Customizing Toolbars and Menus

One of the strengths of a graphical user interface (GUI) such as Windows is that it gives you several choices for accessing a single feature. You can use text-based menus, use keyboard shortcuts, or click visual icons or buttons. A useful feature in PowerPoint is the ability to customize toolbars and menus so that you can access features you need even more easily.

For example, you can choose View, Toolbars, Customize and add, remove, or relocate toolbar buttons or menu commands. The following sections touch on a couple of the methods for customizing toolbars and menus that you're most likely to find useful.

Customizing Toolbar Locations

One way to customize a toolbar is to change its location onscreen. By default, PowerPoint's major toolbars appear at the top (Standard and Formatting toolbars), at the bottom (Drawing toolbar), and at the right (Task Pane toolbar). Others pop up as floating toolbars when needed. To move a toolbar, move the mouse pointer to the four vertical dots at the left side of the toolbar. When the pointer turns to a four-way arrow, click and drag the toolbar to any side of the screen or to the center. As you drag the toolbar, you see how it looks in its new location. Release the mouse button to reposition the toolbar. You can't undo toolbar movement except by dragging the toolbar back to its original position.

Caution

Just because you can remove or reposition toolbar buttons or menu commands doesn't mean you should. If you don't use a button or command for a while, or if someone else tries to use your modified version of PowerPoint, you'll both have a hard time finding what you're looking for.

Generally, it's better to add commands or buttons to menus or toolbars than to remove or reposition them. The more choices you have, the easier it is to find a command. If you remove those choices, you could waste a lot of time later on, trying to find them again.

Customizing Menus

A practical use for customizing menus can be found on the Options tab of the Customize dialog box (see Figure 20.18). Many of the options really are just personal preferences, but you can also modify PowerPoint's method for displaying menus.

Figure 20.18. One useful custom option is to allow PowerPoint to always display full menus.

By default, PowerPoint displays only a basic set of commonly used features, along with a double-arrow at the bottom of the menu. You have to click that arrow or wait a few seconds for less-commonly used menu items to appear. Microsoft designers think this is helpful, but some people find it very confusing because they think they remember using a feature but don't find it immediately. After you use a feature, it appears by default on the menu, but not until then.

These are two useful options in the Customize dialog box:

• Reset Menu and Toolbar Usage Data Clicking this button sets menus and toolbars back to the default lists and buttons so that once again you don't see certain features.

• Show Full Menus After a Short Delay If you deselect this check box, PowerPoint displays menus the same way as any other normal Windows program all menu items appear at once.

And now here's what you've been waiting for: You can even change menu animation to determine how menus appear unfolding, sliding, or fading. Aren't you glad you read all the way to the end of this chapter? Okay, so this feature isn't very important. In fact, many of the options you've read about in this chapter really aren't all that critical. However, PowerPoint's many options allow you to configure PowerPoint to work the way you want it to, not the way an anonymous software designer thinks it should work .

The Absolute Minimum

In this chapter, you found that you can customize PowerPoint to match your own preferences. Here's what you've done:

• You learned how to acquire additional design templates.

• You learned how you can create and save your own design templates.

• You explored many of PowerPoint's option settings.

• You found that you can customize PowerPoint's toolbars and menus.

Chapter 21, "Looking Beyond the Basics," takes a quick look at some of the advanced features that aren't covered in this book and suggests resources you can go to for more information.