Thursday, September 25, 2008

Copy the Quick Access Toolbar to Another Computer

One of the users on campus asked me a very good question that I'm sure other people would love to know. Her question was that after she spent a good amount of time customizing her Quick Access Toolbar in Word, is there a way to share it with her co-workers so they don't have to take the time to do so? I thought this was a great question. I was thinking the same thing earlier this week as I was working on a PowerPoint presentation at work, but didn't finish by 5:00, so I took it home with me. My home computer still had the default Quick Access Toolbar as I hadn't taken the time to customize it. I wished I could just copy it from work to take home.

Well, after a bit of research, I found the answer. I've included both the Windows XP and Vista versions for reference.
  1. Find the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) file associated with the application you want from your source computer.
    • XP, C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office\*.qat
    • Vista, C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\*.qat
  2. Copy the QAT file from your source computer to a USB drive or CD.
  3. Take the file to the destination computer and copy the QAT file into the same location on the destination computer.
  4. DONE!


4 comments:

  1. What if you want all users of that computer to receive the qat file? there is no localsettings directory in all users or default users.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks. Very helpful. I wonder the same as Thomas above. I would like all future users to get this.... Have the same issue with normal.dotm. Vista is a myster! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I pushed normal.dotm via a login script. You could do the same with the .qat files. Excel defaults are trickier because they are in a folder most users don't have permission to write too. I put the excel templates in my installation package.

    ReplyDelete