Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / March 2008

The standard toolbar in the unified toolbar-titlebar ("the dock") is a
result of moving toward increased compliance with the Apple Human
Interface Guidelines:

 http://tinyurl.com/2etj9a

I agree that it would have been nice if all the other toolbars were
either docked or Aqua panels, but much of the toolbar functionality and
therefore development effort has obviously moved to the Toolbox, which
is panel-like.

The formula bar has always been a different beast. There's something
really funky about the way the formula box control has been coded - it
never acted right when put into a custom toolbar in previous versions.
So I'd guess that's why it didn't make it into the dock.

Hi,

May I assume that you are referring to Excel 2008 for Macintosh?

I think your consternation is a result of Microsoft adopting a new attitude
toward toolbars. In all previous versions of Office, toolbars were at the
application level. If you closed a document window, your toolbars remained.
Not matter what document was opened, only things relating to the document
appeared in the document window.  This is the right way to do it IMHO.

However, web browser makers (Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc) never got
around to implementing this behavior. I don¹t know if they were lazy,
incompetent, never thought about it, or what the reason was, but the web
browser makers usually fill each document window with browser controls
instead of making separate toolbars.

Because web browsers are so popular, Apple and now Microsoft have adopted
the same ³look and feel² and are wasting lots of screen space with
application controls in each document window. The reason for the change in
Office 2008 is to follow the crowd to be trendy, chique and look like web
2.0 applications. The same controls are duplicated over and over in each
document. What a waste of screen space! But the look and feel is now
consistent (consistently bad IMHO) in more and more applications.

Thankfully, for those of us who want a clean look with sensible behavior,
the Mac version of Office 2008 lets you customize things. We can make the
interface work the way it¹s supposed to (or at least the way you and I think
it should). Incidentally, Windows Office 2007 users are simply screwed in
this regard, so thank Apple and MacBU for making and following the Apple
user interface guidelines. We still have menus and still have customizable
toolbars.

So let¹s get started on undoing all this messy garbage they put into the
document windows.

First, go to View > Customize Menus and Toolbars.  A box will open on the
screen. We¹re going to make a new toolbar that will behave like the old,
dockable, resizable toolbars did. Click the New button and give the new
toolbar a name; for example: My Standard. Then click the OK button.

A new, very small toolbar will then appear on the screen. It will be a very
small box and you will have to look for it, but it¹s there.

Now drag each command, one by one, from the Standard toolbar to your new
toolbar. While you¹re at it you can arrange the commands in any order on
your new toolbar. If there¹s a command you never use you can drag it off
into the air and let go (like when you get rid of a dock icon) and then it
goes away (no fancy poof, though). If you click on the Commands button in
the Customize box you can add any command you want to to your new toolbar.
If you right-click or control-click on a command choose Properties. Then you
can change the icon for the command (you can paste new icon pictures in if
you want) and whether or not to have a group dividing line to the left of
the command button on your toolbar.

Now we can get rid of the big gray space that¹s left by clicking on Toolbars
and Menus tab in the Customize box and uncheck the Standard checkbox. If you
ever want to restore the controls that were removed from the standard
toolbar you can click on the word Standard in the Customize box and click
the Reset button. Doing so will not affect your new toolbar.

Once you have your new standard toolbar set up, click the OK button in the
Customize box and there it is! You can dock it at the top of the Excel
window, resize it, have it floating or dock to the bottom or sides just like
in all previous versions of Excel.

-Jim

Quoting from "nandor@officeformac.com" <nandor@officeformac.com>, in article
ee88f3d.1@webcrossing.caR9absDaxw, on [DATE:

Make sure you add your vote via Help/Feedback... too.

Just be aware that the Formula edit box control is, and has always been,
very difficult  or impossible to incorporate into other
toolbars/windows. I suspect that's partly because it's an expandable
input box, which is unlike any other ListBox or ComboBox control

i have a question and it's pretty much the same as the first guy's..

i, too, recently converted to mac and got Mac Office 2008. and when I go to
Excel I noticed there is no "formula bar" like I'm used to being right at the
top of my chart on my old PC Excel. So I went to View --> Formula Bar and
then it came up as a floating formula bar that showed the highlighted cell
and the formula or content of that cell.

my problem though it that I can not figure out how to attach/dock the
formula toolbar to the rest of Excel so it's not "floating" anymore...

i hope this makes sense.

here's a picture of my screen that i captured:
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/8126/picture1wh5.png

you can see the formula bar but it's obviously not attached to the Excel
program but is just floating there. how can I attach it to the excel program
view like under the row that has "Arial" "12" "Bold" "Italic" "Underlined"
etc.

thanks!