Like all Microsoft Office products, Excel allows you to customise various settings to suit your own requirements. Whereas Microsoft Word has a default template called normal.dot, Excel has a special file called Excel.xlb in which your settings are stored. Note that not all settings are stored here, however - for example, each file has its own colour palette.

Perhaps the most useful customisation centres around the toolbars and menus. You can decide which toolbars to display (and where you would like them positioned on the screen). If you want to, you can remove, add or rearrange the buttons on a toolbar (or the commands in a menu). You can even create your own toolbars and menus, adding either built-in commands or your own (using macros - see Writing Macros in Microsoft Excel 2003 for further information).

Another common area of customisation concerns charts. You can create your own chart types and change the palette of colours used on charts. Defining your own types lets you apply a given layout to a set of charts - eg for a particular publication or thesis. While on the subject of colours, you can also modify the default colour palette used for fonts and filling cells.

A further aspect of customisation centres around customised lists. A few lists are built into the system (eg the days of the week and months of the year) but you can create your own. These can then be used to fill further cells or to sort data in a particular order. Finally, there are a host of other options which can be set, some of which you may find useful.

Download pdf Setting Options and Customising Microsoft Excel 2002