Moving the Office toolbars


Q I use Excel 97 and Word 97 at the office and at home and I've customised my toolbars. Where are the files that contain those changed toolbars? I'd like to take them on a floppy from my home PC to my office PC.

- Dick Maclay

A Word and Excel may be in the same suite and may let you modify their toolbars in similar ways, but they save toolbar information differently.

Caption: Word and Excel toolbars are easily customised ù you can hide
or reposition them, add and remove buttons, and more

Word stores your toolbars, as well as your macros and default formatting, in a file called Normal.dot, which is usually in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates. Moving Normal.dot is easy. Just copy it to a floppy, take it to work and drag it to your work machine's C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Templates folder, clicking Yes when you're asked if you want to replace the existing file. (Your application paths may vary, so check each system for the location of Normal.dot. If you find more than one, load Word, select Tools-Customize, add an icon to a toolbar, close Word, use Start-Find-Files or Folders to search for Normal.dot; then in the results, look for the one with today's date.)

In Excel, the file in question is probably in C:\Windows and is probably called Excel8.xlb or yourname8.xlb. (Your home system may have more than one. Launch Excel and change something on your toolbar. Then exit Excel, use Find to search for .xlb and locate the one with today's date. That's the file you want to copy from your home machine.)

You can copy this file to a floppy easily enough, but making sure it works on the other machine is tricky. Before you copy the file to your office PC, launch Excel on that system and use the steps given above to find the right toolbar file on it.

The two file names must match, so, if necessary, rename the .xlb file on your floppy (in Explorer, right-click the file and select Rename) to match the name of the toolbar file on the office PC. Now you can simply drag the toolbar file from the floppy to the proper folder on the office system and answer Yes when asked to confirm replacing the file.

- Lincoln Spector


Category:word processing
Issue: September 1999

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