Ribbon Customizer – Add-In for Office 2007 that allows full customization of the ribbon interface

Posted on July 19, 2007 at 9:20 am

I thought it was quite silly of Microsoft to sell Office 2007 with it’s new fancy ribbon interface and not give the user the ability to modify the ribbon! RibbonCustomizer is a third-party tool that Microsoft has been promoting which allows you to modify just about everything on the ribbon interface: tabs, buttons, sort order, etc. There is a Free Starter Edition that allows you to add groups to tabs and customize the ribbon dialog.

The Professional edition is only $30, so it’s not a terribly large amount, but of course we are talking about simply modifying the buttons on a toolbar! The program integrates well with Office 2007 and has a very easy to use interface. You can customize individual commands for each tab, add or remove entire tabs, add and remove groups within each tab, or create your own tab and put your own groups and commands onto it.

The RibbonCustomizer appears as a button on the View tab in any of the Office products. It’s the button called Customize Ribbon all the way to the right.

Click on the button and choose Customize to get the customization dialog. In Office 2007, a tab is one whole section of ribbon, such as Home, Insert, View, etc. Each tab contains a bunch of groups such as Font, Clipboard, or Alignment. You can add or remove groups from tabs.

You can also customize the groups by adding and removing specific commands from a group. If you don’t want to mess with the default groups, you can always create your own group by clicking New Group and create a modified version of the original and then place that new group onto the tab.

Another cool feature about RibbonCustomizer is the Classic UI tab that can be added. Basically, if you feel more comfortable with how Office 2003 or earlier looked, you can have the program add a new tab to the front or end of the other tabs that will display all of the buttons in the classic way. However, they only have the Classic UI tab for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word 2007.

Like I had mentioned before, you can create multiple customized ribbons and switch between them easily by just going to the View tab and choosing the one you want. You can do this by creating a “package” for each customized bar. You can then share you package with someone else easily by simply sending them the package file.

Try out the free version as that might be enough for most people’s purposes!

[tags]ribbon customizer, office 2007 ribbon interface, customize office ribbon[/tags]

» Filed Under MS Office Tips

Comments

One Response to “Ribbon Customizer – Add-In for Office 2007 that allows full customization of the ribbon interface”

Erick said on : July 17th, 2008 at 7:54 am

Yes, this is great. A big help.

Now if only I could have something that allowed me to lose the stupid blue color and just have Office 2007 also inherit my regular Windows UI colors.

Any leads on that? Is there any utility, free or paid, which allows me to do that?