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. 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. Once you've moved away a certain number of pixels, they figure that you don't ever want the Mini Toolbar to come back.Īnd so you actually have to re-select the text before the Mini Toolbar shows up. If you move away, it fades away, if you move back towards, then it comes in. They're all right there at your mouse tip, provided that you move up and to the right.

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. 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. 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. So every time that I select text, I never see the Mini Toolbar. 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. You have to be able to select the text and then move the mouse pointer up into the right. The Mini Toolbar is prevalent in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, although it's hardest to get it to work in Excel.īasically, anytime that you select data in Excel, the Mini Toolbar is available, but unfortunately it starts out completely invisible. Today we're going to talk about something called the Mini Toolbar. Now, every Tuesday and Thursday I've been showing a different Excel 2007 trick. Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, our first netcast of 2007.Ģ007 is going to be a great year for Excel fans, because of Excel 2007 coming out January 30th.

Microsoft word mini toolbar