Hands on: Customise Word 2007 ribbons

Over the past year I have reviewed both Office 2007 betas and the final product.

In each review I have stated, in so many words that, apart from the Quick Access Toolbar, the interface cannot be customised in the way that previous versions could.

This doesn’t mean that it can’t be done at all. Microsoft has provided RibbonX, an XML-based language for customising the ribbons, but this is intended for developers, rather than end users.

However, one such developer, Patrick Schmid, has produced Ribboncustomizer, which does all the clever scary stuff for us.

You can create your own tabs with personalised ribbons – either using exiting groups from other ribbons or creating your own groups and populating them with commands.

You can move groups between ribbons, delete groups and much more. So, if you want the Page Setup group to be part of the Home ribbon, it can be. You can save customised schemes for use on other PCs and view your customisations as RibbonX code.

There are a few limitations – you can’t change the order of the existing Microsoft tabs or the order of the groups within them, though you can place your own anywhere among them.

You also cannot remove the tab that contains the Ribboncustomizer group, for reasons that should be obvious. Finally, should you make a complete mess of things you can remove all the customisation with two clicks.

You’ll find it here and you can get a 30-day trial of the full product before deciding whether you want to part with $29.99 (£15.25), or revert to the free ‘starter’ edition. Note that you’ll also need Microsoft .Net Framework version 2.0 or later – you can download this free here.

Where are they now?
As well as having many new features, Word 2007 has produced several casualties – features that have been, in Microsoft’s words, ‘Removed from product’.

One such is the Text Effects, such as Las Vegas Lights, Sparkle and the migraine-inducing Shimmer. Since I’ve yet to meet anyone over the age of 10 who actually likes these, this is probably no great loss.

Strangely, text effects created in previous versions are preserved when opened in 2007, and survive being saved in .docx format.

Other features that have fallen by the wayside include speech recognition (now part of Windows Vista), getting pictures straight from a scanner or camera, most of the online collaboration and web tools, script (as opposed to VBA) macros and, famously, the Office Assistant.

Since there are no more toolbars, one of my favourites, the function key toolbar, is also a victim of collateral damage.

The useful thing about this is not that you can use it with the mouse, but that the button labels show what the various function keys do, and those labels change accordingly when you press the Shift, Alt and Control keys or combinations thereof.

Microsoft keeps this crib sheet hidden in Word 2003 and earlier. It doesn’t appear in View, Toolbars, but if you click on Customise in that menu and turn to the Toolbars tab, you’ll find it.