Office 2007 RibbonCustomizer

I have been using Office 2007 through the beta process on a daily basis, primarily Outlook, Word and Powerpoint. I am not as overwhelmingly impressed with the Ribbon menu styling as most people are. I would probably like it a lot more if it was dockable.

But that may change with Patrick Schmid's Office add-in RibbonCustomizer Professional. The Ribbon in Office 2007 is not very customizable through the Office UI, but it is a somewhat open technology. Patrick's Office Add-in takes advantage of that to allow the user to easily make changes to the ribbon to suit how they work. RibbonCustomizer functionality includes:

Customize Ribbon Dialog
Add groups to tabs
Reset the ribbon 
Reset a tab
Load pre-defined RIBX packages 
Quickly switch multiple customizations on and off 
Show/Hide all customizations
Remove groups from tabs 
Reorder groups 
Add Microsoft tabs
Add new tabs
Remove tabs 
Reorder tabs

Of all the Office applications, Outlook 2007 makes the greatest use of the new ribbon. This is the case whether using Exchange server or not. If you make use of Patrick's RibbonCustomizer, you may have to do a lot of initial customization for the Outlook 2007 ribbon, or rather ribbons.

"Outlook has 19 different Ribbons (as a comparison, Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word have ONE ribbon each). Each of these ribbon needs to be customized separately. So if you customized the ribbon that you see when you read an email and wonder why the ribbon for reading an RSS post didn’t change, then please know that those are two different ribbons."

There will also be a reduced function RibbonCustomizer Starter Edition for free. 

Thanks, Patrick.

William Lefkovics