Monkey Tools

Customize the Monkey Tools Tab

Why Customize the Monkey Tools Tab?

The Monkey Tools ribbon was designed with one goal in mind – to make you more efficient when building queries and/or data models. A big part of that was building a central ribbon tab which would minimize tab-switching in order to get your job done. But what if you want to customize or personalize the Monkey Tools tab?

While we are pretty happy with all the commands we’ve added for you, there is one group that we could not include in the default Monkey Tools tab layout – the Calculations group from the Power Pivot ribbon. (There is a long and technical story to this, but suffice it to say that Microsoft has not provided a way for us to reference this tab programmatically.)

Given how useful the New Measure and Manage Measures buttons are, we want to customize the Monkey Tools tab to show these. Of course, you may also have other commands that you use frequently… Regardless of which commands they are, this article will show you how you can add groups and buttons to personalize the Monkey Tools tab.

Creating a Custom Ribbon Group

Unfortunately, you are not able to add items into our existing ribbon groups. The good news though, is that you can add a custom group to our ribbon tab, and add whatever controls you like to it.

To make this happen, start by right clicking any ribbon tab and choosing Customize the Ribbon… This will launch you into an Excel Options screen, where you will need to take the following steps:

Select the Monkey Tools tab in the right pane
Click New Group
Select the group
Click Rename…
Enter a name for the new group
Click OK

TIP! As an optional step, you can then use the up/down buttons on the far right to change the order of your groups. We used this to move our new Calculations group to show between the Query Tools and Modeling Tools groups.

Adding Commands to Your Custom Group

Once you have your new group set up, you can then add as many commands to that group as you like. Let’s now add the Measures and KPIs buttons from the Power Pivot tab to our custom group.

Make sure your new custom group is selected
Choose “Main Tabs” from the “Choose Commands From” drop-down
Expand the Power Pivot node
Select the item you wish to add
Click Add

Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each button or menu you would like to add to your custom group. Once finished, click OK to save your changes.

TIP! While we prefer to use the Measures menu to save space, you are not restricted to doing so. If you would prefer to have the New Measure and Manage Measures displayed as individual options, drill into the Measures menu in the left pane, and add the individual items instead!

The End Result

After clicking OK to save the results, you should now be able to see your new custom group displayed on the Monkey Tools tab:

You Should Also Know...

You are not restricted to one custom group per ribbon tab. If you want to customize your ribbon tab to add even more useful commands, go nuts! In fact, you can even add new ribbon tabs through that same interface in order to build your own custom tabs from scratch. This doesn’t require Monkey Tools, it is a standard feature in Microsoft Office.

Monkey Tools

Customize the Monkey Tools Tab

Why Customize the Monkey Tools Tab?

Creating a Custom Ribbon Group

Adding Commands to Your Custom Group

The End Result

You Should Also Know...

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