Learn PowerPoint | Customize PowerPoint

Hide and Show Toolbars

Works with PowerPoint 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

by Geetesh Bajaj, July 26th 2006

Creating and customizing PowerPoint toolbars is so easy as I showed you in the Customizing Toolbars tutorial. Still, there are way too many toolbars in PowerPoint -- these can make the interface look cluttered. The key to streamlining the toolbars is to know how to hide and show them as required. So if you don't need one of the toolbars most of the time, just go ahead and hide it -- getting it back is just another one-click operation.

To temporarily hide any visible toolbar from the PowerPoint interface, just follow these steps:

1. In PowerPoint, choose View | Toolbars as shown in Figure 1.
   
   
   Figure 1: Toolbars
   
   Note: The same menu shown in Figure 1 above can be accessed by right-clicking any toolbar in PowerPoint.
   
   My list of toolbars that you can see in Figure 1 might have more options than what you might see -- that's because I have many PowerPoint add-ins installed that create their own toolbars.
   
   
2. The list of toolbars that you saw in Figure 1 had a check placed in front of several listed toolbars. Click on a checked toolbar to hide it -- in the same way click an unchecked toolbar to show it.
   

Showing More Toolbars

There are still more toolbars in PowerPoint that are not displayed on this list -- that's because these are context sensitive toolbars like the Tables and Borders, Reviewing, WordArt and more. These are only visible when you have the proper object selected -- thus the Tables and Borders toolbar shows up whenever you are working on a table. To show up any of these toolbars permanently, follow these steps:

1. Choose View | Toolbars | Cuistomize to bring up the Customize dialog box that you can see in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Customize your toolbars
   
   
2. Scroll down the list in the Toolbars tab -- the last few toolbars are all context sensitive toolbars -- to make them permanently available, just place a check mark next to them -- in the same way, you can remove a checkmark to hide that toolbar.
   
   
3. Click Close when done to get back to PowerPoint with your changes in place.