The Mini toolbar, which Microsoft interface designers originally called the "floatie," is a small formatting toolbar that appears at the top of the shortcut menu when you right-click something that can be formatted, such as a chart element or a selected group of cells. What’s neat about the Mini toolbar is that it saves you several steps when you want to perform some simple formatting. Rather than having to go to the ribbon, click the Home tab, find the formatting command you want, and then return to the ribbon tab that you need to use to manipulate your object, you can right-click the object and select your formatting quickly.

The graphic that follows shows the Mini toolbar at the top of a shortcut menu. And, yes, if you would prefer not to have the Mini toolbar appear, you can turn it off.