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If you ask me about the customizability of the new Ribbon UI in Office 2007, my answer would be: too little, too difficult. Compared to previous Office versions, especially Office 2003, 2007 simply has a serious customization deficiency. In fact, most users will probably conclude that the Ribbon cannot be customized at all.

In contrast, Office 2003 is the most customizable Office ever. You can locate your menus and toolbars anywhere you want on the screen, create your own menus and toolbars, change icons and labels, modify toolbars and menus, and so on. There is almost no limit as to what components of the UI a user can alter. Customizing Office 2003 is also easy to do, as alteration can be achieved with a few mouse clicks.

The Ribbon UI of Office 2007 though is a completely different story. Static with very limited customizability is probably the description most users would give this new UI. Most users probably only discover the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and then conclude that this must be it. Is that really all there is? How did we end up with such a lack of customization?

Why Office 2007 has a customization deficiency

Microsoft had to create the Ribbon UI completely from scratch. If you have read through some of the Office UI Bible, you can get an idea of the huge amount of resources that went into creating this new UI. However, even at Microsoft resources are limited. Therefore, the need for every feature of the new UI had to be justified. Real customizability was unfortunately a feature that didn’t make the cut.

As the Office UI Bible explains, the UI team could not make the case for customizability, if only ~1.9% of the Office 2003 sessions of roughly one hundred million users were with customization. The case is even weaker, as 85% of those customizations involve four or fewer buttons. Therefore, Microsoft decided to support the case encountered by 99.7% of all users: no customization or four or fewer buttons. That left the remaining 0.3% in the rain. Those 0.3% represent around 1.35 million people ,as there are 450 million paid Office customers, and are also the ones who are most likely to participate in the Office development process, e.g. through participation in the beta. My opinion about this approach can be found in my designing with statistics post.

In addition to this argument, a highly customizable UI unfortunately presents a massive support issue. You can see this, if you try to remember how many times you accidentally moved a menu or toolbar in Office 2003, or customized it otherwise by accident. You probably know how to undo your accident, but many, many users do not.

Why do I keep calling it a customization deficiency?

Microsoft decided that in order to make those 99.7% of all users happy, one toolbar was enough. In order to prevent accidental customization and make sure users always have that toolbar accessible, it became non-floatable. Born therefore was the Quick Access Toolbar. That is not the end of the customization story though. There is also one Ribbon tab that you can hide or show, namely the Developer tab. You can also customize the status bar fully. Toolbars and menus created in a previous Office version and by legacy (meaning non-Office 2007) add-ins can also be used, but not created, in 2007. Last, but not least, galleries can be customized. Some “customize” themselves automatically, e.g. the recent document list or the shapes gallery. Others can be manually customized by, especially in Word. For example, the galleries for page numbers, headers and footers can be customized by the user.

But that’s it. Seriously, that is it. Everything else, especially the vast majority of the Ribbon, is static and cannot be customized. Therefore, describing Office 2007 as having a “customization deficiency” or complaining about the lack of customization in it, reflects appropriately the state of affairs in 2007. (To be fair, there is a way to customize the Ribbon itself. Keep reading, I’ll get to it).

Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)

The QAT is the main component of the Ribbon customization capabilities. In fact, 10 out of 15 major customization capabilities listed in the Office UI Bible revolve around the QAT. You can add everything except an entire Ribbon tab to the QAT. That includes any control, entire groups, galleries, menu items, macros and any command that is not present in the Ribbon. You can add commands in three ways. Either by right-clicking on any command or group in the Ribbon directly, by using the Customize tab in the Options dialog as shown in the first screenshot below, or by using the Quick Customize menu as shown in the second screenshot.

There are up to 40 spaces on the QAT. You can add separators to the QAT to structure it better as well, and determine your own order of commands. You are probably thinking now: “it’s a toolbar, why wouldn’t I be able to have separators and reorder commands?” With Office 2007 everything you can do is worthwhile pointing out, because what is not mentioned, won’t work. So the QAT won’t float, but can either be in the title bar of the window, or below the ribbon as shown in this post.

A feature that didn’t exist before with a toolbar is the automatic assignment of keyboard shortcuts to every item in the QAT. The screenshot below shows you what the keyboard shortcuts are if you add a whole lot of items.>

Adding a group to the QAT is rather useful, as it allows you to make more than 40 commands accessible via the QAT while at the same time keeping some level of organization. Additionally, a group added to the QAT and then opened makes for a cool screenshot, as you can see below.

Developer Tab (does not apply to Access)

The Developer Tab contains all the features mostly relevant for developers which includes everyone writing in VBA, everyone integrating XML into an Office application and everyone working with content and ActiveX controls. Note that in Excel, PowerPoint and Word the functionality to view and record macros is not only on the Developer tab, but also on the View tab (PowerPoint 2007 does not have the ability to record macros). Therefore you do not need to display the Developer tab, if all you need is the Macro related functionality in those three applications. In Word, the Developer tab looks like it does in the following screenshot.

To activate the Developer tab, go into the Office button menu, Options, and choose “Show Developer tab in the Ribbon” in the Popular tab.

Status bar

The status bar is fully customizable, which means you decide what to include in it. To customize the status bar, right-click anywhere on it, and you’ll get the following menu

Legacy menus and toolbars

If you created your own menus and/or toolbars in earlier Office versions, where do they appear in 2007? What about menus and/or toolbars created by legacy (meaning non-Office 2007) add-ins? All of them appear in the same spot, namely on the “Add-Ins” tab. The “Add-Ins” tab will only be displayed, if there are any legacy menus/toolbars in existence, either from your own customizations or from add-ins. The following is a screenshot of my Word Add-Ins tab with the legacy add-in EndNote 7 installed.

Unfortunately, you cannot add any command from a legacy menu or toolbar to the QAT. What you can do though is add the group containing all legacy menus and/or the group containing all legacy toolbars to the QAT. You’d do this by right-clicking in the appropriate group on the Ribbon, as shown in the next screenshot.

Note that you can also see in this screenshot the “Delete Custom Toolbar” command, which allows you to get rid permanently of legacy toolbars you do not want anymore (there is a similar command for menus). This is not the same as not displaying a toolbar or menu in earlier Office versions. This option deletes the menu or toolbar forever. As the only way to recreate a toolbar or menu (except if an add-in is providing it) is to create it using a previous version of Office, you should be very careful with this delete command.

If you add the menus group to the QAT, it will look like the following.

Selecting the EndNote 7 menu, gives me

The toolbars group added to the QAT results in the following

Galleries

As mentioned above, some galleries, e.g. the recent document list, “customize” themselves. A lot of other galleries though can be customized manually. How a gallery is customized depends often times on the particular gallery itself. For example, the Themes gallery on the PowerPoint Design tab can be customized by browsing for themes on the computer or adding themes from Office Online. A new SmartArt though, for example, requires that it be created manually as an XML file.

Word has the greatest flexibility for customizing galleries. All galleries that insert some kind of text element in Word can be easily customized using the Quick Parts feature. To access it, select Quick Parts in the Text group of the Insert tab. The Building Blocks Organizer there, shown below, lets you edit and delete existing gallery content. If you want to add a new element to a gallery, then you have to create it in Word first, select it and use Quick Parts, Save Selection to Quick Parts Gallery. Alternatively, you can search for elements on Office Online as well.

Summary

Compared to Office 2003, Office 2007 has a serious customization deficiency. The new Ribbon UI is mainly static and only a limited number of elements are customizable, most notably the QAT. I personally think that this level of customization is sufficient for most users, and hence Microsoft has met its goal in this regard.

But..that’s not enough for me

If you want to move the entire Ribbon somewhere else on the screen, e.g. float it or dock it vertically, which would be beneficial for widescreen monitors, then you are simply out of luck. The Ribbon is where it is in Office 2007 and that cannot be changed.

However, if you are a power user, an add-in developer, an administrator charged with adding items to the Ribbon specific to your company, or a creator of templates that come with a customized UI, then what I have outlined so far doesn’t cut it for you. Microsoft did realize though that it has to provide some mechanism to customize the Ribbon itself. The rather large ecosystem of Office add-ins and templates simply depends completely on the ability to modify the Office UI. The UI team provided therefore the ability to (almost) completely modify the Ribbon using an XML language called RibbonX. The customization is created in RibbonX, which is then either embedded into an Office 2007 document or template, or is loaded into Office via a COM add-in.

If the Ribbon is indeed fully customizable, then why did I even bother writing this post? The answer is simple: Office 2007 does not ship with a user interface to customize the Ribbon. RibbonX however, as simple as it may be, poses a significant hurdle for anyone who wants to customize the Ribbon. In effect, it represents a barrier of entry to Ribbon customization, and requires that users learn the basics of XML, RibbonX and how to load RibbonX into Office. None of this should be a problem for an add-in developer, but for someone who simply used to create templates with a custom UI with a few mouse clicks (and might have never seen HTML, XML or any programming language), this is a significant challenge.

How can I learn RibbonX?

There are several ways for you to learn RibbonX:

• You can subscribe to and read my blog.
• You can buy a book on the subject. If you want to learn how to customize the Word 2007 Ribbon, then you can get a Word book for which I wrote a chapter on that topic (more on that in another post).
• You can read the “Customizing Office 2007″ posts in the Office UI Bible.
• You can utilize the MSDN Ribbon Developer Center.

I don’t want to learn RibbonX

If you simply don’t want to learn RibbonX, don’t have the time to learn it or consider XML to be out of your league, but still want to able to customize the Ribbon, you will have to turn to third parties. One of those third parties would be myself, as I am working on an add-in called RibbonCustomizer that allows a user to customize the Ribbon with a simple to use UI directly in an Office program. I made an alpha-version of the program available for Beta 2 (it won’t work with B2TR or RTM), and will provide the final version closer to the release of the OEM and retail versions of Office 2007. In the meantime, you can read an overview of RibbonCustomizer.

If you are working on something that allows the customization of the Ribbon, please email me with details and I will feature your project on this blog.

Conclusion

While Office 2007 has some built-in, easy to use customization feature that will satisfy most users, the more advanced form of customization is difficult to use. Microsoft raised the bar to customization with Office 2007 significantly, and I would not be surprised if this won’t stop some users and companies from adopting Office 2007. I hope though that via my blog and my add-in, I can lower the bar somewhat and put full UI customization back into the reach of most users.