Build a new tab in the ribbon with your favorite commands
Use lots of Groups with less than 6 icons each
Make sure your tab is above Home so it is default
Thanks to Ronnie W in Frisco for these tips,
To download this workbook: https://www.mrexcel.com/download-center/2018/08/help-tab-added-to-ribbon.xlsx
List of upcoming seminars: Excel Seminar Schedule
Use lots of Groups with less than 6 icons each
Make sure your tab is above Home so it is default
Thanks to Ronnie W in Frisco for these tips,
To download this workbook: https://www.mrexcel.com/download-center/2018/08/help-tab-added-to-ribbon.xlsx
List of upcoming seminars: Excel Seminar Schedule
Transcript of the video:
Learn Excel from MrExcel Podcast, Episode 2240: Tips for Customizing the Ribbon.
If you like what you see in this video, please subscribe and ring that bell.
Hey, welcome back to MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Last week, I was doing a webinar about pivot tables and, you know, one of the things I always complain about in pivot tables is how I hate this compact layout, and I always switch to tabular form.
Of course if you have office 365 you can set your pivot table to False now, and make that be the default.
But in the chat panel, Ronnie W, from Texas, said, "Hey, you can just add this to the quick access toolbar." And, sure enough, right-click, I had a quick access toolbar like that.
I never realized that was one you could add to the quick access toolbar, but now with one click-- BAM!
It's back in a tabular form, which is the form that I like.
And so, you know, I said, "Hey, Ronnie, so let me know and I'll send you an Excel Guru patch for that idea.
And then Ronnie sends me two new ideas, even better than the one he just gave me, right?
He says, "Yeah, you know the best thing to do in Excel is to customize the ribbon," and sent me a copy of Ronnie's ribbon setup and gave me two tips that I had never heard before.
Tip Number 1: I'm always frustrated when I customize the ribbon because I can't seem to have control over whether the icon is large or small.
Alright, see it?
You know, you get these small icons and, unless you go into the ribbon XML, you're not going to have a chance to control this, and Ronnie broke the code and said, "Look, always make sure that you just use lots of groups, and each group has five icons or less, and that'll keep all the icons really large." So, great tip there, and then Ronnie says, "Make sure that whatever tab you create, you put that tab above the Home tab and that it'll be the default tab-- would be the tab that you have all the time." Alright, so let's try this.
We're going to right-click, Customize the ribbon.
Okay, so I'm sitting around the Home tab, I click New Tab, and I get two things: both New Tab and New Group.
Alright, so you want to go to New Tab and rename that-- I'll call it the MrExcel tab-- click OK, and then with that selected, move it up so it is before the Home tab.
Alright, then you have your New Group here, and we're actually going to have a lot of groups.
So this first group, What are the most important things to me?
It has to be related to pivot tables.
So I'll rename that to be Pivot, click OK.
And then we have to find commands to add to that.
Currently, Pivot is on the Insert tab, so if I Insert, Tables, choose PivotTable, and then Add that.
And then what else would I like? if I find, go to Design and then Report Layout, Show in Tabular Form, click Add.
Alright, so now I've built a group with two items there and then maybe I want a new group.
That is, my formatting group.
So I'll rename, click OK, and back to the All Tabs, Home, Font, Font size, I'm always changing that so I'll add Font Size, Bold, all of that, underlined-- that's alright.
So, there you go.
So we have two groups-- in this case, Group one has two icons, Group 2 has three icons.
Take some time, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, to create the perfect set of icons for you.
If you need to move it to another machine you can export all customizations and then import on the other machine.
Let's see how it looks-- click OK.
Alright, so we have our new tab-- MrExcel, PivotTable, Show in Tabular Form, the Font Size.
Alright and just keep going straight across.
Alright so, now, let me close Excel and reopen Excel and see if MrExcel becomes the default.
Yeah, there we are-- beautiful.
So as soon as I open Excel, it is the default-- MrExcel.
And if I need to go find something else, I could go to the Home tab.
Yeah.
Show the Start screen when this application starts-- so, File, Options, General-- I have this turned off so that way I just go straight to a blank workbook instead of starting at that new Home screen that we talked about yesterday.
Alright, hey check out my new book, "Microsoft Excel 2019 Inside Out." Click that "I" on the top right hand corner for more information about that.
Today, wrap-up: Build a new tab in the ribbon with your favorite commands, thanks to Ronnie W. for this idea-- lots of groups with less than or equal to 5 icons each, make sure that the icons stay nice and large like this and then move your new tab above the Home tab to make sure that it is the default.
To download the workbook from today's video is the URL in the YouTube description.
I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
If you like what you see in this video, please subscribe and ring that bell.
Hey, welcome back to MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Last week, I was doing a webinar about pivot tables and, you know, one of the things I always complain about in pivot tables is how I hate this compact layout, and I always switch to tabular form.
Of course if you have office 365 you can set your pivot table to False now, and make that be the default.
But in the chat panel, Ronnie W, from Texas, said, "Hey, you can just add this to the quick access toolbar." And, sure enough, right-click, I had a quick access toolbar like that.
I never realized that was one you could add to the quick access toolbar, but now with one click-- BAM!
It's back in a tabular form, which is the form that I like.
And so, you know, I said, "Hey, Ronnie, so let me know and I'll send you an Excel Guru patch for that idea.
And then Ronnie sends me two new ideas, even better than the one he just gave me, right?
He says, "Yeah, you know the best thing to do in Excel is to customize the ribbon," and sent me a copy of Ronnie's ribbon setup and gave me two tips that I had never heard before.
Tip Number 1: I'm always frustrated when I customize the ribbon because I can't seem to have control over whether the icon is large or small.
Alright, see it?
You know, you get these small icons and, unless you go into the ribbon XML, you're not going to have a chance to control this, and Ronnie broke the code and said, "Look, always make sure that you just use lots of groups, and each group has five icons or less, and that'll keep all the icons really large." So, great tip there, and then Ronnie says, "Make sure that whatever tab you create, you put that tab above the Home tab and that it'll be the default tab-- would be the tab that you have all the time." Alright, so let's try this.
We're going to right-click, Customize the ribbon.
Okay, so I'm sitting around the Home tab, I click New Tab, and I get two things: both New Tab and New Group.
Alright, so you want to go to New Tab and rename that-- I'll call it the MrExcel tab-- click OK, and then with that selected, move it up so it is before the Home tab.
Alright, then you have your New Group here, and we're actually going to have a lot of groups.
So this first group, What are the most important things to me?
It has to be related to pivot tables.
So I'll rename that to be Pivot, click OK.
And then we have to find commands to add to that.
Currently, Pivot is on the Insert tab, so if I Insert, Tables, choose PivotTable, and then Add that.
And then what else would I like? if I find, go to Design and then Report Layout, Show in Tabular Form, click Add.
Alright, so now I've built a group with two items there and then maybe I want a new group.
That is, my formatting group.
So I'll rename, click OK, and back to the All Tabs, Home, Font, Font size, I'm always changing that so I'll add Font Size, Bold, all of that, underlined-- that's alright.
So, there you go.
So we have two groups-- in this case, Group one has two icons, Group 2 has three icons.
Take some time, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, to create the perfect set of icons for you.
If you need to move it to another machine you can export all customizations and then import on the other machine.
Let's see how it looks-- click OK.
Alright, so we have our new tab-- MrExcel, PivotTable, Show in Tabular Form, the Font Size.
Alright and just keep going straight across.
Alright so, now, let me close Excel and reopen Excel and see if MrExcel becomes the default.
Yeah, there we are-- beautiful.
So as soon as I open Excel, it is the default-- MrExcel.
And if I need to go find something else, I could go to the Home tab.
Yeah.
Show the Start screen when this application starts-- so, File, Options, General-- I have this turned off so that way I just go straight to a blank workbook instead of starting at that new Home screen that we talked about yesterday.
Alright, hey check out my new book, "Microsoft Excel 2019 Inside Out." Click that "I" on the top right hand corner for more information about that.
Today, wrap-up: Build a new tab in the ribbon with your favorite commands, thanks to Ronnie W. for this idea-- lots of groups with less than or equal to 5 icons each, make sure that the icons stay nice and large like this and then move your new tab above the Home tab to make sure that it is the default.
To download the workbook from today's video is the URL in the YouTube description.
I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
