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Mini Toolbar in PowerPoint now adaptive

Feature deep dive
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Hi, I’m Daniel Fairweather, a Program Manager on the Office Shared Experiences team. We are excited to share that the Mini Toolbar feature in PowerPoint has been upgraded to help you be more efficient and focused.

Mini Toolbar

Back in Office 2007, the Mini Toolbar was introduced as a way for you to pick the commands you use most frequently and make them quickly accessible.

Fast forward to 2020 and we are now leveraging machine learning to evolve this feature and add commands to the Mini Toolbar that are even more relevant to your work and context. In PowerPoint, it now includes three additional buttons at the end of the toolbar, which are personalized for you based on your most recent actions in the app.

Mini Toolbar feature.

How it works

When you select text, tables, or shapes in PowerPoint, the Mini Toolbar will automatically appear above the selection. The three large buttons at the end of the menu are from your recent usage and will change continuously as you use commands in the app. In addition, the commands that appear in the Mini Toolbar are based on the last 20 commands you used. As you move between tasks and commands, it will update to include commands that are relevant to your current task.

Requirements and Availability

  • A Microsoft 365 subscription.
  • Be an Office Insider running Windows Current Channel (Preview) Version 2005 (Build 12723.10000) or later. We’re releasing this feature to Current Channel (Preview) users in August. If you don’t see it today, it will be available to you soon.

We typically release features over some time to ensure that things are working smoothly. This is true for Insiders as well. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as Insiders, have had the opportunity to try them.

Feedback

We highly encourage you to send feedback! If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can submit them by clicking Help > Feedback. In addition, please use #PPTMiniToolbar  in your feedback so that we can find your comments easily.

Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We’re excited to hear from you!  Sign up for the Office Insider newsletter, and you’ll get the latest information about Insider features in your inbox once a month.