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 ...