How to Create a Toolbar Button for an Existing Macro

You have been given a special project that requires you to travel and conduct massive training workshops for new employees that have been hired by your company, Happy Tummies – a restaurant chain. You will need to train a co-worker to fulfill your job duties for about a month. You only have two days to train her. One of your main responsibilities is creating various monthly training reports, and you have created macros that quickly and automatically run monotonous steps associated with the reports. You decide to create toolbar buttons for the most commonly used macros in order to train your co-worker faster and make it easier for her to prepare the training reports using the macros in your absence.

In this tutorial, I will show you how easy it is to add a toolbar button for a macro instead of using the keyboard shortcut or going through the steps to run an existing macro. We’ll create the toolbar button for an existing macro, which runs the names of all the existing training managers.

Let’s Get Started!

1. Go to Start>Programs>Microsoft Excel to open the application. Go to File>New and open a new spreadsheet.

2. Go to Tools>Customize and select it.

3. A pop-up menu window called “Customize” will appear, click on the “Toolbar” tab and select the toolbar where you want the macro button to appear. For this tutorial, we want the macro button to be accessible and visible in the “Standard” toolbar, so check the box for the Standard toolbar.

4. Now click on the “Commands” tab and select a category – the kind of function you will be creating as a button. Go down and select “macros.” The Commands window to the right of the pop-up window appears with two options: Custom Menu Item or a Custom Button.

5. Click on the “Custom Button” (it looks like a happy face) option and drag it to the standard toolbar (located at the top of the screen under the different menu options - File, Edit, etc.), place it right next to the “Save” button so it is easy to locate.

6. Now click on the new macro button and a pop-up window called “Assign Macro” will appear. Here select the actual macro that will be assigned to this button, so for this tutorial we’ll use one already created called “PERSONAL.XLS!.ht” macro and hit OK.

7. Finally, we’ll test the new custom macro button. Go to File>New to open a new spreadsheet, and click on the newly created macro button located on the standard toolbar to the right of the “Save” button. After clicking the button, you will see the names of ten training managers automatically appear.

Great! wasn’t it super easy. You can basically follow the same steps to add a button for any function other than a macro. Remember to keep practicing because the more you do it, the better you will get.

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