Office 2010: Introducing the customisable ribbon

The decision to replace the familiar menus and toolbars with the new Office 2007 ribbon was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. Even allowing for the initial irritation of not knowing which aisle the baked beans have been moved to, many users have found the ribbon can reduce rather than enhance productivity.

Instead of vital options always being visible and accessible in the same place on the static toolbars, significant options come and go depending on which ribbon is active, and the most commonly used options skulk behind the mysterious Office button. Those who have bothered to reposition and populate their Quick Access Toolbar may have alleviated the problem to some extent, but the lack of any ability to customise the ribbon itself adds insult to injury.

Enter the beta version of Office 2010 and what looks like a U-turn from Microsoft. When Office 2007 was released, the main reason given for restricting customisation of the ribbon seemed to be the difficulty of supporting a product without a consistent interface. Microsoft rationalised the change by arguing that most people who changed their toolbars and did so by accident.

Changing the ribbon in Office 2010 requires deliberate action to choose particular options and accepting the changes, so there won’t be issues with people accidentally dragging things to the wrong place or closing them altogether. Although you have pretty free access to create and populate your own custom ribbon tabs, what you can do with the built-in tabs is restricted. You can’t add commands to built-in tab groups and you can’t remove individual tools within a built-in tab group.

But you can add, move and remove whole tab groups and indeed move and hide whole tabs. There is also an option to reset all changes back to the original setting either for a selected ribbon tab, or for all ribbon and quick access toolbar customisations.

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