One of my favorite April Fools Day tricks involves a trick that will only work with Excel 97 through Excel 2003. Since it is Friday, and your manager might be upgrading to Excel 2007 soon, try this trick out now, before the opportunity is lost. Episode 426 shows you how.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Well, it's Friday.
It's almost the last Friday before Excel 2007 comes out and I realized that guy who does the netcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays is counting down the days.
You know, there's a few things that we really loved about Excel 2003, that I'm definitely going to miss.
And one of them is this great April Fool’s Day prank.
We've been talking about how to customize your toolbars, you right click and choose Customize.
Well, in the past couple of days I've been showing you how to add buttons to the toolbar, change buttons on the toolbar, but once the customize dialog box is displayed, it's possible to take things off the toolbar.
Well, of course, I mean all these things that I basically jumped up my toolbar within the past couple of days, I'd want to be able to remove those.
So that way I go back to sort of the normal view.
But what's really interesting, is that you can take an entire menu item and drag it off the toolbar.
For example, the Window menu or the Data menu, or the Tools menu.
And so, if you have a manager who can take a joke, and he goes out to lunch and leaves his door open, I think it's pretty funny to sneak into his office, customize the toolbar leaving him nothing but Help.
Click Close, he comes back from lunch, there's nothing there except for Help and of course Help has no Help on how to solve this.
Now, I have to warn you though, as I painfully learned April 1st 1995, these changes are actually permanent.
So you close Excel, reopen Excel and the toolbar does not come back, which is a gut-wrenching thing, if you don't know the next trick.
To get the toolbars back, you have to right click and choose Customize.
Now we talked about the last two tabs: the Options tab and the Commands tab.
This time we need to go to the Toolbars tab, scroll down and find the entry for Worksheet Menu Bar and click Reset.
Excel warns you, says: Are you sure you want to reset the changes?
I really think this should say: Are you sure you want to have a job?
You click Yes and the original menu bar comes back.
Great trick, make sure that you know the antidote for it though, how to get it back, otherwise you're going to be in big, big trouble.
Now, Excel 2007, unfortunately this trick goes away, we're not allowed to customize the toolbars just by dragging and dropping anymore, other than a good quick access toolbar.
So normally this would be an April Fool's Day trick, we can't wait till April Fool’s day though, because there's a chance your boss is going to upgrade on January 30th, so go ahead pull the trick now, either this Friday or next Friday, best of luck.
Hey, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Well, it's Friday.
It's almost the last Friday before Excel 2007 comes out and I realized that guy who does the netcast on Tuesdays and Thursdays is counting down the days.
You know, there's a few things that we really loved about Excel 2003, that I'm definitely going to miss.
And one of them is this great April Fool’s Day prank.
We've been talking about how to customize your toolbars, you right click and choose Customize.
Well, in the past couple of days I've been showing you how to add buttons to the toolbar, change buttons on the toolbar, but once the customize dialog box is displayed, it's possible to take things off the toolbar.
Well, of course, I mean all these things that I basically jumped up my toolbar within the past couple of days, I'd want to be able to remove those.
So that way I go back to sort of the normal view.
But what's really interesting, is that you can take an entire menu item and drag it off the toolbar.
For example, the Window menu or the Data menu, or the Tools menu.
And so, if you have a manager who can take a joke, and he goes out to lunch and leaves his door open, I think it's pretty funny to sneak into his office, customize the toolbar leaving him nothing but Help.
Click Close, he comes back from lunch, there's nothing there except for Help and of course Help has no Help on how to solve this.
Now, I have to warn you though, as I painfully learned April 1st 1995, these changes are actually permanent.
So you close Excel, reopen Excel and the toolbar does not come back, which is a gut-wrenching thing, if you don't know the next trick.
To get the toolbars back, you have to right click and choose Customize.
Now we talked about the last two tabs: the Options tab and the Commands tab.
This time we need to go to the Toolbars tab, scroll down and find the entry for Worksheet Menu Bar and click Reset.
Excel warns you, says: Are you sure you want to reset the changes?
I really think this should say: Are you sure you want to have a job?
You click Yes and the original menu bar comes back.
Great trick, make sure that you know the antidote for it though, how to get it back, otherwise you're going to be in big, big trouble.
Now, Excel 2007, unfortunately this trick goes away, we're not allowed to customize the toolbars just by dragging and dropping anymore, other than a good quick access toolbar.
So normally this would be an April Fool's Day trick, we can't wait till April Fool’s day though, because there's a chance your boss is going to upgrade on January 30th, so go ahead pull the trick now, either this Friday or next Friday, best of luck.
Hey, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
