Edit the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar

I know everyone is driven to belong but if you actually want to customize your toolbar then you can not lump yourself in with 90% of Office users as you implied with “…we mortal users…”.

I have never seen a non-default Office toolbar configuration and that’s after watching my wife, office mates, my boss, our CEO, mother, friends, teenagers and even other developers. I would be suprised if even 10% of Office users customize their toolbar. The most “customization” I see is people turning on the Drawing toolbar.

Didn’t you actually just prove Microsoft’s logic for making it more difficult to customize with this quote? “Office used to be able to do for us automatically (or wait for a developer to help us).” If you were already waiting for a developer to help you then you’ve just strengthened MS’s argument.

As an application developer that has written all sorts of interfaces I have learned that it is the rare person that actually uses custom toolbars, non-default floating toolbar windows, dockable panels, etc. Sure, they are out there but when considering features and priorities the ability to customize is rather low on the list as the average consumer just doesn’t use it.

You mean something like this?

http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/CustomUIeditor.aspx

What part of that Custom UI Editor would you consider user friendly, Chris from LiveSide? :)

How to fix the ribbon:

1. Make the ribbon work like a regular menu. Tabs are top tier menus, the panels are sub menus. When you hit [Alt][Insert], now you get speed keys for just sub menus, (panels). Once you hit the panel key, it lights up the speed keys for the rest of that specific focused panel.

All your keyboard stuff now functions EXACTLY like office 2003 or before, because now it’s a regular menu. You can even use the exact same office 2003 layout. Also, you don’t have the silly 8000 shortcuts at a time.

2. Make the home tab JUST be a series of shortcuts. Items on the home will always be somewhere else in one of the more in-depth menus. You just right click on one of the panels somewhere in another menu and say “Add to home”. MS can still promote whatever the heck that want in the common distro.

3. Bring back the old file menu. Make life easy for beginners by adding a small file panel to the home tab. If you like the cutesy circle in the UL corner, make it a place to have an ‘about’ box, get updates and run wizards.

4. Forget the “0″ to “9″ speedkeys, unless they’re in a list of items, like the style items list, (where they aren’t now). For things like [Alt][Home][Bold] — it’s got a friggin speedkey! Show the “^b”. If people are silly enough to type the “^”, then limit the list to things that are speedkeys, showing only “^” items.

5. Bring back real keyboard menu options. Not the silly shotgun approach to UI design, but allowing you to tab through menus, panels, easily. It’s there PART of the time, but try clicking on FONT NAME. Can’t tab to font size or get there any other way other than clicking it or going out of the menu and back in.

6. Get rid of the 2003 compatibility, unless it’s a checked option. Why do ribbon users need to do Alt N for Insert and Alt W for View, just because MS doesn’t want an option for 2003 compatibility? AGAIN, the ribbon COULD BE LAID OUT JUST LIKE IN 2003, with an “Insert”, “File”, “View”, “Edit”, etc. tab.

There’s more, of course, but it’s a good start.

Late on the scene but two comments:
1) The harder MSoft makes it for (the 90% of ) end-users to customize office, the less MSoft capitalizes on its products great strength.

2) In over a month of searching, I haven’t found a way to make the AddIn ribbon the default on loading Office2007 beta, which makes it tough for the 10% of us who have customised e.g. Word to automate our common daily tasks.
http://www.chrisgreaves.com/Office2007User/MondayAugust282006.html

Office 2007 sucks like hell, it’s hard to use, too many pictures, it’s distracting to the eye. I would believe if I wanted a program like this I would just use a freakin Mac. There are other things like making Cells in word, it just doesn’t align right to the bottom or top, I have to fool around with the settings for about 1 hour before anything happens. Once I got that done, … I can’t list the problems that come with this program. I think I’ll just shred it like what I did with Vista.

In fact, Office 2007 Menus and Toolbars could be show again. Just download and install Classic Menu for Office 2007 from
http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice , you will see the Main Menu Bar, Standard Toolbar, Formatting Toolbar in Excel 2007, Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.

I use Office daily professionally. I have EVERY TOOLBAR in all office products, including Visio and Project, customized. I have moved almost every icon on the standard toolbars so they are grouped the way I need them - for speed and accuracy. I have also located certain toolbars on the bottom and edges of the screen because I have found those locations to afford me faster operations, especially in generating any type of drawing.

In addition, the professional version of Adobe Acrobat adds icons to the Office toolbars - icons I can manipulate.

Office 2007 may be great for Office dummies - but what about the pros who buy the expensive products?

As it stans today, I’m staying with Office 2003 forever!

I was very disapointed by the new cutesy ribbon. I can see how it could be useful to office newbies, but I have like many others of you customized everything in 2003. I could do anything I needed to quickly and easily. Now I have to search for everything in all of the programs. I appreciate the link to the add-in, but I have already spent hundreds of dollars for office. Microsoft couldn’t have thrown in some old code to make the 10% of us happy. We are most likely to upgrade as each new upgrade comes out.

Just as a sidenote I took an office class in college (I have been using office since I was 13) and the test was all based on were the icons were. I had customized all of the menus and didn’t know where the default locations were. Maybe we shouldn’t be able to make programs the most useful and productive for us.

Thanks for listening to my rantings

Time to update my workplace’s old Office 2000 and have been reading comments about Office 2007. Not terribly excited about what I’ve read about the ribbon. I’ve customized the toolbars because it’s more efficient for my work (I’m an administrative secretary squeezing 40 hours of work into 30…it’s what I’m budgeted for.).

So…what’s the recommendation: Get Office 2007 (and download the classic menu bar)? or get Office 2003?

Thanks.

I just started a new job last week. I’d used previous versions of Office for years, and I never had difficulty adapting whenever Microsoft came out with a new version to replace the old version with a newer version, because the newer versions usually retained the basic design of the older versions, albeit with a few new features.

Not so with Office 2007. Here I’d been telling this guy that I knew Office inside and out, during my job interview, only to find myself trying on the first day of my new job to figure out where all of the features I was familiar with had gone.

Thankfully, my new boss did have a high speed Internet connection, so I was able to use Help (which is increasingly impossible to use with Microsoft products if one is not online at the time). But I still found myself having to look up the same things several times before I could remember how to perform certain basic functions I’d always taken for granted before. I have a feeling I’ll be doing that for quite a few weeks before I’m really comfortable with Office 2007.

Naturally, none of this occurred during my leisure time. It occurred in the context of a new job, working under a microscope for a computer-illiterate guy who wanted everything done immediately, and who had no idea of the kind of challenge I was facing. The worst part was that when I would express frustration with the situation, it made me look as if my previous claims concerning my extensive computer knowledge and expertise had been fraudulent.

Later, I noticed an ad in the bus I took home from work. It emphasized that Office 2007 was very, very different from previous versions. That, in my opinion, is an understatement. Microsoft seems to think that’s a selling point. I beg to differ. It might be a selling point to someone who’s never used Office before, but realistically, how many people is that? Office has long been the default software in professional offices, and computer professionals don’t want to have to learn a new program from scratch every time Microsoft decides to upgrade. It inhibits productivity to have to do so.

What made things even worse was that I assumed that one would be able to bring back the menubars simply by opening up the Options function and choosing that particular option. From what I can tell, that is not the case.

What Microsoft should have done was to make it so that whenever one opens an Office application, one is presented with a choice: “Do you want the new Office 2007 interface, or the classic Office interface with a menubar?” One of the buttons on the main tab which is shown whenever you first open the program should say “Show Classic Menubar”. For people who have used Office for years, it’s a slap in the face for the company to create a new interface which essentially negates all of the time long-time users have spent in learning Microsoft Office programs inside and out.

The new Office Ribbon is horrible. Sucks. It look like a child toy, cartoon even. The fucntionality is TERRIBLE! U guess I will use Office 2003 forever.

Microsoft has positively butchered Office 2007. It is one thing to upgrade an application to improve functionality and ergonomics, yet another to create such an abortion. After using it for months I still cannot find many necessary functions, and am stuck looking at ones that I don’t want and will never, ever use. The lack of personalization options is an absolute shame.

Unfortunately I am stuck with this piece of garbage to remain compatible with my peers. Something about Office 2003 no longer being offered on new business hardware. I guess there’s a reason for that.

The good thing is that Microsoft will surely come out with Office 2008 or 2009 that will improve on the shortcomings, just like with Windows 95 - another imfamous piece of Microsoft garbage. It will only cost us another $600 for the upgrade. What a scam.

If you don’t absolutely need Office 2007 stick with 2003.

Count me as a fan. I like how the ribbon changes automatically if I double-click on the item I’m using. I hated turning toolbars on & off because I wanted screen real estate for my work. Plus, the 2007 file format is MUCH MUCH better. It’s compressed XML, and I’ve seen Excel docs compress by a factor of ten. Plus, since it’s not binary, it’s a lot less likely to get corrupted.

HUGE learning curve, but on the other side it’s much better.

I’m a 12-year Office pro, including macro development in VBA.

Off the top of my head list of Word 2007 problems:

Can’t customise anything anymore - Microsoft know better than you.
Autotext cannot be turned off, leading to repeated mistakes especially - the wrong date.
Menu items MS deems “unpopular” are buried deep and take ages to find.
The page jumps around in Web view.
Cursor won’t move when it comes to a XML separation point.
Can’t see dark buttons on the Quick access toolbar when using the black colour scheme.
Printed characters are now always thinner than they should be.
You have to be online for help now. (If your on your laptop in a cafe, then no help for you.)
Ribbon takes up the top of the screen which is the most important area for horizontal screen laptops.

I can list a hundred more problems if I set myself the task of noting them when they happen. Having said that, beginners love it.

Using a car analogy, Microsoft’s idea went something like this:

“Since people don’t use 3rd and 4th gear, we’ll remove 3rd and 4th gear and insert 1.5 gear and 2.5 gear. The proper answer was to teach people to use 3rd gear and 4th gear. A bit to obvious I guess.

Martin Gifford.

What a user already knows, applied to the new, is intuitive software. As an aside, this makes me wonder if the new user interface Ribbons for Windows Office are going down well. I don’t know the answer, but these comments ona post by Chris Pirillo are funLater, I noticed an ad in the bus I took home from work. It emphasized that Office 2007 was very, very different from previous versions. That, in my opinion, is an understatement. Microsoft seems to think that’s a selling point. I beg to differ. It

I’ve been using Office 2007 since some time in the Spring, and I don’t ever want to go back to the old menu-only model. I spend a significant portion of my billable time creating VBA enhancements to PowerPoint, and I’ve added ribbon support for all of my old menu-driven functionality. It looks great!

All that having been said, however, I find the Custom UI Editor to be really clunky. That, in conjunction with the Save As facility of Office (or at least PowerPoint, for sure) makes working on VBA kind of cumbersome. Every time you do the Save As *.ppam, it wipes out the custom UI xml that was paart of the previous .ppam file. Then you have to load the Cusdtom UI Editor, copy in your own custom XML (you *did* save it, didn’t you?) and resave the .ppam. None of that seems to be very well-thought out. Or am I missing something obvious here?

Office 2007 is an abomination. It is slower for me to do basic things and nearly impossible to do more complex things. I need a formatting toolbar at all times, and having to click everytime I want it and watch a new menu scroll into place is just plain stupid when the buttons used to be there all the time. Rolling buttons and menus create visual confusion. I liked office 2003, why can’t they keep a similar layout and have a new file format if that is an improvement? Now I keep office 2003 and 2007 on my computer so I can always go back to 2003 to edit a document when I can’t find the function buried in 2007. What a waste of time and space…. not to mention I still have the macintosh version of office 2004 running natively outside my windows virtual machine to deal with native mac files which don’t read correctly in 2003 or 2007….

This is all marketing. Do you think Microsuck really cares? This new product will justify millions of dollars coming as people will need to update themselves with.. guess.. “Microsoft Training”!!

You create a product and a service system that produces even more revenue. It’s got nothing to do with actually ’satisfying’ people. The only satisfaction is the bank account for Bill Gates swelling even larger.

Windows XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro are difficult to improve upon (for Windows users). They then release a confusing OS (Vista) and office package (2007) that requires even the experts to have to plunk down the dollars and register for new and updated training. (side note: the new OS is so bloated that IT departments even have to plunk down dollars on new hardware).

Hey people.. It’s nothing personal.. It’s business!!

I’ve been using Office 2007 most of this year. I’ve grown to like the ribbon as it reveals options that were more difficult to get to under the old 2003 menu system. On my work computer, the company is still using Office 2003 and it is clearly INFERIOR to 2007. Also .DOCX files seem to be smaller than .DOC files.

I just wish they would provide more choice in changing their color schemes for Office 2007. Right now I think all that is available is black, silver and blue. None of which I think look real good.

Sometimes, you need to clean house, get rid of the old junk before you can move forward into the future. That is what MS has done here. I wish they would do this with Windows! Write a whole new code base from zero. I bet the system would be 1/3 the size of what Windows is now and orders of magnitude faster.

I am just so pissed I wish I could yell at some MS designers.
Thanks for making me lose so much time.

Hi All,

From Classic VB 6.0 i’m unable to put my icon on the command button on office 2007.
Could you please guide us? Your prompt reply would be appreciated

Looking forward your reply.

Thanks & Regards
Ashokkumar P

Yes the old ribbon….kind of makes me think of visions of oversized - gaudy - hideous and unnecessary tangled bit of fluff stuck to a fat bridesmaids ***!!! Similar to the ribbon in Office 2007.
Sorry but I am not fooled by this marketing BS. As one of the more skilled MS persons in our office I would like to thank MS for making me the designated rep who will most likely get stuck helping those find the print set up or some other basic task now hidden somewhere in that dame ribbon…too bad I don’t reap the financial benfits of re-training competent, well experienced staff how to “format” their documents.

Shawn:

…I have learned that it is the rare person that actually uses custom toolbars, non-default floating toolbar windows, dockable panels, etc….

If there really is a 10% that actually customizes toolbars, that should be reason enough to keep the option available (so says the person who knows nothing about business).
I mean, for those who don’t use it, the option to customize is certainly low priority. But for those of us who do, it is important enough to influence purchasing decisions.

Look, I created an entire Word template, for use mainly with my fiction, but I also use it occasionally when working on homework.
Isn’t the idea of a toolbar to have the commands we use most readily available at all times…rather than sifting through menus and dialog boxes to find them?
That template depends heavily on the four or five toolbars I created for it (plus something like three different styles, but they’re less of an issue).

We don’t have to be a majority to be very loud. The fact that some people want the ability to customize should be reason enough to make it available; the rest of the world, who doesn’t want to use it, doesn’t have to.
As a for instance…I’m using Office 97 on my computer, all so that I can still use my customized toolbars. I would be using Office XP, but the license on my dad’s copy isn’t good for two computers.
For me, that’s reason enough NOT to use Office 2007. And I know I’m just one consumer…but we don’t have to be a majority to be very loud. And from the looks of this webpage, those of us who dislike the 2007 layout are very loud indeed.

Shawn:

“…I have learned that it is the rare person that actually uses custom toolbars, non-default floating toolbar windows, dockable panels, etc….”

Wow, what a monkey - and what a complete, misleading falasy. Written like a true programmer. Maybe Chris should go back to his locked, dark, windowless room and continue programming without any sense of the end user who will ultimately have to use it. The Programmer always knows best, right Chris? What a ****.

Office 2007 is HORRIBLE!! What a gigantic leap backwards.

I agree with those who are completely dissatisfied with Office 2007. All of our office computers in the past have run on XP with Office 2003, but we recently had to purchase some new systems, and of course they came pre-loaded with Office 2007. It is a shame that Microsoft has lost their business sense. ANY time you market a new product that is completely re-formatted you should provide the option to retain the formatting from the old version for those customers who use it in a business setting. We povide a service that depends on our CSR’s being able to work swiftly, and they had customized their toolbars with the options that best enhanced their productivity. Now, not only do they have to search through endless “ribbons” of nonessential garbage, once they do finally find the tools they’re looking for, they have no way to customize for quicker access in future. Sure, you can go online and buy a program to customize the interface so it resembles and functions like Office 2003, but it is assinine that we should have to PURCHASE another program written by some other disgruntled user in order to restore the functionality of the program as we had it before MIcrosoft in its infinite wisdom decided what was “best” for us. Just my two-cents’ worth, after spending an hour searching online for solutions.

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I’ve spent a billable hour trying to find a single PPT instruction. That’s a lot of dollars. In ten minutes I’ve found two Office ‘classic menu’ plug ins . And both sub $50US. Time to kill the ribbon.

First the idiots at Redmond forget to include classic mode, (never mind actually skinning office). And then they put the idiot who developed the ribbon in charge of the NT 7 UI!

Steve Jobs and Tux will be laughing - if I am going to learn a new UI it’s _not_ going to be on Windows