The first part of the feature tour showed you how RibbonCustomizer lets you choose which tabs and groups are displayed on your Ribbon. This is the second part of the tour, which will show you how to create your own groups, or in other words, how to add and remove individual commands from the Ribbon. In this part of the tour, I will be using Word 2007 to demonstrate features and commands.

Some background

In the first part, I explained that a tab is composed of multiple groups. In the screenshot below of the PowerPoint Home tab e.g., you can see that the Clipboard and Font groups are highlighted in red. Only groups can be added to tabs, and individual controls can only be added to groups. In other words, a group serves as a container for controls, whereas a tab serves as a container for groups. In addition, I pointed out that Microsoft groups cannot be changed at all.

What does this mean for you? This means that the only way for you to customize individual commands on the Ribbon is to create a new group for each tab that you wish to customize. Having done this, you can then add the desired commands to these groups. You can only “fake” changing a Microsoft group by creating a new group with only the commands you want and removing the original Microsoft group.

Creating a new group

In order to get started with individual command customization, let us create a new group called Playground on the Word Home tab. To do this, open the Customize Ribbon dialog. Then select the Home tab on the left (1) and click New group (2), as shown in the screenshot below.

This will bring up the label dialog you are already familiar with from the first part of this feature tour. Enter Playground as the label and press OK. The dialog will then change to look like the following screenshot.

Adding, changing and removing the commands of a new group

This is still the same window, but a second tab labeled Customize Group has opened up (marked A). As in the layout of the first tab, the left hand side (marked in red) shows your group while the right hand side (marked in blue) shows the available Microsoft commands. The only thing shown on the left for your new group is the label of the group (marked B). If you want to change the label of the group, double-click the label to bring up the label dialog again. The Microsoft commands on the right are grouped the same way as they are grouped in the Quick Access Toolbar Customization Dialog of the Word Options. You can change the grouping using the drop-down box (marked C).

For this example, pick the entries labeled “About”, “Close” (the first one), “View Document Properties…” and “Style:” and add them to the group. You can add them either by double-clicking them or by using the Add command button (marked D). After you have added the fourth command, your dialog should look like the following screenshot.

You can use the arrow buttons highlighted in red to reorder the commands any way you want. If you do not change the order, click OK and switch to the Home tab, you will see the new Playground group, as shown below.

You can see in this screenshot that Word has added the commands column by column, with each column having three rows. The first three commands filled the first column from top to bottom, while the fourth command was added at the top of the second column. As this does look messy, we will go back into the Customize Ribbon dialog and change the group somewhat. After opening the Customize Ribbon dialog, select the Home tab on the left and then the Playground group on the bottom. Only after you have selected this group will the Customize group tab appear. You can switch to this tab by either clicking it (A) or using Edit group (B), as shown below.

On the Customize group tab, select the Close command on the left (1), check the Large checkbox (2), and finish by moving the Close command to the top of the list (3).

The result of this change can be seen on the Home tab after you left the dialog with OK. As you can see in the screenshot below, the Close command (A) is now shown with a large button that uses an entire column. The Styles command (B) is now on the bottom of the second column. The Styles command (B) is the good old Styles combobox used by previous versions of Word to select a Style. The Styles gallery on the Home tab replaces B in Word 2007, but unfortunately it is not a very effective tool for users of styles. For example, it does not always allow you to easily see the style of the current text. Therefore, if you use styles in Word, you will probably want to add B to your Ribbon.

It is also possible to remove a command from a group. For example, if you do not want the Close group in the Playground group, go back into the Customize Ribbon dialog, select the Home tab followed by the Playground group, and switch to the Customize group tab. Then select the Close command and either double-click it or use the Remove command button.

You can also add a separator to a group of yours. Separators can be seen on the Word View tab, for example. The two red arrows in the next screenshot indicate them.

To add a separator to your group, go back into the Customize group tab of the Customize Ribbon dialog and select Custom Items in the choose commands from the drop-down box on the right (1). Then add <Separator> to your group (2 & 3)and move it after the Close button (4).

The Playground on the Home tab will then show the separator as you can see in the following screenshot.

Finding commands

If you know where a particular command is in the Ribbon, or if you know that a command is not in the Ribbon at all, then finding it is rather simple. The choose commands from drop-down box gives you access to that. As you can see in the following screenshot, you can pick commands from the Office Menu and all Microsoft tabs that Word has.

If you do not know where a particular command is, you can select All Commands and try to find the command in the list of 1000+ commands that Word offers. As this is not very efficient, RibbonCustomizer allows you to search for a command. To search for a command, simply enter the term you want to search for in the search box highlighted in red in the next screenshot. After you enter your query in the search box, the choose commands from drop-down box (A) will automatically switch to Search for Command. The add-in searches as you type. The search is performed across all labels of all commands, all groups and tabs those commands are on, as well as the idMso’s for each command. The following screenshot shows you the result of typing “style” into the search box.

Summary

The first part and second part of this feature tour have given you an overview of how you can customize the Office 2007 Ribbon to suit your needs. The next parts will demonstrate the more advanced features of RibbonCustomizer.