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Selecting and Customizing Toolbars

Toolbars are a quick and easy way to accomplish many tasks in applications that run in the Windows environment. Normally you have two toolbars that are shown when you begin an application, the Standard toolbar and the Formatting toolbar, as seen below.

To add a toolbar, place your mouse pointer on the name of the toolbar and click. The toolbar will be added where your application decides it is to be placed. By default, each toolbar has a location where it will always be placed in your window.

To remove a toolbar, follow the exact same steps as above, clicking on the name of the toolbar that you want removed from your window.

All toolbars can be moved should you not like the location where the application places it. To move a toolbar place the mouse pointer anywhere on the toolbar at the far left edge until the mouse pointer become a four-prong arrow, as seen below. Once the mouse pointer changes to the four-pronged arrow, click and hold down the click and drag the toolbar to its desired location. 

Or the toolbar can be docked (placed on an edge of the screen or attached to another toolbar for placement into the window).

To dock the toolbar drag it until it changes from a window to a long bar and release the mouse. It will attach itself to the window or nearest toolbar.

Each toolbar can be customized to contain the buttons that you use most often or delete buttons that you do not use. As an example the Standard toolbar will be used for illustration, adding a button to “close” documents.

To customize, click on the “View” menu, “Toolbars”, and then click on the very last option in the cascaded menu, “Customize.”

Buttons are stored in the menus in which they are found in the application. “Close” is found in the “File” menu, so that is where the button to represent closing a document is stored.

On the right side of the dialog box, under “Commands” scroll to find the command you wish to add. Click and hold the click on the button for that command. Drag the button to the toolbar that it is to be added to. You will see a large “I” as you float over the toolbar. Where that “I” is when you release the mouse is where the button will be placed on the toolbar. (Note:  If the toolbar is already full—stretching completely from side to side—the last button will be dropped from sight when the new button is added.)

Again, click on “View,” “Toolbars” and then “Customize”. Regardless of the button that you are deleting, all you have to do to delete a button from the toolbar is to click on it, hold down the click and drag it to the “Customize” dialog box. Release your mouse ANYWHERE in the dialog box. MS Word will put the button back in its proper location.

The “Options” tab in the Customize dialog box offers additional ways to customize your toolbars.

Click on the appropriate square next to the option to enable it. When finished making your selections, click “Close” and your selections will be saved and shown on your screen.