Backing Up Quick Access Toolbars

Kym normally sets up a personalized Quick Access toolbar in Excel 2007. Recently his PC crashed and Excel had to be reloaded. This meant that he had to recreate the Quick Access toolbar manually. Kym wonders if there is a way to save the Quick Access toolbar layout to a backup file.

The answer is an unequivocal "yes." You can back up the Quick Access toolbar for Excel by simply looking for files (in Windows) that end with the .qat file extension. Where they are normally located depends on the version of Windows you are using. If you are using Windows XP, then the files are normally here:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office

If you are using Windows Vista, then they will usually be in one of the following:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Office
C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office

In all instances, "username" should be replaced with the name of your user account. Note that these are default locations; depending on how Excel was installed, the files could be elsewhere. For this reason it is a good idea to simply do a file search to locate any files that end in .qat.

The Quick Access toolbar files are plain text files and can be copied to a separate location for backup. There will be one for each Office application that has a Quick Access toolbar defined. If you are simply interested in the file for Excel, then look for the file Excel.qat.

Microsoft MVP Ron de Bruin has some wonderful resources on Quick Access toolbar files, including how to find all of the icon images built into Office and how to add custom images, on his site:

http://www.rondebruin.nl/tips.htm

On the page, look for the section entitled "Excel 2007 Ribbon and QAT pages."