Even though I've been working in Office 2007 for two years now, I'm still not sold on the ribbon model Microsoft created for it. With the original model, every command was quickly available from either the toolbars or the menus across the top of the window—they were always there and they were always the same. Now, I'm always having to switch back and forth between ribbons to access different features. I'm constantly forgetting where some of them are, like Word's Thesaurus, which I think belongs under References rather than Review. And it's really frustrating that you can't customize the ribbons at all, something you could do with toolbars and menus in previous versions.

The one saving grace is that they did add a Quick Access bar in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that lets you at least create one custom toolbar so you can quickly access the commands you use most often. This bar appears at the top left of the window, beside the round Office button. By default it shows the Save, Undo, and Redo buttons.

If you click the arrow, it lists a few more of most popular commands, like Open and Print Preview, that you can add to the bar simply by clicking on them.

However, you can add any command that is available from any of the ribbons. For example, suppose you do work that requires you insert footnotes frequently into Word documents. Normally you would have to keep switching to the Insert ribbon to add the footnote and then go back to the Home ribbon for the most common options, like copy and paste and formatting commands. Here's how you can add an Insert Footnote button to the Quick Access bar.

• Click More Commands from the dropdown menu.
• In the window that comes up, choose All Commands from the dropdown menu at the top.
• Scroll through the list and click on Insert Footnote, then click the Add button to move it to the right-hand area.
  
  You can use the arrow buttons at right to change the order of the buttons.
• Click OK. The button has now been added to the toolbar.

Note: To remove any button from the bar, right-click on it and select Remove from Quick Access Toolbar from the pop-up menu.

Posted in How To, MS-Excel, MS-Office, MS-PowerPoint, MS-Word, QuickTips, User Interface