How Many Items Can be Added to the Quick Access Toolbar?

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 5, 2020)

Liz is thinking of upgrading to Office 365. She tried it as a free trial, but it only seemed to allow adding a very few items to the Quick Access Toolbar. So, Liz is wondering if Microsoft has reduced the number of items that can be put on the QAT.

The short answer is no, they haven't decreased the number. What Liz may be detecting is that Microsoft increased the width of the tools you can add to the QAT. (They did this to make it easier to use the tools on a touch screen.) This means that the number of tools visible on the screen will appear to be fewer than in older versions of Word. You can keep adding them just like you always have, though.

In fact, there doesn't seem to be an upper limit to the number of tools you can add. The number of tools displayed will be limited by the resolution and size of your monitor, as mentioned, but you can keep adding, even if you can't immediately see all the tools. If not all of the tools can be displayed, then Word displays a >> icon at the right side of the QAT. Click the icon, and you'll see more tools on a "pop-out row." If you have even more tools (in other words, the number of tools can't be displayed in the pop-out row), then at the end of that row you'll see a drop-down arrow you can click to display even more tools.

A common request made by those with many tools on their QAT is that the overflow be automatically displayed on a second row, without the need to click the >> icon. If you would like to lend your voice to this request, you can do so by visiting this page on Microsoft's User Voice site:

https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/42069706-qat-overflow-to-2nd-row

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13806) applies to Microsoft Word 2021.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 4 + 4?

2026-06-06 10:55:39

Jeff Wood

RE: How Many Items Can be Added to the Quick Access Toolbar?

The note with this title omits the fact that you can save a lot of space on the QAT by editing the text out or mostly out of the symbol for the particular action. If you are a reasonably heavy user, it is easy to remember what a particular symbol in a particular location means in the QAT. For example, when you strip the text from the Hanging Indent QAT entry, it becomes a blue circle. It is easy for me to remember that the blue circle appearing after the justified text hamburger symbol is Hanging Indent. Of course, if multiple people use the particular computer, this solution is not very user friendlyl

2020-12-05 22:22:18

Thiers Halliwell

I use several COM Add-ins with MS Word, but in its 'wisdom' it sometimes decides to omit them because it considers they slow the start-up process, meaning that I have to reload them manually using the Developer/COM Add-ins pane.
Is there any way of making the Add-ins permanently 'sticky'?

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