Adding Icons for Use On the Quick Access Toolbar

by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 18, 2013)

Penny notes that she can easily add macros to the Quick Access Toolbar. She wants to assign an icon to the macro on the toolbar, but wonders if is possible to add more icons than what Word provides. The list of standard icons seems, to her, to be quite limited.

The answer is that you can create some custom icons and use them on the Quick Access Toolbar, but it isn't as easy as you might prefer. To see what I mean, take a look at this article by Greg Maxey, which provides a great overview of how you can make changes to button images:

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Ribbon_Custom_Icons.htm

The steps that Greg provides relies upon a tool called the Office 2007 Custom UI Editor. You can find information about this utility here:

http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/customuieditor.aspx

If you don't want to use such a utility, there is an outstanding article here about how to add buttons to Excel's Quick Access Toolbar. (The concepts about modifying the Quick Access Toolbar are the same for both Word and Excel, so this article is very relevant.)

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/07/17/add-buttons-to-the-quick-access-toolbar-and-customize-button-images.aspx

Read through these articles and you'll quickly get the feeling that customizing Word (even something that used to be simple, like modifying toolbar images) is no longer user friendly (meaning, it isn't something to be easily undertaken by users). Instead, it is now oriented more towards developers and geeks. If you decide to venture into the world of modifying the icons, it is a good idea to make sure you keep backups in case things don't work out as you expected.

You could also take a look at commercial solutions, such as the popular RibbonCustomizer by Patrick Schmid:

http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/

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