A default 2007 Office system installation — that is, an installation without any software updates, hotfixes, or service packs applied — does not allow Quick Access Toolbar customizations to work with roaming user profiles. In this default configuration, when a user customizes the Quick Access Toolbar, logs out, and then logs on to another computer, the Quick Access Toolbar customizations are lost. In this section, you will learn how to allow Quick Access Toolbar customizations to work with roaming user profiles.

The changes covered in this section are especially important for users in environments who have roaming profiles and who have customized the Quick Access Toolbar on one computer and then expect those changes to appear automatically when they log on to another computer on the network. This is the approach that is recommended for users in an environment that uses a farm of multiple terminal servers. The changes in this section will enable you to modify the default folder for the QAT customizations from the local application data directory which serves as a data repository for local (non-roaming) applications to the application data directory which serves as a common repository for application-specific data and supports roaming users.

For 2007 Office system to support Quick Access Toolbar customizations for roaming users, you must make some simple changes.

• Make sure that you are using Mso.dll version 12.0.6323.5000 or higher.

• Add a new registry key, QuickAccessToolbarRoaming.

For details about how to perform these changes, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 958062: Quick Access Toolbar files for 2007 Office applications do not roam with your profile (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=136675).

If you customized the Quick Access Toolbar for an application before you added support for roaming profiles, the existing customizations will not be preserved. You can preserve existing QAT customizations by copying the *.qat settings files from the local application data folder to the application data folder.

Before you enable support for roaming users the default folder for *.qat settings files is in the local area of a user profile, as follows:

• Windows XP:

  %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office

• Windows Vista:

  %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office

After you enable support for roaming users the default folder for *.qat settings files for all platforms is:

• %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Office

Note:
By default, the folder that contains the *.qat settings files is hidden. To work with these files, you might need to enable the option to customize the folder options to Show hidden files and folders.

The 2007 Office system applications that use the Quick Access Toolbar create at least one *.qat settings file. It is important to note that the customizations to the Quick Access Toolbar in one 2007 Office system application do not apply across all 2007 Office system applications. This means, for example, that if you want to add the Track Changes command to the Quick Access Toolbar for both Office Word 2007 and Office Excel 2007, you must customize the Quick Access Toolbar in both applications.

You can add or remove commands to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. For commands that are already on the Ribbon, you can right-click the command, and then click Add to Quick Access Toolbar. For more extensive Quick Access Toolbar customization, use the steps in the following procedure.

Customize the Quick Access Toolbar

To remove commands from the Quick Access Toolbar, you can either right-click the command on the Quick Access Toolbar and then click Remove from Quick Access Toolbar, or you can use the process from the previous procedure to make changes in the Customize the Quick Access Toolbar and keyboard shortcuts pane.

To customize a Quick Access Toolbar, we recommend that you open the 2007 Office system application and make the changes directly in the user interface for that application by using the previous procedure. However, you can also change the Quick Access Toolbar by customizing XML in the *.qat settings file that corresponds to the 2007 Office system application. For example, to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Office Word 2007, you would edit the Word.qat settings file.

Note:
For more information about how to edit a *.qat settings file, see Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar in the 2007 Office Fluent User Interface (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=137083).

The process of distributing the customized Quick Access Toolbar can be as simple as copying the *.qat settings files to the target computers. However, since it is time consuming to copy these files by hand or by script we recommend that you use the OCT to distribute the *.qat settings files. To distribute these files, use the following procedure.

Use the OCT to distribute *.qat settings files

For more information about how to use the OCT, see Office Customization Tool in the 2007 Office system.