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Did you know... you can switch and swap buttons on the toolbars while the Tools - Customize dialog is showing - #139

This is one of those, "whoa... i never knew this!" until someone shows you how to do it.

Go to Tools - Customize.  Now the Customize dialog box pops up.  Note that this is a semi-modal dialog (my made-up term, although there's probably a real term for it somewhere).  A modal dialog is where you can only click inside the dialog.  This is true most of the time, but some dialog boxes are non-modal (where you can click outside the dialog box and focus is retained outside).

Work with me here.  Take your mouse and try to click+drag a button on any toolbar around here, there, and everywhere.  Trust me, it will work.  Crazy, huh?

Customizing Toolbar Buttons while the Customize dialog is opened

Note that you can even duplicate items by doing a Ctrl+Drag.  The duplicate item can even live on a different toolbar!

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Posted: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 3:00 AM by saraford

Comments

Roland said:

Regarding "semi-modal":

http://www.bugbash.net/comic/29.html

;-)

# January 29, 2008 8:17 AM

Rory Becker said:

I recently discovered that you can CTRL+drag Winforms components and this will duplicate them.

How long has this been the case?

# January 29, 2008 10:17 AM

Jeff Handley said:

Something I've used this trick for, is to copy the 'Recent Projects' menu item out of the File menu into the main toolbar.  This gives a dropdown on the toolbar to quickly open a recent project.

Nice stuff!

# January 29, 2008 11:30 AM

Daniel Puzey said:

If you didn't know that, then maybe you also didn't know this:  holding Alt and dragging a toolbar button allows you to reorganise your toolbar *without* the Customize dialog open.  This even works with the root menu items (File/Edit/etc)!

You can also use Alt+Ctrl+drag to duplicate any tooolbar button in this way, at any time.

(This is fairly standard behaviour across most MS apps, actually.)

# February 1, 2008 5:27 AM

xjb said:

# December 23, 2008 9:10 PM
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