How to Customize the Status Bar in Microsoft Excel 2016

Watch Microsoft Excel 2016 video tutorial below. We will take a quick look at the status bar and learn how to customize it. We will show you what you can find in the status bar, including different page views. And how to enable or disable controls.

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Video Transcript

We’re now going to take a very quick look at the Status Bar. That is at the bottom of the Excel 2016 workspace.

It’s actually pretty straightforward to control the Status Bar. What I’m going to do is to put the cursor down over the Status Bar. Right-click on it and you get this long Customize Status Bar sort of menu.

And it’s a list of all the things that can appear on that Status Bar. Now everything that’s ticked can appear. And you may look at that list of ticked things and say well there seem to be about 20 things there. However, I can only see half a dozen.

Some of the things, if they’re ticked, will still only appear if they have a certain value. Whereas some of them will give an indication whatever their value.

So for example, if you take the very top one, Cell Mode, the current Cell Mode is Ready. Now, if you look at the Status Bar, bottom left-hand end, Ready, you can see that the Cell Mode is Ready.

Don’t worry about what Cell Mode means at the moment, just take it as Ready. There are then a couple of options, Flash Fill Blank Cells, Flash Fill Change Cells. We’ll come back to those later on. Signatures, Information Management Policy, etcetera. A whole list of things, many of which are ticked and some of which are not.

Now let me tick one of the ones that aren’t. I’m going to tick Caps Lock. And if I tick Caps Lock then Caps Lock would show on the Status Bar if I actually enabled it.

So let me now press the Caps Lock key on my keyboard and you can see that Caps Lock is now showing as On. If I click the Caps Lock key again, switch it off, then you don’t see it any longer.

If I didn’t have Caps Lock ticked here then you wouldn’t see whether Caps Lock is on or off. I hope that’s an adequate explanation.

So really the ticks say do I want to see an indication of this thing or do I not want to see an indication of this thing. Now I don’t normally need to see Caps Lock on the Status Bar so I don’t normally have that checked.

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The next item along to the right of Ready on my current Status Bar is an indicator of whether I’m currently recording a macro.

That’s recording a set of instructions for later use and reuse. Now that’s ticked. So I’ve got an indicator there that indicates that it’s not recording.

And the little symbol that you can see down there on the left is the not recording symbol. If I started recording a macro then that symbol would change to show that I was recording a macro.

So basically the Status Bar you customize to show the things you do and don’t want to see. Even with some things that you say I do want to see that you won’t see anything unless it’s got a particular setting or a particular status.

At the right-hand end of the Status Bar, so that’s the very bottom of the list, we have the Zoom percentage which is shown. Currently 106%.

Not quite sure why I’ve got it on 106 but I have. Then the Zoom Slider. If you didn’t want to see the Zoom Slider you could switch it off again.

And then three buttons which correspond to the description View Shortcuts. And in fact, these give us a way of toggling between different ways of viewing this worksheet. Let me just click to get rid of that list.

The shortcut that’s currently highlighted is the Normal shortcut. That’s the normal view of my worksheet. If I click the next one, Page Layout, it will show me the pages on my worksheet as though I were printing them on sheets of paper.

So it will actually show me how they’re divided up. And you notice how with the current arrangement three of the numbers would appear on one page and one on the next.

And to the right of that is a related view, what’s called Page Break Preview, which shows that breakdown of pages more clearly based on the data and based on the sheet.

So I could actually adjust the settings for my pages, for instance, to make sure that all those numbers appeared on the same page.

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Now we’re going to look more at View settings later on but they are the basic settings on the Status Bar. And as with all these other settings and tools that we’re going through once you’ve been using Excel for a little while making a point of going through those and make sure that you’ve got them set correctly for you.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!