Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Appendix A. Customizing Office 2010 Applications

Office 2010 is more customizable than ever. Exhibit A: You can now customize the ribbon. That’s great news if you sometimes have trouble remembering whether the button you want is on, say, the Review tab or the Reference tab. Now you can outfit the ribbon pretty much any way that makes sense to you—adding or removing buttons, creating new groups, moving things around, even creating your own custom tabs. And, of course, as in Office 2007, you can also handpick what’s on the Quick Access toolbar and the status bar.

Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

The Office Quick Access toolbar sits in the upper-left part of your screen, giving you easy access to the buttons you use most, no matter what’s currently on the ribbon. Out of the box, the Quick Access toolbar displays these buttons in most Office programs: Save, Undo, and Redo. Those aren’t set in stone; consider them suggestions from Microsoft.

To add your favorite buttons, click the button circled in Figure A-1, which displays some of the program’s most popular commands. Items already on the toolbar have a checkmark next to their names. Click any command that’s not already checked to add its button to the toolbar. The new button appears to the right of those already there. To remove any button, repeat the steps just described, but this time uncheck the command’s name.

Tip

If you want to see the Quick Access toolbar below the ribbon, rather than way up there at the top of the screen, select ...