Deploy Quick Access Toolbar customizations by using the Office Customization Tool
Updated: January 16, 2009
Applies To: Office Resource Kit
This Office product will reach end of support on October 10, 2017. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see , Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14
In this article:
Adding support for roaming users
Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar
Distributing Quick Access Toolbar settings files
This article describes how you can enable a customized Quick Access Toolbar to work with roaming user profiles. This article also describes how to customize the Quick Access Toolbar and how to use the Office Customization Tool (OCT) to deploy Quick Access Toolbar customizations to existing 2007 Microsoft Office system installations.
The 2007 Office system applications that use the Quick Access Toolbar, and their associated Quick Access Toolbar settings files (*.qat), are listed in the following table.
| 2007 Office system application | Feature | Settings file name | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Microsoft Office Access 2007 |
All |
Access.qat |
||||||||||||||
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 |
All |
Excel.qat |
||||||||||||||
Microsoft Office Word 2007 |
All |
Word.qat |
||||||||||||||
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 |
All |
PowerPoint.qat |
||||||||||||||
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 |
|
|
In order to use OCT to distribute a customized *.qat settings file you must first configure the settings that enable roaming user profiles to access the *.qat settings file. You typically start the deployment process for Quick Access Toolbars by customizing a default Quick Access Toolbar to meet your company or department requirements. You customize a Quick Access Toolbar by making the changes directly in the user interface for each 2007 Office system application. If you do not need to distribute a customized *.qat settings file but only need to enable Quick Access Toolbar customizations to move with roaming user profiles, you can skip the Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar modifications. In the next step, you configure OCT to distribute the *.qat settings file.
Adding support for roaming users
A default 2007 Office system installation — that is, an installation without any software updates, hotfixes, or service packs applied — does not allow Quick Access Toolbar customizations to work with roaming user profiles. In this default configuration, when a user customizes the Quick Access Toolbar, logs out, and then logs on to another computer, the Quick Access Toolbar customizations are lost. In this section, you will learn how to allow Quick Access Toolbar customizations to work with roaming user profiles.
The changes covered in this section are especially important for users in environments who have roaming profiles and who have customized the Quick Access Toolbar on one computer and then expect those changes to appear automatically when they log on to another computer on the network. This is the approach that is recommended for users in an environment that uses a farm of multiple terminal servers. The changes in this section will enable you to modify the default folder for the QAT customizations from the local application data directory which serves as a data repository for local (non-roaming) applications to the application data directory which serves as a common repository for application-specific data and supports roaming users.
For 2007 Office system to support Quick Access Toolbar customizations for roaming users, you must make some simple changes.
Make sure that you are using Mso.dll version 12.0.6323.5000 or higher.
Add a new registry key, QuickAccessToolbarRoaming.
For details about how to perform these changes, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 958062: Quick Access Toolbar files for 2007 Office applications do not roam with your profile (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=136675).
If you customized the Quick Access Toolbar for an application before you added support for roaming profiles, the existing customizations will not be preserved. You can preserve existing QAT customizations by copying the *.qat settings files from the local application data folder to the application data folder.
Before you enable support for roaming users the default folder for *.qat settings files is in the local area of a user profile, as follows:
Windows XP:%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office
Windows Vista:%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office
After you enable support for roaming users the default folder for *.qat settings files for all platforms is:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office
Note
By default, the folder that contains the *.qat settings files is hidden. To work with these files, you might need to enable the option to customize the folder options to Show hidden files and folders.
Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar
The 2007 Office system applications that use the Quick Access Toolbar create at least one *.qat settings file. It is important to note that the customizations to the Quick Access Toolbar in one 2007 Office system application do not apply across all 2007 Office system applications. This means, for example, that if you want to add the Track Changes command to the Quick Access Toolbar for both Office Word 2007 and Office Excel 2007, you must customize the Quick Access Toolbar in both applications.
You can add or remove commands to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. For commands that are already on the Ribbon, you can right-click the command, and then click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. For more extensive Quick Access Toolbar customization, use the steps in the following procedure.
Customize the Quick Access Toolbar
Open the Customize the Quick Access Toolbar and keyboard shortcuts pane by using one of the following methods:
Right-click a command on the Ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar, and then click Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click 2007 Office system application Options. For example, in Office Word 2007 you would click Word Options, and then click Customize.
In the Choose commands from list, select a group of commands.
Select a command, and then click Add.
Note
Because you can only select one item at a time in this list, you must repeat this step for each command that you want to add to the Quick Access Toolbar.
Click OK.
To remove commands from the Quick Access Toolbar, you can either right-click the command on the Quick Access Toolbar and then click Remove from Quick Access Toolbar, or you can use the process from the previous procedure to make changes in the Customize the Quick Access Toolbar and keyboard shortcuts pane.
To customize a Quick Access Toolbar, we recommend that you open the 2007 Office system application and make the changes directly in the user interface for that application by using the previous procedure. However, you can also change the Quick Access Toolbar by customizing XML in the *.qat settings file that corresponds to the 2007 Office system application. For example, to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Office Word 2007, you would edit the Word.qat settings file.
Note
For more information about how to edit a *.qat settings file, see Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar in the 2007 Office Fluent User Interface (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=137083).
Distributing Quick Access Toolbar settings files
The process of distributing the customized Quick Access Toolbar can be as simple as copying the *.qat settings files to the target computers. However, since it is time consuming to copy these files by hand or by script we recommend that you use the OCT to distribute the *.qat settings files. To distribute these files, use the following procedure.
Use the OCT to distribute *.qat settings files
Start the OCT by running 2007 Office system Setup with the /admin command-line switch. Setup.exe is in the root of the folder that contains the 2007 Office system installation source. For example, if your installation source was E:\OfficeEnterprise_2007\, you would run: E:\OfficeEnterprise_2007\setup /admin.
In the OCT, under Additional content, select Add files.
In the right pane, click Add.
In the Add Files to MSP File dialog box, open the folder that contains your *.qat settings files, select the *.qat files you want to include, and then click Add.
In the File Destination Path dialog box, type %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office or select the path [AppDataFolder]\Microsoft\Office for the Destination path on the user’s computer.
For more information about how to use the OCT, see Office Customization Tool in the 2007 Office system.