Excel 2003: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. Customizing Excel

Excel is very good about letting you have it your way. Thanks to a generous helping of customization options—which let you do everything from tweak your toolbars to rearrange what appears on your menus—you can outfit your version of Excel so it fits your work style perfectly.

For example, you might want to add a new menu or toolbar with some timesaving shortcuts you know you’re going to be using a lot. Or, you might decide to attach a custom toolbar to a template so everyone who uses that template can use the toolbar.

Tip

Of course, just because you can customize every square inch of Excel doesn’t mean you should. It might seem like a great idea to correct the oversights of the Excel programmers by rearranging buttons and menu commands, but creating your own version can be quite confusing. For one thing, if you change Excel’s menus, you might not be able to follow the instructions in this book! Instead, you’ll be in a world of your own creation.

In this book, you’ve already seen a few examples of how to customize Excel:

• In Chapter 14 (Section 14.2.3), you learned how to create a custom toolbar to add missing grouping and outlining features.

• In Chapter 25 (Section 25.3.5), you learned how to create a custom toolbar button or menu entry that launches a macro.

In this appendix, you’ll get a full-fledged tour through all of Excel’s customization tools.

The Customize Dialog Box

The central hub for customizing Excel is the Customize dialog box. To show this box, ...