Customizing Menus and Toolbars
Make Minitab's Interface Work for You
Menus and toolbars are like a dashboard for Minitab — and luckily, you’re not stuck with just preset "factory" options. You can easily customize the Minitab interface to achieve added speed, clarity, and efficiency for your work projects, and to gain quick access to the methods and tools you use most often. Best of all, you can adapt Minitab’s flexible menus and toolbars as often as you like, as your data analysis needs change.
How Can I Customize Menus and Toolbars?
Expand or streamline choices
Minitab gives you the ability to easily add or remove menu items and toolbar buttons.
 Fill your Tools menus with resources you frequently use, such as links to favorite Web sites, external applications, and more. | Original
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Streamlined
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You can make your toolbars more concise and to-the-point by removing any items you wish, or simply choose to hide an entire toolbar. |
Create task-specific menus and toolbars
Avoid searching for items by making frequently used commands more accessible. Or, design new menus and toolbars for specialized tasks and projects. In Minitab Statistical Software, you can drag any menu, menu item, or toolbar button to another menu or toolbar.
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Group all the methods and features for quality improvement projects within specialized menus and toolbars, or centralize the statistical functions you frequently depend on. |
Personalize the display
Need to see an icon more clearly? Want to change a button image or a command name? Consider the menu and toolbar your personal canvas for customizing colors, icons, item names—even shortcut keys.
 
Make toolbar icons more visually appealing and user-friendly by editing their shape, color, and even size. |  You can design a new image for a custom menu, rename menu items for clarity, and add shortcut keys to save time. |
Try It Yourself
Do you find yourself always relying on the same graphs from the Graphs menu to evaluate your data? To simplify and streamline the interface, design a new customized menu and create shortcuts to quickly display your favorite graphs.
Create a new menu- Choose Tools > Customize (or right-click any menu bar or toolbar and choose Customize).
- Click the Commands tab (shown at right). From Categories, choose New Menu.
- From the Commands pane, drag New Menu onto the main menu bar.
- From Categories, choose Graph. From the Commands pane, drag Bar Chart to New Menu on the menu bar. As you drag an item, a location bar indicates where the item will be placed.
- Repeat step 4 to drag all your favorite graphs from the Graph menu to New Menu.
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Edit item names and images- With the Customize dialog box open, right-click New Menu on the menu bar.
- Choose Name Button. In Enter button name, type My Favorite Graphs. Click OK.
- Right-click My Favorite Graphs. Choose Edit Button Image. From Tools, select drawing tools to create an image for the My Favorite Graphs menu in the Picture grid. Click OK.
- Repeat these steps to edit the item names and images of individual graphs on the menu.
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Add shortcut keys- To assign shortcut keys for a graph, click the Keyboard tab in the Customize dialog box.
- From Category, choose Graph. From Commands, choose Bar Chart.
- In Press New Shortcut Key, type the shortcut keystrokes, such as [Ctrl + T]. Click Close.
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Restoring the default settings
You can restore menus, toolbars, and other customizable features to the original (default) settings at any time. To reset all menus, click the Menus tab on the Customize dialog box. Under Application Frame Menus, click Reset.
To reset shortcut keys, click the Keyboard tab on the Customize dialog box. To reset a single shortcut key, under Commands, highlight the command that corresponds with the shortcut. Under Current Keys, highlight the shortcut keystrokes, then click Remove. Or, click Reset All to restore all shortcut keys to default settings.
To reset other customizable features, click the appropriate tab in the Customize dialog box and follow similar steps.
Putting Customized Menus and Toolbars to Use
Customizing Minitab's menus and toolbars can save you time when you perform your most frequently used analyses. Take advantage of the flexible display options by reorganizing the software terrain to better support your project requirements and personal work style. For more information on customizing menus, toolbars, and other features of the software, see Minitab Help.