Changing the Shortcut Menu

The shortcut menus that you see when you right-click on different objects can be very helpful. In Word, it is relatively easy to change the shortcut menus. In Excel, however, changing the menus—while possible—is nowhere near as easy.

In Excel, you can only change the options on a shortcut menu by using VBA. The exact code you use depends on whether you are removing items from a shortcut menu or adding them in. The following code illustrates how to delete an item from a shortcut menu:

Sub Del_Item()
    CommandBars("Cell").Controls("Cut").Delete
End Sub

Each shortcut menu is really a member of the CommandBars collection, and can thus be manipulated in VBA. In this case, a CommandBar by the name of "Cell" is being manipulated. This just happens to be the command bar for the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click on a cell in a worksheet. Excel has 47 named shortcut menu CommandBars.

If you want to add a command to a shortcut menu, all you do is use code similar to the following:

Sub Add_Item()
    CommandBars("Cell").Controls.Add _
      Type:=msoControlButton, Id:=21, _
      Before:=1
End Sub

In this instance you are again manipulating the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click on a cell. You are adding a command that is defined by the Id value setting. In this case, the Id value is 21, which represents the Cut command. There are scores, if not hundreds, of different command IDs within Excel.

To aid you in determining both the Id to use for a command, as well as the names of the various shortcut menu CommandBars, you should refer to the Knowledge Base article 213552. This article is quite long, and can be found at the following address:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=213552

The article is written for Excel 2000, but is also applicable to later versions of Excel, through Excel 2003. In Excel2007 there are still CommandBars, but it can be hit-and-miss trying to see what will work with them. In my testing it appears that the CommandBars for the Context menus (or, if you prefer, shortcut menus) are all available in Excel 2007. What can be bothersome is trying to figure out what the proper command IDs are for the various commands available in Excel 2007.