Excel provides many, many shortcuts for its users. One of the nicest shortcuts is the set of action buttons that abound around your document. These easy to see and reach buttons let you click once on a single screen object and accomplish the same thing you could by clicking on a Menu title, dragging down to select something from a drop-down menu, and perhaps even several submenus below the initial menu. (We rate these helpful items right up there with morning coffee!)
Excel groups these action button on what is called toolbars. The toolbars holding buttons have been grouped into categories of similar buttons. That is, a single toolbar might hold all of the drawing buttons. You can control which of these toolbars is visible at any time. Follow along as you explore the toolbar selection process.
The
toolbars are selected by clicking on View from the main
Menu.
Toolbars is one of the options. Highligh Toolbars and you will see the various sets of toolbars available in Excel.
Note some of the toolbars have checkmarks besides their names. The checkmark means the toolbar is displayed on the Excel document.
You can hide a toolbar and bring out others by clicking on the name of the toolbar.
We strongly recommend you keep Standard and Formatting out. We ususally keep the Drawing toolbar out too.
Each toolbar you choose to bring out "pinches" the available space for your document. We advise bring out the most commonly used buttons and keeping a larger document. You can always bring out a particular set of buttons on a toolbar when your current project would be helped by using a particular toolbar.
The Standard Toolbar is positioned on top of the Format
Toolbar.
The Drawing Toolbar
During the course of each of the tutorials on this website, we will use Excel with these Toolbars out.