If PowerPoint 2007 is the first version of the program you have ever worked with, you will quickly become accustomed to working with commands represented as buttons on the Ribbon. However, if you have upgraded from an earlier version, you might have identified a few commands that no longer seem to be available.

For the 2007 Office release, conducted extensive research to find out how people actually use the programs in the Office suite. As a result, a few PowerPoint features that seemed superfluous have been abandoned, and a few others that were used very rarely have been pushed off to one side. If you sorely miss one of these sidetracked features, you can make it a part of your PowerPoint environment by adding it to the Quick Access Toolbar. Simply click the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button at the right end of the Quick Access Toolbar, and then click More Commands to locate and add the one you want.

You might also want to customize the Quick Access Toolbar if you regularly use buttons that are scattered on various tabs of the Ribbon and don't want to switch between tabs to access the buttons. If you use only a few buttons, you can add each one to the Quick Access Toolbar by right-clicking the button and clicking Add to Quick Access Toolbar. You can then hide the Ribbon by double-clicking the active tab. The tab names and Quick Access Toolbar remain visible. (You can temporarily redisplay the Ribbon by clicking the tab you want to view, or permanently redisplay it by double-clicking any tab.)