Weird & Wonderful IT

Just had a request from a user, who was complaining that everytime that she logs into a computer, she has to customise the Quick Access Toolbar in Word and Excel. (The few buttons to the rights of the Office Button.)

Turns out that the QAT is not stored in the roaming part of the user profile, but the local part. As profiles are deleted when a user logs off, and the user accesses a couple of different computers, the settings were not following her.

When a user customises the QAT, a new file is created in C:\Documents and Setting\%username%\Local Settings\Microsoft\Office\ called word.qat, for Word or excel.qat for Excel.

This default location can be changed by amending a registry entry, after applying a hotfix. The location of the key is:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars

You need to create a new DWORD value called QuickAccessToolbarRoaming and give it a value of 1.

As this was a user policy, we created an ADM file and deployed the changed using Group Policy. The ADM file contains the following:

CLASS USER

CATEGORY "Office 2007 Quick Access Toolbar"
 
    POLICY "Include Quick Access Toolbar in Roaming Profile"
    KEYNAME "Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Toolbars"
                VALUENAME QuickAccessToolbarRoaming
                VALUEON NUMERIC 1
                VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0
    END POLICY
END CATEGORY

To use this:

1. Copy the above code into Notepad
2. Save the file with a .adm extension, e.g qat.adm.
3. Open Group Policy Management and then the desired GP.
4. Right click Administrative Templates -> Add/Remove Templates
5. Add in the template that you saved  in step 2.
6. Go to View –> Filtering and then untick the box labelled Only Show Policy Settings that can be Fully Managed
7. Expand ‘Office 2007 Quick Access Toolbar’
8. Amend the ‘Include Quick Access Toolbar in Roaming Profile’ setting to Enabled.

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