3. Now click the menu title (in the duplicate menu bar) that contains the

offending command. Finally, drag the command itself off the menu.

Tip: In Word only, there’s a faster way to remove a menu command, one that doesn’t even involve the

Customize dialog box: Just press Option-c-hyphen (on the main keyboard, not the number pad). The

cursor is now “loaded,” as reflected by its status as a big, bold – sign. Now just choose the menu command

you want to nuke, using the regular menus. When you release the mouse, the command is gone, and your

cursor returns to normal.

Removing commands from menus doesn’t delete them from the program, of course.

To restore a command you’ve removed from a menu, reinstall it as described in the

previous section.

Adding a menu

You can do more than just add commands to existing menus. You can also create

completely new menus, name them whatever you please, and fill them with any com-

Figure 17-3:

Once you’ve chosen Tools

→

Customize, you get the duplicate,

editable menu bar. By dragging

menus and commands as shown

here, you show Office how you

want to modify your real menu

bar. Here, a Meeting Minder

command is being added to the

Slide Show menu in PowerPoint.

Delete

an

entire

menu

Rearrange your menus

Move a

command

to a

different

menu

Take a

command

off a menu

Redesigning

Your Menus