Custom Toolbuttons

Some of your macros will be written for a very specific purpose, such as to prepare a specialized report. The workbook containing the macro will be opened only when you want to assemble the report. Other macros automate tasks that you perform often, and you ll want to have them available whenever you re using Excel. These macros should be saved in the Personal Macro Workbook. To make a command macro even easier to use, you can add a custom toolbutton to a toolbar and assign the macro to it. The three macros described in this section — the NumberFormatConvert macro, the FullPage macro and the ChemicalFormat macro — are particularly convenient to use when they are assigned to a button. 

Choose Toolbars from the View menu and choose Customize. or choose Customize... from the Tools menu, or right-dick on a toolbar and choose Customize... from the shortcut menu. 

Select the happyface toolbutton (you ll create a new image for it later) and drag it to the desired location on the toolbar. 

Excel Tip. When you place a custom toolbutton on a toolbar, you don t have to assign a macro to it right away. Later, if you click a custom toolbutton that doesn t have a macro assigned to it, the Assign to Tool dialog box will appear. 

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The complete macro is shown in Figure 16-1. Right now you ll have to use the Macro Run dialog box to run the macro, which isn t very convenient. Of course you could assign a shortcut key to the macro, as described in Chapter 13. In Chapter 19 you ll learn how to create a custom toolbutton and assign the macro to it. 

There are two ways to create a custom toolbar. One way is to modify an existing toolbar (such as the Standard toolbar). The other way is to create a new toolbar and then proceed to add built-in tools, as described earlier, or custom toolbuttons, as described later in this chapter. This way you can leave the Standard and Formatting toolbars (for example) unmodified and display your own custom toolbar. To create a new toolbar, use the procedure in the following box. 

Figure 19-5. A custom toolbutton that can be placed on a toolbar.

The Macros category in the Commands tab (Figure 19-5) contains a custom toolbutton that can be assigned to a macro by following the procedure in the following box. 

Two custom toolbuttons, a FullPage(Portrait) toolbutton and a FullPage(Landscape) toolbutton, were created and positioned on the left side of the Standard toolbar. The FullPage macro was assigned to both buttons, as described earlier. 

Custom toolbuttons were created for the Full Page Portrait, Full Page Landscape Chemical Format H2O and Toggle Between Floating Point and Scientific macros. The Chemical Format macro is described in Chapter 16. Module sheets containing these macros should be saved in the Personal Macro Workbook. 

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