Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Debate will surely continue over the Ribbon interface in Office 2007. For those performing support duties, having an interface that is “locked down” can be a great benefit. For individual users, and power users like me who want control over their system, the inability of customizing the Ribbon is a big drawback.

Until now.

Patrick Schmid’s RibbonCustomizer Professional 1.0 ($29.95) is exactly what you’d want it to be. The add-in for Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word adds a group to the View menu. Click it and this slick little utility lets you move or remove groups from any tab on the Ribbon.

Since I work with text-only documents for this newsletter, I never need the Styles menu on the Home tab. Instead, I want to access Track Changes (which is on the Review tab -– which is inconvenient). With RCP I can remove the Styles group and place the entire Tracking group on the Home tab with a couple of clicks.

Alternatively, RCP lets me modify a group, albeit not the way you’d think. You can’t change a group of icons directly -– groups are “fixed” by Microsoft. Instead, I used RCP’s other slick feature: the ability to create a custom group of icons.

First, I created a new group (I called it My Changes) and populated this group with just the features (in this case, two different “track changes” features) I wanted. You can populate your group with any of nearly 1,000 choices; the available items are arranged alphabetically, and I had no problem finding what I needed. If 1000 items seems a little overwhelming -- or you just don’t remember the exact name of the feature you want -- you can use the Search feature to limit the number of displayed items. I entered “changes” in the search box and found Track Changes quickly.

Each feature in your new group can appear in a “normal” size (appearing as a text link or drop-down menu, for example) or “large” (seen as a large icon). Figure 1 shows my new group, with one large and one normal-sized icon.

Figure 1

The inability to remove a feature from one of the predefined groups is a limitation of Microsoft’s design, not RCP’s power, and this roll-your-own-group approach is a satisfactory workaround.

If you don’t need an entire tab (or just want to hide it for a while), RCP can handle that chore, too, and you can toggle between your customized Ribbon and the standard Ribbon with a couple of clicks. If you want to switch between sets of customizations (one for editing text documents, another that puts the styles and formatting in a special arrangement for working with brochures), RCP can help you define what it calls a customization scheme. Unfortunately, you can’t clone features of one customization to another to get a head start when all you want to do is tweak one of your customizations. That’s a minor quibble about a utility that finally gives you back the control Microsoft should never have taken away.

RCP works with Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word; I tested it with Word and Excel. I ran into no problems -- no hiccups, no slow response, no problems whatsoever. Given I’m always leery of installing an Office add-in, and given how new Office 2007 still is, I’m pleased to say that nothing could have been easier.

The author provides a 30-day free trial at http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/index.php. I strongly suggest you view the Feature Tour. Part 1 is a video tour that shows how to move or remove entire icon groups from the tabs. Part 2 offers an explanation with screen shots about how to set up a new group. Five minutes spend watching and reading will pay off handsomely.

If you’ve made the move to Office 2007 but are frustrated with only having the Quick Access Toolbar available for customizing your environment, you’ll love RibbonCustomizer.

-- James E. Powell

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