Get quick access to all of the text formatting commands by moving your mouse towards the completely invisible mini toolbar! (Who at Microsoft comes up with this stuff?) Episode 413 shows you how to get the shy mini toolbar to appear.
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, our first netcast of 2007.
2007 is going to be a great year for Excel fans, because of Excel 2007 coming out January 30th.
Now, every Tuesday and Thursday I've been showing a different Excel 2007 trick.
Today we're going to talk about something called the Mini Toolbar.
The Mini Toolbar is prevalent in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, although it's hardest to get it to work in Excel.
Basically, anytime that you select data in Excel, the Mini Toolbar is available, but unfortunately it starts out completely invisible.
You have to be able to select the text and then move the mouse pointer up into the right.
Now, this is incredibly annoying to me, because somewhere along the line I learned, that it would be better to start selecting text at the end and drag to the left.
So every time that I select text, I never see the Mini Toolbar.
Why?
It's even advertised by Microsoft, I couldn't make it show up, but finally I realized that after selecting the text, I have to move up and to the right.
Once you do that, you get basically everything that used to be on the formatting toolbar, all the things you would want to do to text.
So for example, you want to change the color and make it larger or smaller, change the font change, the underlying color or use the format painter.
They're all right there at your mouse tip, provided that you move up and to the right.
If you move away, it fades away, if you move back towards, then it comes in.
There's some number of pixels.
Once you've moved away a certain number of pixels, they figure that you don't ever want the Mini Toolbar to come back.
And so you actually have to re-select the text before the Mini Toolbar shows up.
So, kind of a cool feature, I can see, well, it be used a lot more prevalently in Word and PowerPoint, but still, when you're doing something like this with charts and you'll select the text and just move up to quickly get a list of all the items that you can format.
In Excel we also have the ability, if you select a cell and right-click on the cell, the Mini Toolbar will show up to format that entire cell.
Hey, thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel.
2007 is going to be a great year for Excel fans, because of Excel 2007 coming out January 30th.
Now, every Tuesday and Thursday I've been showing a different Excel 2007 trick.
Today we're going to talk about something called the Mini Toolbar.
The Mini Toolbar is prevalent in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, although it's hardest to get it to work in Excel.
Basically, anytime that you select data in Excel, the Mini Toolbar is available, but unfortunately it starts out completely invisible.
You have to be able to select the text and then move the mouse pointer up into the right.
Now, this is incredibly annoying to me, because somewhere along the line I learned, that it would be better to start selecting text at the end and drag to the left.
So every time that I select text, I never see the Mini Toolbar.
Why?
It's even advertised by Microsoft, I couldn't make it show up, but finally I realized that after selecting the text, I have to move up and to the right.
Once you do that, you get basically everything that used to be on the formatting toolbar, all the things you would want to do to text.
So for example, you want to change the color and make it larger or smaller, change the font change, the underlying color or use the format painter.
They're all right there at your mouse tip, provided that you move up and to the right.
If you move away, it fades away, if you move back towards, then it comes in.
There's some number of pixels.
Once you've moved away a certain number of pixels, they figure that you don't ever want the Mini Toolbar to come back.
And so you actually have to re-select the text before the Mini Toolbar shows up.
So, kind of a cool feature, I can see, well, it be used a lot more prevalently in Word and PowerPoint, but still, when you're doing something like this with charts and you'll select the text and just move up to quickly get a list of all the items that you can format.
In Excel we also have the ability, if you select a cell and right-click on the cell, the Mini Toolbar will show up to format that entire cell.
Hey, thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel.
