Cool QAT in Microsoft Excel 2010

All of which segues into the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT), a rather mild-mannered strip of buttons
you’ll find lining the upper-left perimeter of your Excel screen, as seen in Figure 1–18:

Figure 1–18.  The Quick Access toolbar

Apart from demonstrating Excel’s tenacious attachment to the word “toolbar,” the QAT plays a
valuable role in enabling you to access important commands easily. Stocked with but three buttons at
the outset—the ones which execute the Save, Undo, and Redo commands—the QAT can be tailored to
store any other command buttons—ones you presumably want to use often. The idea is that you can
post any existing, tab/group-based command to the QAT so that the command remains available even
whe n  y ou g o ahe ad an d mov e  on  to a di ffe r e n t tab.
For example, suppose you’re a pivot table devotee, and while you know that the command for
designing a new table is housed in the Tables group of the Insert tab, you want to able to activate a
pivot table at any time—even if you now find yourself in, say, the Data tab. By right-clicking your
mouse on the Pivot Table command (important note: unless otherwise indicated, all mouse clicks in
this book call upon the left button) and clicking the Add to Quick Access Toolbar  option shown in Figur e
1–19:

Figure 1–19.  Where to add commands to the QAT

you can dispatch a copy of the Pivot Table command to the QAT, where it makes itself available
whenever you want it (Figure 1–20 ):

Figure 1–20.  QAT access to the Pivot Table command
No need to revisit the Data tab; just click Pivot Tables on the QAT instead—and there’s your pivot table.
You can also install any command onto the QAT from that master list of all Excel commands
catalogued in the File tab.