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Add custom toolbars to Expression Web 4

  • Article

Expression Web 4 provides eleven toolbars on the View > Toolbars menu, organized around particular activities, such as editing in Code view, and working with styles or tables. The default toolbars are sensible unless you regularly use only a few buttons from each toolbar; in that case, the default toolbars may clutter and waste valuable space in the application, especially when your favorite buttons are on three or more different toolbars. To the rescue: the free Custom Toolbars add-in for Expression Web 4 lets you create one or more toolbars to organize your favorite buttons and commands in Expression Web 4.

Install the Custom Toolbars add-in for Expression Web 4

  1. If Expression Web 4 is open, quit the application.

  2. Download the Custom Toolbars add-in from the Expression Gallery at https://gallery.expression.microsoft.com/en-us/CustomToolbars.

  3. Double-click the CustomToolbars.msi file, and follow the onscreen instructions to install the add-in.

    Microsoft Expression Web 4 Custom Toolbars Add-in

  4. Start Expression Web 4.

  5. The Favorites toolbar, labeled Customize Toolbars, appears below any open toolbars at the top of Expression Web 4. Select View > Toolbars > Favorites to close this toolbar. This “Favorites” toolbar that appears is known to be buggy if you try to customize it so we recommend closing it and creating a new custom toolbar from scratch, as demonstrated in the following steps.

    The Favorites toolbar  

Create a custom toolbar

  1. In Expression Web 4, on the Tools menu, click Customize Toolbars.

     Customize dialog box

  2. Click New, enter a name for your custom toolbar, and click OK.

    New Toolbar dialog box

  3. In the Customize dialog box, in the column on the left, select the items you want to add to your toolbar, and click Add. To change the order of items in your toolbar, in the column on the right, select an item you want to move, and then click the up or down arrows. When you are done editing your toolbar, click OK.

    Customize dialog box

Your custom toolbar now appears below other toolbars open in Expression Web 4, with all of your favorite buttons at the ready! To show or hide your toolbar, select the toolbar’s name from the View > Toolbars menu.

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Expression Web team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2010
    G-r-r-eat! Thanks, guys, and you ladies, too, if there are any on the team. It's been a while, but the wait is over, and as a hand-coder who uses only a small subset of the toolbar items, it's going be great to build a custom toolbar that provides quick, space-saving access to those functions. Thanks again!

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2010
    Do NOT try and create a custom toolbar with more than one instance of Expression Web running because it won't work properly. I quite often have more than one instance of EW running especially when writing tutorials. This is the second feature I have found that will not work properly with two different sites open at the same time. Once I closed the 2nd instance of EW, I could create the toolbar with no problem. This is not quite the same as the earlier customize toolbar that was available in EW 2 but it is a start. Thanks Anna.

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2010
    Nice idea, can't get it to install in vista

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2011
    I can't get it work reliably in Windows 7 Pro 32-bit either.  Closed EW 4, ran the install, rebooted and reopened EW 4.  After a few tries I got one custom toolbar to get saved but it was gone the next time I used EW 4.

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2011
    Doesn't work. The addin appears in Tools -> Addins but it is disabled on every Xweb 4 startup. I enable it and restart XWeb and it's again disabled. There's no Customize in Tools menu.

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2011
    Worked for me...Win 7 64 bit. Great Add-on.  One comment, the provision of separator (bars) would have been nice.

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2011
    Is this addin unsupported? Why it doesn't work? It's never getting enabled even if I enable it.

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2011
    Mine installed, but the add-in will not enable from within EW4. I select it to enable, but then after re-starting, it is not enabled. tried multiple times, no workee.

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2011
    No problem installing the add-in, but to enable it, I'm told to run EW4 as Administrator - Now the add-in is listed, but unchecked in the add-in list - After selecting add-in, message says to re-start EW4 to enable.. I do this, but the add-in is un-selected again. My OS - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Please advise how to solve this problem.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2013
    great thanks for the link this should be fun !