Add and Remove Toolbar Commands in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

It's great to be able to customize a program according to your workflow, it's almost like how everyone likes to organize the stuff on their desks, or even the furniture in their rooms. One of the ways that PowerPoint allows you to customize the interface is via adding custom Toolbars, this can be of great help when you use a certain set of commands repeatedly for your tasks. Once you add a new Toolbar though, it's time to populate the Toolbar with your favorite commands. You can add, reorder, and also remove commands from a Toolbar, as explained in the following steps:

Adding Commands to a Toolbar

To add commands to a Toolbar in PowerPoint 2011, follow these steps:

1. Launch PowerPoint and select the View | Toolbars | Customize Toolbars and Menus option as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Select the Customize Toolbars and Menus option
3. Alternatively, you can right-click on Standard Toolbar or Formatting Toolbar and select the Customize Toolbars and Menus option from the resultant contextual menu as shown in Figure 2.
4. 
   Figure 2: Select the Customize Toolbars and Menus option
2. Either option brings up the Customize Toolbars and Menus dialog box, make sure the Toolbars and Menus tab is active. Now, make sure that your Toolbar is visible by selecting the check-box in front of it's name, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3. This will make the Toolbar visible, additionally, we dragged our custom Toolbar over the Customize Toolbars and Menus dialog box as shown highlighted in blue within Figure 3, this was done just so that you can see both the dialog box and the Toolbar at the same time.
3. 
   Figure 3: Toolbar made visible
3. Now, select the Commands tab as shown highlighted in red within Figure 4.
4. Within the Categories list (highlighted in blue within Figure 4), you can see various command categories, choose any one of these and you will see the commands belonging to the choosen category within the Commands list (highlighted in green within Figure 4).
5. 
   Figure 4: Commands tab within the Customize Toolbars and Menus dialog box
4. Click on the command that you want to add to your Toolbar in Figure 5, you can see that the Spelling command from the Tools category has been selected.
5. 
   Figure 5: Select the command to be added to the Toolbar
5. Now, drag this selected command onto the Toolbar where you want it placed, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 6.
6. 
   Figure 6: Command being added to the custom Toolbar
6. Similarly, populate your Toolbar with your favorite commands from various categories. In Figure 7, you can see how our custom Toolbar looks, after being populated with commands.
7. 
   Figure 7: New Toolbar populated with commands
Note: At this stage, you can also reorder the commands within the custom Toolbar. To do that, just click and drag the individual command that you want to change the order of, to the new position.
7. Click OK button to get back to your slide.

Removing Commands from a Toolbar

To remove a command from your Toolbar, follow these steps:

1. Access the Customize Toolbars and Menus dialog box as explained in Step 1 in the preceding section of this page.
2. Click and select the command that you want to remove from within the Toolbar, as shown highlighted in red, within Figure 8.
3. 
   Figure 8: Select the command to be removed from the Toolbar
4. Drag the selected command off the Toolbar, as shown in Figure 9.
5. 
   Figure 9: Drag the command off the Toolbar
5. This will remove the selected command from the custom Toolbar. Similarly you can delete more commands from your Toolbar. Figure 10 shows our custom Toolbar after removing the last command.
6. 
   Figure 10: Command removed from the Toolbar
6. Click OK button within the Customize Toolbars and Menus dialog box to get back to your slide.