Microsoft Excel provides a system of toolbars containing toolbar buttons that the user can click to access frequently used commands. Each toolbar can appear as a bar docked at the top, at the bottom, or on either side of the application window, or as a floating window positioned anywhere on the workspace. Each toolbar button is a simple, graphical control that allows the user to exchange information with your application.
There are several types of controls that are classified as toolbar buttons.
The most common type of toolbar button is simply a button control containing a graphic. The graphic, called the button image, is a visual representation of the command or option accessed by the toolbar button. The user can click one of these toolbar buttons to execute a command (for example, clicking the New Workbook button on the Standard toolbar creates a new workbook) or to alternate between the two possible states of an option represented by a button (for example, clicking the Bold button on the Formatting toolbar alternately applies and removes bold formatting from selected text).
Another type of toolbar button is composed of a button control containing a graphic and an attached drop-down palette. The user clicks the drop-down arrow to display a palette and chooses an option from the palette. The user clicks the button control to apply the current option. For example, clicking the drop-down arrow of the Font Color button displays a palette of font colors. Clicking the button control of this toolbar button applies the color to the selected text.
A combination drop-down edit box can also be a toolbar button. The user either types text in the box or clicks the drop-down arrow and then clicks an item in the list. For example, you can set the font size of the selected text by either clicking an item in the drop-down list contained in the Font Size button or typing an entry in the edit box.
The last type of toolbar button is the TipWizard® box, which consists of a text box containing tips pertinent to the user's current task and a spinner that lets the user browse through tips.
To display any Microsoft Excel toolbar, click Toolbars on the View menu, and then click the name of the toolbar you want to display. To see additional available buttons, click Customize in the Toolbars dialog box, and browse through the items in the Categories box.
Now that you understand what toolbars and the various types of toolbar buttons are, you can study the specifics of modifying the toolbars and toolbar buttons described in the preceding paragraphs. In the following sections, you will learn how to customize toolbars, how to control the availability of the toolbar changes you've made, and how to make specific types of changes.