SubscribeRelease of RibbonCustomizer Professional V0.2
I have talked a bunch of times about it before, but today is the big day:
RibbonCustomizer Professional V0.2 is now available for purchase!
Big deal that I am releasing an Office 2007 add-in? It is! This is the first time ever that I am selling a piece of software, it is my first Office 2007 add-in release and today is also the official launch of Office 2007. If you have been eagerly waiting for this and already know that you just have to buy this add-in for $29.99, you can do so right now. If you want to know everything there is to know about this add-in (in excruciating detail), keep reading.
You might remember that I announced earlier that there will be a free edition of RibbonCustomizer as well. I will make this free RibbonCustomizer Starter Edition available for download next week. The Starter Edition will have less features than the Professional one. Check back for the announcement what will be in the Starter Edition tomorrow (Friday)!
Overview
What can RibbonCustomizer Professional V0.2 do for you? With it, you can customize the Ribbon of any Office 2007 Ribbon application with a simple to use user interface. It supports Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word 2007. RibbonCustomizer works in Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 as well as Windows Vista. Please note that it only supports the RTM versions of Office and Vista, and not any of the beta builds.
Activating your copy of RibbonCustomizer
After you installed RibbonCustomizer, you will find it on the View tab for Excel, PowerPoint and Word and on the Add-Ins tab for Access and Outlook. The first thing you will have to do is activate your copy. If you take a look at the View tab of Word, you’ll note that the icon for the “Customize Ribbon” button is grayed out. What you are looking at is in fact a split button though, similar e.g. to the Paste split button on the Clipboard group of the Home tab.
To activate your copy, click the label “Customize Ribbon” (not the icon), and you will see the following.
Click on “Activate RibbonCustomizer” and follow the steps in the following windows. Please make sure to specify a valid email address that you will have access to in the future! If you forget the password that you specify during the activation, the email address will be used to send you that password.
You can use RibbonCustomizer on up to two computers at the same time. If you are like me and have two computers (a desktop and a tablet), those two copies come in pretty handy. Especially if you consider for example that retail versions of Office generally allow you to install the same copy on a desktop and a portable, if they are used by the same user only (I am not a licensing expert, so check your Office EULA before attempting this!). However, in contrast to the Office license, RibbonCustomizer doesn’t require that the same user uses the two computers it is installed upon. You can easily reactivate a copy of RibbonCustomizer, if you moved it to a new machine as long as you don’t go over the two machines at the same time limit (there is also a limit on how many times in a certain time period you can reactivate it).
Integration into Office
As I already said, you will find the installed and activated add-in on the View tab for Excel, PowerPoint and Word and on the Add-Ins tab for Access and Outlook. After activation, in Word, the View tab will look like this:
While the PPT View tab will look as follows.
If you drop down the menu of the split button, you will see the following
The “Customize…” button in the menu opens the Customize dialog. You can also access this dialog faster by just clicking the icon of the split button. The toggle button “Show/Hide Customization” will show all selected customizations or hide them. The button is a quick way to switch all customizations on and off. I’ll discuss “Customization Schemes” later in this post. About shows the About screen of the add-in including the End User License Agreement.
Customize Ribbon Dialog
The Customize Ribbon dialog is where most of the action happens. Below you can see a screenshot of it in Vista (as I am running this in Virtual PC 2007, you don’t see any Aero Glass; VPC only supports Vista Basic).
If you can’t find the red and blue rectangles in your copy of RibbonCustomizer don’t be surprised. I added them to the screenshot for explanatory purposes.
So how does this work? The right hand side (blue) shows you the default Ribbon specified by Microsoft for the application you have open. For example, if I select Home in Word on the right hand side, I’ll see the following
Essentially, the add-in shows me the groups for the Home tab in the order that they are on that tab. On the side of the red rectangle, you see the Ribbon as it is currently customized. If you pick Home there, it will show you:
If you want to remove a group from the Home tab, you can double-click it here, or click it and then select “Remove Group”. If you want to add any group from the original Ribbon (blue) to your customization (red), then double-click the group in the right hand side, or select it and press “Add Group”.
If you want to reset a tab that you customized on the red side to its original state, use “Reset Tab”.
You can use the up and down buttons to the left of the part of the red rectangle that shows the groups for one tab to move the currently selected group up and down.
The top part of the red rectangle works similar to the bottom part, except that double-clicking doesn’t work, which is on purpose (picture yourself having just spent 20 mins making the “perfect” tab, and then losing it all through an accidental double-click…). In addition to adding and removing tabs from the default Microsoft Ribbon, you can also create your own New tab. If you press that button, you’ll a dialog where it asks you to enter a label for the new tab.
The “Reset Ribbon” button will erase all your customizations and reset the Ribbon to the default Microsoft one. Use it with caution! As a rule, all core tabs that are listed after the “Add-Ins” tab are not visible at all times.
Please note that the core tabs shown in the Customize Ribbon dialog might not all be visible at all times. So for example, the Word Print Preview tab will only appear when you are in print preview. Also note that a new tab you added that is listed in the dialog after the Add-Ins tab, might actually end up appearing as the first tab in the Office application. To prevent such surprises, you should make sure to put all your new own tabs before the Add-Ins tab in the Tabs list.
Limitations of the Customize Ribbon dialog
There are limitations in regards to what you can do with the Customize Ribbon dialog. Most are limitations imposed by Office, which means that there simply is no way to do that for anyone with Office 2007 (or in developer speak, it is a limitation of RibbonX. To continue in developer speak, if you use startFromScratch=true, you can get around most of those limitations, but you should use that attribute very rarely and only under special circumstances. See my RibbonX UI stlye guide for details on that. Using this attribute is simply not an option for RibbonCustomizer). I will include in the following list in parenthesis whether a limitation is imposed by Office or RibbonCustomizer:
- You cannot remove the tab that contains RibbonCustomizer. That means, in Excel, PowerPoint and Word, the View Tab cannot be removed. In Access and Outlook, the Add-Ins tab cannot be removed. The reason should be pretty obvious: if you were able to remove the tab that contained RibbonCustomizer, there would be no way for you to get back to it and undo that customization. (RibbonCustomizer limitation)
- You cannot reorder Microsoft tabs (Office limitation)
- You cannot use a contextual tab outside its original tab set. That means, you cannot use the SmartArt Tools | Design tab e.g. as a core tab, or with the tab set Chart Tools. Note: Tabs listed under “Tabs” in red blue side are core tabs, e.g. Home, Insert. (Office limitation)
- You cannot use a core tab within a contextual tab set (Office limitation).
- You cannot reorder groups on their original tab. For example, you cannot change the order of groups on the Home tab for the groups that are there by default. However, if you added the Clipboard group to the Insert tab, you can freely choose where to place it (Office limitation).
- The groups on the Add-Ins tab that hold the UI for legacy (pre-2007) add-ins, cannot be added to any other tab. You can however add them to the QAT (Office limitation).
- You cannot modify any existing group (Office limitation).
- You don’t see any of your add-ins (incl. RibbonCustomizer) nor any modifications applied via RibbonX outside of RibbonCustomizer in the Customize Ribbon dialog. Office 2007 unfortunately does not provide a way to query the Ribbon, so RibbonCustomizer cannot determine what modifications have been made by other add-ins, documents or templates to the Ribbon already (Office limitation). As you cannot remove RibbonCustomizer itself from the Ribbon, it is not shown in the Customize Ribbon dialog.
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You cannot create your own group. This also means that you cannot add or remove individual commands on the Ribbon. This is a limitation of V0.2 of RibbonCustomizer. The next version due in early 2007 will provide that ability. If you purchase RibbonCustomizer Professional now, you will save $10 compared to purchasing it once the new version is available: RibbonCustomizer currently sells for $29.99. The next version will cost $39.99. If you purchase it now, you will receive a free upgrade to the next version.
RibbonCustomizer will present you with an error message if you attempt to do anything that is not possible due to those limitations.
Cool features of the Customize Ribbon dialog - Non-Modal dialog
You have used the Ribbon so much already, that you know exactly what each of the over 100 groups every one of the 24 Ribbons Office 2007 does and what commands it contains, don’t you? Do you want to test yourself? Then select “All Tabs” at the bottom of the tab selection portion of the blue rectangle! If you, like me, fail that test pretty badly, then RibbonCustomizer has just the right feature for you. The Customize Ribbon dialog is actually non-modal. That means, you can play around with the Office application as much as you want while the dialog is open. So if you e.g. don’t know what the Text group on the Word Insert tab contains, then simply click on that tab on the ribbon (you might have to move the RibbonCustomizer window out of the way to get a better look). If you don’t know what a group for a contextual tab contains, then insert an object of the appropriate type (e.g. a SmartArt if you want to take a look at the SmartArt contextual tabs) and switch to the tab you want to look at. Please note that your own customizations though won’t be applied while the dialog is open. You need to close it with “OK” to see the result of your customization on the Ribbon! Also, the RibbonCustomizer split button is grayed out (disabled) while the Customize Ribbon dialog is open.
Cool features of the Customize Ribbon dialog - Show RibbonX
Another cool feature is the “Show RibbonX” button highlighted below.
If you press it, you will see something like this:
What it shows you is the RibbonX that RibbonCustomizer generated for the customization you currently are looking at in the Customize Ribbon dialog. If you understand a bit of RibbonX, the above means that the Clipboard group was removed from the Home tab of Word. With “Copy to Clipboard”, you can easily use the generated RibbonX as a way to jump start your own RibbonX uses. Please note that the dialog won’t show any RibbonX, if you added your own new tab. It’s a technical limitation that I’ll overcome for the next version. If you are interested as to why this is case, ask me in a comment and I’ll explain it.
A word on Outlook
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. Essentially each object type (appointment, post, email, RSS, contact, task, etc) has a different ribbon and for the same object type, there are multiple ribbons for different things you can do with it (e.g. there is one ribbon for reading an email and another one for writing an email). Also, some things of a ribbon might not be visible when you first look at it, but they appear in the Customize Ribbon dialog. E.g., the ribbon for reading an email has tabs that are used for editing one, but they only become visible after you selected Message tab, Actions, Other Actions, Edit Message.
Customization Schemes
That brings me to the most difficult to understand, but also very powerful and convenient feature of “Customization Schemes”. In Office 2003, you can create a toolbar or menu, and only display it when you needed it. This is used e.g. to create task-based toolbars or menus that contain everything one needs to perform one task (e.g. proof-reading). Customization Schemes allow you to do the same and more. If you take a look at the Customization Schemes submenu, you might see the following:
Or, it might look like this:
So what is this menu item Default shown under the heading User? That is the customization you made in the Customize Ribbon dialog! It will only appear after you used that dialog for the first time for this particular ribbon. This item gives you the option to switch all the customizations you made in the dialog off, and later on again. This is different from “Show/Hide Customization” which toggles all customizations on or off.
If you click More, you’ll see the Customization Schemes dialog, which shows all the customizations that you loaded specifically (meaning, not performed in the Customize Ribbon dialog). For a brand-new installation, this is what you will see:
If I open that dialog in PowerPoint, click Add and add this file, the dialog will look like this:
So what did I actually do? I download the package file PPTInsertTabSlidesGroup.ribx and saved it to a new folder in my Documents folder. This particular .RIBX package contains a small customization, namely one that adds the Slides group that is on the PPT Home Tab to the Insert tab. So next time that I go to the Insert tab when I want to insert a slide, the group to do that is actually going to be there, as the following screenshot shows (look all the way on the left):
If you share with me a certain aversion for the WordArt group being on the PPT contextual format tabs for SmartArt Tools, Chart Tools and Drawing Tools, you can download the PPTReplaceWordArtWithFont.ribx file. This particular package replaces all those WordArt groups with the Font group from the Home tab. As the WordArt group would no longer be accessible after that though, it adds it as well to the Design tab. After loading both those customization, the Customization Schemes submenu now looks like this:
As you can see, I can now toggle very quickly individual customizations on and off. You might wonder what that RIBX file format is. It is a format I created specifically for RibbonCustomizer that contains the actual customization in form of RibbonX. So why didn’t I just use RibbonX itself, meaning a straightforward XML file? Remember those 19 different Outlook ribbons? If you load a RibbonX that doesn’t match the ribbon you are trying to apply it to, you are going to get in trouble. RibbonX itself does not have a way of specifying for which ribbon a particular customization is. The RIBX file format though does! So if you try to load a package file that is not for the current ribbon, RibbonCustomizer will give you an error message and not load it. Creating your own package file is cumbersome in this version (improving that is on my to-do list). I’ll blog another day about how to create your own package file. Once I did that, I hope to get an exchange of package files between users on my website going!
RibbonCustomizer lets you however also load plain RibbonX files (assumed to have the extenion .XML). To do so, change the file type in the Open dialog that you see after you press Add to “RibbonX Files (*.xml)”. You can use this e.g. to quickly see how your own RibbonX code will look like when loaded into Office. Your RibbonX code can contain callbacks. RibbonCustomizer will strip them all out before asking Office to apply the customization!
Language support
RibbonCustomizer is currently only available in English. It should work with non-English languages of Office 2007 as well, but that configuration is currently not supported (meaning, I didn’t test whether it works and if it doesn’t work for you, please don’t be angry at me). What you cannot do though is using language-specific labels for your own new tabs. There, you are limited to one label in one language for each new tab.
Updates & Support
I will fix all bugs as soon as I only can. If I judge the bug to be major, I’ll notify everyone via email. If the bug is minor in my opinion, I’ll post the updated version and announce it in my forums. Implementing the group creation feature is going to be a major development effort. Please use the forums to let me know whether you would rather see smaller improvements first (e.g. an easy way to save package files, RibbonCustomizer in multiple languages), or the group creation feature. Please note that you will definitely get a version of RibbonCustomizer that has the group creation feature no matter what the development order is, if you purchase it now! Similarly, submit all your feature requests on the forums as well.
If you need support, then you can use the forums as well or, as a paying customer, email me. Please see the support page for details how to get support.
Accessibility
RibbonCustomizer Professional V0.2 is not accessible. I am 100% committed to making it accessible though, and this should happen in the near future.
Summary
If you want all those features and think RibbonCustomizer is worth its $29.99, then purchase it now.
If you rather want to see first what the free Starter Edition has to offer before making your decision, then check back tomorrow.