Programming Excel with VBA and .NET

About Excel Menus

Excel has two top-level menu bars, and which menu bar is displayed depends on what has focus in Excel. The worksheet menu bar (Figure 19-1) is displayed when Excel first starts up, when a worksheet has focus, and when all workbooks are closed.

Figure 19-1. Worksheet menu bar

The chart menu bar (Figure 19-2) appears when a chart sheet or an embedded chart object has focus.

Figure 19-2. Chart menu bar

There are also context menus for just about every item in the Excel interface. Context menus pop up when you right-click an item in Excel. For example, Figure 19-3 shows the context menu displayed when you right-click a range of cells.

Tip

Context menus are also sometimes called shortcut menus.

Figure 19-3. The cell context menu

You can change any of these types of menus to:

• Add or delete existing commands

• Create new items that run code

• Build custom menus of items with multiple levels

The following sections detail how to create and modify each of these types of menus.