Many users wish the old, classic UI (menus & toolbars) back when they first start using Office 2007. Evidence of that is the existence of two tools by now that offer a classic UI for Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2007 (ToolbarToggle and Classic Menu for Office 2007). Personally, I am a big fan of the Ribbon and are not convinced of offering some sort of Classic UI in Office 2007. There are a multitude of reasons for that:

• Keyboard shortcuts to open menus (e.g. Alt-F) cannot be used with a Classic UI, because Office intercepts those shortcuts and either offers a 2007 feature triggered by it, or lets you enter a complete 2003 menu shortcut in order to trigger the command it would ordinarily have triggered in 2003. A Classic UI in 2007 is therefore mainly going to be controlled by the mouse.
• Where do you put new features of Office 2007? A major reason that Microsoft decided to do the Ribbon is that they did not really know where to put all the new 2007 features in the menus and toolbars. A Classic UI will therefore always have difficulties with new features.
• The Ribbon has contextual tabs that appear once a user inserts or activates an object. That means, that whatever tab holds the Classic UI will no longer be in the foreground. Alternatively, as done by ToolbarToogle, you can have a Classic UI in a task pane and therefore visible independent of whatever tab the Ribbon is showing currently, but you have to sacrifice additional screen real estate for that.
• A Classic UI lets one defer learning the Office 2007 Ribbon. Considering the investment Microsoft made into the Ribbon, it can be expected that all future Office versions will have the Ribbon as UI. Menus and toolbars will not return to Microsoft Office. If one defers learning the Ribbon, one will eventually be simply behind.

Despite these objections to a Classic UI in Office 2007, I decided to provide one for Word 2007 using my RibbonCustomizer add-in. Integrating a Classic UI into RibbonCustomizer gives you the best of both worlds: You can have a familiar UI around while you need it and at the same time customize your Ribbon the way you want it. RibbonCustomizer with a Classic UI is a forward-looking solution that embraces the Ribbon.

Currently, I only provide a Classic UI for Word 2007. I plan on adding one for Excel and PowerPoint 2007 shortly. I have no plans to support Access and Outlook 2007 with a Classic UI.

The Classic UI tab can either be listed as first tab:

Or as last one:

The Classic UI support is really a demonstration of the reusability and ease of distribution of customizations created with RibbonCustomizer. All you need to do is to download the two RIBX files (see below), and then add them to your Customization Schemes in RibbonCustomizer. To do so, you first open the Customization Schemes dialog via the bottom half of the Customize Ribbon split button on Word’s View tab, select Customization Schemes and then More as shown in the following screenshot.

In the dialog, click Add.

Then find the location where you downloaded either or both RIBX files. If you want to the Classic UI as first tab, pick the WordClassicUIAsFirstTab.ribx file as shown in the following screenshot.

Installing Classic UI for Word 2007 with RibbonCustomizer

In order to be able to get the Classic UI tabs, you absolutely have to run the latest beta version of RibbonCustomizer 1.1 (V1.1.2666.14038). If you downloaded and installed a beta version of 1.1 before Friday, April 20, then you do not have the latest one. I found a bug while working on the Classic UI tab in RibbonCustomizer and it is fixed in that particular version. No earlier version (including 1.0) will be able to open these particular RIBX files. The good news is that this particular build will most likely become the stable 1.1 version sometime next week.

Once you have installed the latest 1.1 build, you can download the two RIBX files and save them anywhere you like (best to download via right-click, save as):

• Word 2007 Classic UI as first tab
• Word 2007 Classic UI as last tab

The title of this blog post mentions that you can get a Classic UI for Word 2007 for free. How is this possible? The Starter Edition of RibbonCustomizer (which you get for free just by downloading and installing RibbonCustomizer) allows you to load up to three RIBX packages per Ribbon. That means, you can download & install RibbonCustomizer from the link above, and then load the Classic UI RIBX files with it into your copy of Word 2007 completely for free.

Many users, especially power users, have more than one version of Office installed on their computers. This configuration is not supported by Microsoft. However, Microsoft generally tries to make this configuration possible. There are lots of things to consider when running multiple versions of Office with the most important one being that the oldest version has to be installed first and the newest one last. Microsoft discusses all these things in KB 928091.

The KB notes that you will see Windows Installer messages when switching between different versions of Access and Word. For example, if you had Word 2003 open last and then opened 2007, you would see a setup dialog for a minute or so. If you had 2007 open last and then opened 2003, you would see a setup dialog as well. The main thing Windows Installer does in that minute is to return the Word file extensions associations (ownership of .doc e.g.) to the version of Word being opened.

For Access, there is unfortunately nothing that can be done to get around these annoying Windows Installer dialog. Thanks to the research of some Microsoft support people though, there is a way around these dialogs for Word (the KB does not document this).

It turns out that there is a registry key you can set that will force a particular version of Word to not claim the file extensions back. That means, setup will not run for that particular version of Word if it does not own its file extensions. The particular registry entry has been around for a long time already and is documented in KB 306021 as method 2, albeit for a different purpose. If you want Word 2007 to be the version of Word that owns the Word file extension, then use these steps:

1. Close all versions of Word.
2. Open Word 2007, let setup run (if it appears), then close Word.
3. Open the registry editor and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options
4. Add a DWORD named NoRereg set to 1

Note: 11.0 refers to Word 11, which is Word 2003. Word 2007 is Word 12. To make Word 2003 the default and not 2007, use the same steps but interchange 2003 and 2007, as well as 11.0 and 12.0

The preview functionality in Outlook 2007 is very useful. Unfortunately, you cannot preview any PDFs with it straight ouf ot the box. There is now an unofficial PDF previewer available for it. It works with Outlook 2007 under Windows XP and Vista. I have been using it for some time now and it is very useful!

This is the second part of my series on creating a setup program for Shared .NET Add-Ins for Office 2007 (read Part 1). One of the toughest problems is figuring out what you should ship with your setup program besides your actual add-in. To ensure that your Shared .NET Office 2007 Add-In will work under any circumstance, you will need to include the following:

• Windows Installer 3.1. Installed by the setup bootstrapper (setup.exe). You generally don’t include this in your actual setup package, but rather let the setup bootstrapper download it as needed from Microsoft.
• .NET Framework 2. This is installed by the setup bootstrapper as well and should be downloaded as needed from Microsoft directly. Including the .NET Framework 2 in your package would increase the size of your downloadable file way too much.
• Visual C++ 8 runtime DLLs. If you use the COM shim wizard, then you should ship the VC++ 8 runtime DLLs with your add-in. There are multiple ways you could redistribute these files: You could include the Visual C++ Redistributable Package in your setup bootstrapper. Or you could use a merge module and include the files directly into your MSI. Unfortunately both these approaches require administrative privileges in Vista, and hence cannot be used for our standard-user installable setup program. Thankfully there is a third method, which simply requires you to include a number of DLLs into your MSI and copy them to your application folder: Include the entire Microsoft.VC80.CRT folder found in %programfiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\redist\x86 into your MSI and make sure that its files get installed in a similar named subdirectory of your application folder.
• Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs). The Office 2007 PIAs allow your .NET add-in to interact with Office 2007. They are absolutely needed. Office 2007 will install them as part of a typical install, if the .NET 2 Framework is present during the Office setup. As this might not be always the case, you have to ship them with your add-in. Again, you could install them via their redistributable package as part of your setup bootstrapper. Unfortunately again, this requires administrative privileges. Therefore you have no other choice but to include the individual DLLs in your MSI. You have to make sure that they are not registered in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), because a GAC registration requires administrative privileges. You need to include the following files:
  • extensibility.dll. IDTExtensibility2 interface, which your add-in uses to plug itself into Office.
  • stdole.dll. OLE Automation support.
  • Microsoft.Vbe.Interop.dll. Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Extensibility 5.3. Needed due to dependency reasons of the Office object model.
  • office.dll. This is the Microsoft Office 12.0 Object Library. In the references of a Visual Studio project and in the Object browser, you can find this one as Microsoft.Office.Core.
  • Microsoft.Office.Interop.XXXXXXXX.dll. Each application has its own PIA DLL. You need to include the PIA for every application your add-in supports. For example, an add-in supporting Excel, PPT and Word needs to include Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel.dll, Microsoft.Office.Interop.PowerPoint.dll and Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.dll. See this MSDN article for a full list of available PIAs for Office 2007.
• Last, but not least, your MSI needs to include your Shim DLL, your .NET DLL and all supporting DLLs, e.g. for .NET components. Again, do not register anything in the GAC.

Let me conclude with a word about KB 908002. KB 908002 is not required for Office 2007 despite the KB stating differently at this point in time. KB 908002 includes three different components, one of which is extensibility.dll. Due to that, the KB will appear to fix a runtime crash of a shared .NET add-in in situations where the .NET Framework 2 was installed after Office 2007. However, you can achieve the same fixing effect by simply including extensibility.dll in your MSI as outlined above. That the KB incorrectly lists Office 2007 as applicable program is my fault, as I asked Microsoft to add this when I observed the fixing effect it had and before I tried to build my own setup program via WiX. Microsoft is currently investigating how to best include the real situation into the KB.

RibbonCustomizer Professional V1.1 Beta 2 is now available. Beta 2 fixes all known bugs and provides setup support for Vista. Standard users can now install the add-in under Vista. Administrators can now also use the add-in when User Account Control is off (given that UAC was off at install time).

Download V1.1 Beta 2

Please let me know about any problems you are encountering right away!