Customizing the Office 2016 Applications
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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In this chapter, you learn about customizing the Office 2016 applications, including working with the application options and customizing the interface. Topics include the following:
- Accessing the Options dialog box for the Office 2016 applications
- Changing your Office 2016 user name and initials
- Pinning, hiding, and customizing the Ribbon
- Positioning and customizing the Quick Access Toolbar
- Changing the background for the Office 2016 applications
This book is called My Office 2016, so it’s time you learned how to put the “My” in Office 2016. I speak, of course, about customizing the applications in some way. After all, the interface and settings that you see when you first use Office 2016 are the “factory defaults.” That is, how the program looks and how it works out of the box has been specified by Microsoft. However, this “official” version of the program is almost always designed with some mythical “average” user in mind. Nothing is wrong with this concept, but it almost certainly means that the program is not set up optimally for you. This chapter shows you how to get the most out of the main Office 2016 programs—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and Access—by performing a few customization chores to set up the program to suit the way you work.
Working with Application Options
Customizing Office 2016 most often means tweaking a setting or two in the Options dialog box that comes with each program. Each program has a unique Options dialog box configuration, so it’s beyond the scope of this book to discuss these dialog boxes in detail. Instead, I introduce them by showing you how to get them onscreen and by going through some useful settings.
Working with the Options Dialog Box
You often need to access the Options dialog box for an Office 2016 application, so let’s begin by quickly reviewing the steps required to access and work with this dialog box in your current Office 2016 program.
Select File. The Office 2016 application, Excel in this example, displays the File menu.
Select Options. The Office 2016 application opens the Options dialog box.
- Select a tab. The Office 2016 application displays the options related to the selected tab.
- Use the controls to tweak the application’s settings.
Select OK. The Office 2016 application puts the changed options into effect.
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Changing Your User Name and Initials
In Chapter 18, “Collaborating with Others,” you learn how to insert comments into a document and track document changes. In both cases, the underlying program keeps a record of each “reviewer” who made changes to the document. For revisions, the program identifies the reviewer by his or her Office 2016 user name; for comments, the program identifies the reviewer by his or her Office 2016 initials. You can change both your user name and your initials to whatever you prefer.
Select File to open the File menu.
Select Options to open the Options dialog box.
- Select the General tab.
- Use the User Name text box to type your user name.
- In Word, PowerPoint, and OneNote, use the Initials text box to type your initials.
Select OK. Office 2016 puts the new user name and initials into effect.
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Bypassing the Start Screen at Launch
By default, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint display the Start screen when you first launch the application, which lets you choose a template for a new file or select a recently used file. If you almost always opt to open a blank document, workbook, or presentation at startup, you can make this the default behavior.
- Launch the Office 2016 application you want to customize.
Select File to open the File menu.
Select Options to open the Options dialog box.
- Select the General tab.
- Deselect the Show the Start Screen When This Application Starts check box.
Select OK. The Office 2016 application puts the setting into effect.
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