Customizing Your Toolbars Makes Life Easier

All the applications on the Mac come with a toolbar. The row of tools spread across the top of the application window. And all those little tools come in handy. But the default choices aren't always the best choices.

For example, here is the default toolbar for the Finder on my computer...

And here is the current toolbar after I customized it...

I create a lot of new folders, so why not have a quick button for that? And I delete a lot of items and this gives me a one-click option for that, as well. Plus I am a daily user of Dropbox and this gives me quick access to my Dropbox folder. So customizing makes my work easier.

So how can you do the same? Well, some applications have a "customize" button right on the toolbar that looks like this...

But if that button isn't there, no worries. Just right-click or Option-click on a bare spot on the toolbar of an application and you'll get some options for optimizing. Here are a couple of examples of what you might see...

Customize drop down menu in Firefox

Customize drop down menu in Microsoft Word

Once you choose to customize, a window with various options will drop down. You'll see a range of buttons (don't forget to scroll for more!) and you can just drag them on and off your toolbar. You can even use the space and separator options just to help organize your toolbar for easier use. Once you are done, just click Done.

And don't worry about messing things up. There is always the option to just restore the Default toolbar.