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Let's Talk About Customization

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One topic that has come up frequently in our private beta newsgroups as well as here in blog comments from time to time is the issue of customization.

As with every component of the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we put a lot of thought into how much customization to provide; today I'm going to try to walk you through our thought process.

Many of you have been passionate in conveying feedback that you wish the UI had absolute customizability. As in my article on the size of the Ribbon, I'm going to lay the facts out on the table and hopefully it will help you to at least understand the rationale behind the decisions we made (even if you wish we had made different ones.)

What is Customization?

There are many aspects to customization in a software user interface. The ability to change the visual appearance, to change preferences, and to turn pieces of the UI on or off are all aspects of customization.

Most frequently among power users, the term "customization" is used to represent the ability certain programs have to add, remove, and relocate commands within the UI.

The History of Customization in Office

Command Bars, introduced in Office 97, were kind of a nirvana of customization capabilities. With Command Bars, you could change virtually anything imaginable within the organization of the menus and toolbars: create new ones, move buttons from toolbars to menus and back, use a built-in icon editor to directly edit the pixels of the icons, etc.

Unfortunately, this flexibility came at a price in terms of the complexity of Command Bars and the kinds of layouts and controls it could support. One of the reasons that many of the prior attempts to simplify the UI were unsuccessful was that any feature had to work within this ultra-customizable framework where you could never predict where a control might live or how it might be presented to the user.

There were downsides for normal users as well. When we go on site visits to watch people use Office 97-2003 in their place of business, we often find that Office has been ravaged by the effects of accidental customization.

In fact, one of the most frequent questions we are asked by people during on-site usability research is: "How can I get the menus back to the top of the window?"

Because of the ultimate flexibility of Command Bars, you can make one small misplaced click and suddenly the menu bar is docked to the left side of the screen or floating in space. Of course, this could have been improved somewhat by some sensible measures such as locking the UI by default, but it does illustrate the different ways a power user and a more typical user think about the same feature.

How Many People Customize?

When we started designing the Office 2007 user interface, one of the first and frequent discussions we had was: "what is the right kind of customization to include in the UI?"

We started collecting research by talking to some of our expert users within large companies, who in several cases assured us that "everyone" customizes their UI to optimize it for the most efficient use possible and, furthermore, that any new UI needed to be at least as customizable as Command Bars (preferably even more.)

An interesting perspective, but it can be dangerous to base decisions on just a few opinions (especially when the first word in the opinion is "everyone.")

The next step was to see what was actually happening in the real world: were people customizing as much we assumed?

Given that we already had one of the most customizable user interfaces of all-time in Office 2003, looking through the real-world data could help us to confirm objectively how many people were customizing their UI and exactly how they were customizing it.

Looking across a hundred million or so people using Office 2003, here's what we found:

  • In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars.

  • Of the 2% of sessions with customizations present, 85% included customization of four or fewer commands.

Needless to say, we were surprised, but when we looked at the statistics in detail, this data matched that which had been collected from other sources and in historical research.

It breaks down like this: in ~1.9% of sessions, buttons have been added, removed, or moved between toolbars and menus. (Changing the docking position or location of an entire toolbar is not counted as a customization. Buttons added by add-ins or templates are also not counted.)

Of the customized sessions, around 85% of them had only what we'd call minor customizations: four or fewer buttons. Most of these are added toolbar buttons, either from the command well or from a toolbar people don't want to keep up all the time. And even within these 85% of 2% of sessions, there are patterns that emerge.

The most popular single customization? Removing the "Read" button from the Standard toolbar in Word.

The PowerPoint team helped by collecting hundreds of screenshots of heavily-customized versions of PowerPoint from professional slide designers. It turns out that many of the same customizations are widespread among these users, such as adding Send to Back as a top-level command so that it's not buried four-levels deep in the Drawing toolbar.

Finding so many patterns in the customizations was a heartening revelation, because it implied that if we got enough of the details of the command organization right based on these common customizations, many fewer customizations might be necessary.

Furthermore, because Office 2003 is still relatively new, it is deployed disproportionately among power users--the very people who most likely to customize. In all of our analyses, we try to be aware that the raw statistical data skews slightly towards early-adopting power users. This is probably much less true today than it was more than two years ago when we first compiled customization statistics.

(One metric that causes us to believe that the Office 2003 data slightly skews towards power users even today: Every month, the average screen resolution of people using Office 2003 decreases as more of the core installed base adopts it.)

Using the Data to Drive the Design

Even though Microsoft is a big company, we don't have unlimited design or development resources. Given how ambitious our plans were for reinventing the Office user interface, we had to be realistic and optimize for the most common scenarios first.

So, we took a pragmatic approach and decided to focus on the 99.7% case: people who don't take advantage of customization or only use it to customize four or fewer commands. Out of this goal was born the Quick Access Toolbar.

The Quick Access Toolbar is designed to make it easy to add controls, galleries, and groups from anywhere in the Ribbon: just right-click the thing you want to add and choose "Add to Quick Access Toolbar" from the context menu. We designed the customization model to be efficient but with the goal of "zero customization complexity"; it would be unacceptable for customization to cause the user interface to degrade as it did so often with Command Bars.

Adding controls to a persistent toolbar allows people to have one-click access to the features they choose from anywhere in the product, and can help eliminate problematic command loops as well.

We also paid close attention to common customizations in Office 2003, making sure that commands are organized together for maximum efficiency. This helps to further reduce the need for customization.

Command Location Customization in Office 2007

What command location customizations are supported in Office 2007?

Here's a list of the major capabilities:

  • Add any control in the Ribbon to the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Add an entire Ribbon group to the Quick Access Toolbar as a single icon
  • Add a gallery to the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Add individual menu items to the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Add any command from the command well to the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Add macros to the Quick Access Toolbar and choose an icon and label for them
  • Add separators to help organize the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Reorder controls within the Quick Access Toolbar
  • Full-width Quick Access Toolbar mode below the Ribbon
  • Auto-assigned keyboard shortcuts given to customized Quick Access Toolbar commands
  • Customize the content of many galleries (especially in Word)
  • Customization based on use of many galleries (Recent Documents, Margins, Shapes, Themes, etc.)
  • Complete customization of status bar
  • Customize the Ribbon via XML in document template
  • Use RibbonX XML to customize Ribbon content through a COM Add-in

As you can see, there's quite a lot of customization available in the Office 2007 UI. The laser focus on the Quick Access Toolbar is evident as a result of mapping the design of the product to real-world use.

That said, the last two items on the list will be of interest for expert users who are craving more control over customizing Ribbon content. RibbonX, which has been written about in this space many times, provides an XML interface for describing Ribbon content, including repurposing built-in controls and groups.

You can build custom tabs and groups in RibbonX already; it's just a matter of loading the XML into the program you're using. There are a few ways to do this, including saving the XML into your default document template.

Undoubtedly, people will write tools to help take the XML coding out of using RibbonX to customize Ribbon content. Patrick Schmid has illustrated many of the techniques necessary to make this work on his blog. We've added some additional capabilities to the object model post-Beta 2 that will help these tools along, such as the ability to query for the icon of a command or to execute it directly from code.

Beta Feedback

Nevertheless, throughout the beta cycle we've received requests for additional customization capabilities. There have been discussions about the desire for it in private beta newsgroups, and people have posted comments on the topic here as well. One reader in particular has graced me with at least five personal flame-mails, complete with speculation about my ancestry and theories about the difficulty I will have finding future employment once I've been fired.

If we really optimized for the 99.7% case (98% + (85% of 2%)) , why are we hearing so much about this issue?

Because 0.3% of the 450 million paid Office customers still represents 1.35 million people.

And given the strong correlation between expert users and customization, one would expect that these 0.3% are precisely those who download early betas, participate in private beta programs, visit enthusiast web sites, read technical blogs, and generally are interested in and participate in the software development process.

On the other hand, in our long-term broad deployments of Office 2007 Beta 1, Beta 1 Technical Refresh, and now Beta 2 at customer sites, customization has not been a particularly hot issue--nor has it been in Send a Smile feedback.

I have definitely heard those of you who spend the time and effort necessary to build totally custom menus and toolbars in Office 2003, and I hope that a combination of the Quick Access Toolbar and RibbonX-based customization will provide you with a similar level of flexibility in Office 2007, albeit using different technologies.

Addressing Feedback

In a way, all of this attention around customization is a bit like a TV show getting canceled.

Even the least successful network shows attract a lot of viewers in absolute terms--just not relative to the opportunity cost of keeping them on the air. Financially, it doesn't make sense for a network like NBC to keep around an underwatched sitcom like "Joey," but if you're one of the people who like "Joey" it doesn't sting any less when it's canceled. The fact that you're in a small minority doesn't console you.

In other words, the decisions we made around customization in Office 2007 weren't based on absolutes ("no one should be allowed to customize the Ribbon") but instead based on pragmatic use of resources ("let's start by getting the core aspects of the design right for everyone's benefit.")

Is additional customization against the design philosophy of the Ribbon? No, provided that we could add it in such a way that it added no additional complexity for the vast majority of people who aren't interested in it.

Within our resource and schedule constraints, we've acted on the expert user feedback by continuing to add additional customization throughout the beta cycle.

In Beta 1, we added the ability to move the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon to allow many more controls to be added to it. In Beta 1 Technical Refresh, we introduced the ability to add whole groups to the QAT, the ability to add galleries to the QAT, separators, and new command well functionality. In Beta 2, we added the ability to assign custom keyboard shortcuts by adding controls to the QAT.

Are there other customization features we'd like to add eventually? Of course. One example is the ability to customize the contents of the Mini Toolbar--this was an affordance we included in the original spec, but ultimately didn't get done for Office 2007. In future versions, could I imagine adding built-in facilities for customizing Ribbon content? Yes, I could imagine it.

At the same time, I honestly believe that Office 2007 as it stands will be a great user experience for people of all skill levels. If you're a power user (as I am), there's a lot we designed just for you, and even more coming post-Beta 2.

The fundamental principles and constructs of the new UI--galleries, Ribbon layout and command organization, Live Preview, Contextual Tabs, the Mini Toolbar, and all the rest--have been designed to benefit everyone who uses Office, power users and novices alike.

Other Aspects of Customization

A different kind of customization people ask about occasionally is the ability to relocate certain parts of the user interface. The two biggest feature requests in this area are for a vertical version of the Ribbon (to take advantage of widescreen monitors especially in Word) and the ability to "float" and drag around certain parts of the UI.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, I plan to write a post about why we built a horizontal version of the Ribbon instead of a vertical one. There are several compelling reasons, but needless to say we looked at prototypes of both aspect ratios in great detail before making a decision.

Could I imagine a hypothetical version of the Ribbon designed to dock to the side of the screen instead of the top? Of course. Will we build it in a future version? Nothing's for sure, but if it's the right thing for the UI platform moving forward, we'll definitely consider it.

The story with floating UI is similar. Floating toolbars in Office 97-2003 caused a lot of problems, primarily because they were forced on people as the primary means of accessing many features. As a result, toolbars were always popping up over top of what people were working on, needing to be dragged out of the way, or mistakenly docking to the side of the screen.

Our design mantra for Office 2007 was that default feature access wouldn't rely on floating things popping up on top of the document; the UI would be in a single, consolidated, consistent place.

But there are a few repetitive action scenarios in which it would be useful to be able to float UI just to make it closer to the area of the document you're working in. While the data shows that the vast majority of people don't take advantage of this functionality in current versions of Office, we've definitely prototyped a more expert mode in which you could "tear off" groups from the Ribbon or the Quick Access Toolbar, or even a whole tab of the Ribbon to move to a secondary monitor.

Again, were we to build such a feature in a future version, it would be in a way that had no possibility of accidental misuse, and in a way that added minimal complexity to mainline cases.

Last but not least, there's always a lively discussion to be had around choosing a visual appearance for any piece of software.

Unlike in past versions of Office, we allow you to choose your color scheme directly in Office 2007. You can change between the three schemes from the first page of the Options dialog box. People always want more color choices, but I hope with the addition of the third scheme in the final product that most everyone will be able to find a look for the product they're happy with.

Summary

As with everything in the Office 2007 user interface redesign, we informed the design both by analyzing the usage data and then by adding a sprinkling of anecdotal feedback. We focused first on the most common scenarios which benefit the broadest set of customers. Then we've used the feedback from the beta process to drive iterative improvements to the design to help satisfy more of the specialized uses of the product.

In the next version of Office, we will undoubtedly look at all of the feedback we get on the completed product (which, as more people use it, will be more fully representative of the entire user base) and decide how to continue to move the UI platform forward.

One goal won't change however: to empower people to do great work in Office as easily as possible.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Interesting post. The main reason I avoid customizing (and I think this applies to a lot of people) is that I know I'm going to switch computers one day, or upgrade to a new version of Office, or both. I'm sure there is a way to transfer your customized settings to a new machine or a new version of Office, and maybe it's easy....I see a "Save My Settings" wizard in my Office Tools folder (how many users are aware that this exists?). But still the process of migrating my settings to a new machine feels intimidating and unlikely to succeed perfectly, and so I've never bothered taking time to customize any of my Office applications.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    PingBack from http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/06/27/24

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Hey, I commented back on an earlier post, begging you to maintain customizability.

    Well it sounds like you've struck just the right balance.  Optimize for the "average user" while still making customization possible (don't worry about making it easy) for the power user.  Nice.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Jensen,
    Thank you for your explanations. I now understand better the decisions about enduser customisation (thats not to say I agree with all of them <g>), and your statement that programmed customisation has been excluded  from the customisation stats removes a lot of confusion.
    I observe that all my customers except for some smaller companies use custom Excel addins which create their own toolbars and menus, usually several addins at a time.
    Do you have any statistics showing if this is typical for large customers or not? (I have not yet found a sensible approach for migrating these kinds of customers to Excel 2007 ...).

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    So, being a power user I am not a valued customer. Ok, being a power user I can figure out a way to deal with it. Still, I am disappointed:

    One person's essential feature is another person's bloatware, and vice versa. What may be a natural default for you may be an option I would never use under any circumstance, and vice versa. That is why customizability is valuable.

    It is sobering to consider that for 98% the most important customization may be a choice of color schemes.
    ______________________________
    "The enjoyment of one's tools is essential to the successful practice of one's craft."
    -- Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    My biggest problem in Office 12 has been the inability to customize the right-click menus.  I don't want to have to add all of my preferred commands to the QAT and run up to the top of my screen whenever I need one.  I want to right-click and get at the command I want.  

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    So, I see that customization is a battle already lost.

    The only thing to do now is, wipe away the tears and say good bye, and, wipe away the sweat and start working the old, hard way.

    Well, I'm not giving up altogether so soon; I'm still looking forward for it by its next birthday (becoming a teenager-version 13).

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    I aplaud the customization desisions chosen, and am glad to have some statistics to back it up.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    It's hard to try and argue with those numbers. Personally like the guy who posted before I tend not to customise due to swapping machines.

    In fact I'd say the prevous poster who complained about the needs of a power user who will teach the masses - well it's easier to help people if your both using the same interface - and if your answer to a problem is first customise this... then your probably on the wrong route already.

    One thing that I felt the product lacked (tho I may be mistaken in it's non existance) is a reset to defaults option - something that the Repair feature never seemed to do. That and lockable UI... but you alredy mentioned that :)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Customization is totally overrated, it just serves to calm people who like to think they're in control of everything.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    I don't think customization is the problem. I think the problem is that the Office team has put the features in the wrong place. Things are just too difficult to find.

    I found the Office 2007 beta so hostile that I've uninstalled it.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Well, I do not think those statistics represent the real world! We've got some customizations of the Office 2000 GUI and when rolling out (Outlook) 2003 later on we decided AGAINST using the customer experience program - and we disabled it by policy and customized settings.

    But even if we let the customer experience program enabled and already had updated completely to 2003 when you created the statistics you would NOT have received all the results from our company - simply because only few of our clients do actually have internet access. Also I doubt that the company firewall would have let the traffic sent.

    I think there are many companies with similiar environments - results from all of those are missing in the statistics.

    For that reason I believe the release after Office 2007 will be more customizeable - just to encourage these companies finally to update their Office to the new GUI world...

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Ruben:

    As I believe Jensen mentions, the "statistics" came from CEIP data, presumably from millions of users. If you didn't have CEIP enabled on your machine, then in effect you were registered but didn't bother to vote.

    I use a highly customized version of Word (though not so highly customized as some other users of my acquaintance), and I will be scrambling to fill up the QAT when I start using Word 2007 (and there will be some commands I still won't entirely be able to replicate that way), but I do think Jensen has done a masterly job of explaining how and why the customizability decisions were reached, and I can see the point even though I will be one of the 0.3%/1.35 million users who will be adversely affected.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Jensen,
    I think the customization decisions you've made are spot on. But PLEASE tell me that you're going to let developers add buttons to existing groups by the final release.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    PingBack from http://www.symphonious.net/2006/06/28/customization-in-uis/

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    I think this is a great post, Jensen. The power users who are making comments about how you've let them down seem to be missing the point: you have to concentrate resources on satisfying the majority of people.

    Power users are intelligent enough to work around the issues, and the really sensible ones will make a living from working around these issues.

    Sure, I'd like more customisation, but I think this post, one of the best you've written, is a great justification for making tough business decisions.

    Remember that, everyone. Microsoft, evil or not, is a business. It cannot afford to satisfy every last customer. It must make tough decisions on where to allocate resources. The power users can cope, so stop moaning!

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Joe: I highly doubt it. The entire automatic resizing of groups as the window size changes (e.g. for lower resolutions or when you make the window narrower) is hand-coded and hence depends on those groups being static. That's probably just one of the reasons why it won't happen.

    The add-in I am working on that gives (power) users the ability back to customize the ribbon itself is almost done. I'll see if I can find the time tonight to implement the last feature bits and get rid of a few bugs. Then I'll make an alpha version accessible to the tech beta users, followed by a beta a week later or so.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Patrick: Thanks for your reply. I understand your explanation, but I don't think it's a good reason. Custom buttons don't resize, so there's no reason why other buttons shouldn't just resize around them. OK, so maybe it'll be difficult when two buttons that would normally combine to a menu have had a button placed between them. Solution: either don't combine those buttons in that case, or at the least, let me add buttons on the end of a group that won't interfere with the others. If Microsoft don't allow us to add buttons to built in groups, it totally contradicts their own guidelines to place buttons where users should expect to find them. i.e. if i have a button that inserts a predefined comment, it should go in the Comments group.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Andy: I'm happy with the customization available in office 2007, but don't forget, in Office 2003, you didn't have to be a super duper programmer to customize it. There will be plenty of people who dragged and dropped buttons to get them just the way they want them, who are now completely unable to acheive those same results because learning XML or creating a comm addin is beyond their abilities.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Once upon a time (I think it was like ten years ago) I turn on /every single menu option in existance/ for Office 5 for Mac.

    That was dumb, i could never find anything ever again.

    Nowadays the main extent of my "customization" is adding half a dozen standard toolbars to Visio's opening configuration.

    Vorn

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    I really don't think that you can complain about not being noticed when you decide to hide yourself. If you didn't choose to be part of the customer experience program, and you blocked yourself off from providing any info about your usage to Microsoft, you shouldn't be surprised when they don't include you in their changes.

    You sound like th child that hides from his mother and then gets upset when she doesn't notice him.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Jensen, this has to be the single best post to date on your blog.  It reads like gospel.  In my opinion, one of the strongest points of the Macintosh has always been a patent limit on the degree to which customization is allowed.  While the parallels between office applications and operating systems may not be perfect, the logic of your case is wholly inescapable.  I'm not the least bit surprised to hear that you've been bombarded by customization complaints.  These are likely the same people that think multiple inheritance was an essential feature of a programming language.  ;-)

    Lastly, I’d like to say that posts like this are what really bring the value of Microsoft’s new more inclusive development and beta processes to full fruition.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    I've heard this number before:

    "In fewer than 2% of sessions, the program was running with customized command bars."

    And I always suspected, but never knew for sure, that:

    "Buttons added by add-ins or templates are also not counted."

    Thanks for clarifying.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Tim: I think the perception of the Costumer Experience Improvement Program among power users and IT in general was that it is just another Microsoft phone home feature that better should be turned off. The importance of it never really got through until the beta of Office 2007 started. I am among all the people who deliberatly switched this feature off as I was concerned for my privacy.

    Andrew: What would we do without multiple inheritance? ;)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    "Furthermore, because Office 2003 is still relatively new, it is deployed disproportionately among power users--the very people who most likely to customize. In all of our analyses, we try to be aware that the raw statistical data skews slightly towards early-adopting power users."

    I'd say most of the power users I know fit into one of two categories.

    1. They work for large companies whose IT departments are very slow to upgrade applications like Office. In my last corporate job, which I left in 2004, I was still using Office 97.

    2. They work as consultants or contractors to the companies listed in #1.

    I suspect that a lot of the "early-adopting power users" are the moms and pops who have finally upgraded their Windows 95 machines for something newer to read their email and browse the web. The replacement machines came bundled with the trial version of Office 2003, and when the trial period ran out, they merely upgraded the license.

    The first couple of computers I bought with the Office 2003 trial on it, I uninstalled the trial version of 2003 and installed Office 2000, because that was what most of my clients were using. More recently I run a hodgepodge of Office versions on a hodgepodge of machines, and I will admit that I really do prefer Excel 2003 to prior versions. It crashes less frequently, and the data list feature is worth the price of the upgrade.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Jon: thief! ;) Sure go ahead, that's what my blog is for :)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    you mention that .3% of the users may be power users and that's why you may get a lot of requests for customization during betas and previews.

    well, i would think that power users declined your invitation to the customer experience improvement program, and therefore those usage stats you mention may be skewed the other way. i know i never joined.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    People don't customize Office because it's too complicated.  

    Questions that should have been answered:

    1) Why is it so difficult/impossible for a documentation team or a team of lawyers or an author and editor share the same customized toolbar?  

    2) Where's the offical Microsoft community site for sharing customizations, toolbar recommendations, and safe macros and templates?  


    3) Why is it so easy to move a toolbar where it shouldn't be but so hard to discover how to remove toolbar icons I never use?  

    4) I just made a change to my toolbar and i don't like it.  Why doesn't undo work?  I should be able to undo toolbar changes just as easily as document changes.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    Well...  I'm the developer for a commercial excel based tool. I was / am critical, BUT I do like the Ribbon.

    There's no design tool yet. It's like building HTML with notepad. It takes time to select appropriate controls and containers, and getting familiar with the hierarchy and the properties in the schema. Then typing, saving, opening, editing, evaluating. Alas.

    You DESIGN a Ribbon's Tab, where you implemented a commandbar.. It took several days to decide which controls to use where and how they should appear on the tab.. I've spent the weekend creating my icons.(14done, 8todo)

    This week I'll be starting on a ton of  callbacks. Most of it is just tedious repetitive implementation. (all labels, screen and supertips need table lookup to implement multilanguage). The "Push to Pull" change reqs a change of mind but it makes sense. I was very worried about the impossibility of "insession creation". As I go and learn I've found that I CAN fill my dropdowns and galleries at runtime. I probably wont even NEED Dynamic menus.

    It's tedious.. but you can make it work and look terrific.






  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    This is the post I really needed to read.  Thanks Jensen.

    But as an Excel developer who builds highly customised applications using Excel as a base, these decisions make things extremely awquard for me.  And before I'm accused of moaning as a member of a tiny proportion of users, I should add that my application is used daily by 150+ people in my company, and I very much doubt that I'm alone being in that kind of position.  It is highly unlikely that my bank will upgrade to 2007 precisely due to it's lack of customisation.  And that's 10000+ users.

    It seems to me that 2007 will cater superbly for home office/small business use, but far less so for professional corporate use where the majority of users will at least have several tailored proprietory add-ins, and many will have full Excel-based applications that totally tailor the UI (like mine).

    If I could just get rid of the ribbon/QAT/minibar, build custom menus and tailor right-click menus PROGRAMMATICALLY, then I'd be a happy camper.  Office 2010, perhaps?

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Messenia:

    Re customizing context menues, this still works:

    Sub AddClearAll2CellMenu()
     On Error Resume Next
     With CommandBars("Cell")
       .Controls("Clear All").Delete
       With .Controls.Add(, 1964, , _
        .Controls("Clear Contents").Index + 1)
        .Caption = "Clear All"
       End With
     End With
    End Sub

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Jensen, do your numbers include LORG customers and their customizations? Is there a breakdown of the number of customizations made by end users vs. those made by administrators deploying Office to <n> users?

    In other words, if one IT department makes 15 (non-programmatic) customizations and deploys that configuration to 10,000 desktops, does that count as 10,000 customizations? Or are you just counting end user customizations with these numbers?

    --Stacia

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    We build cars.

    Only 2% of our cars have a manual transmission.  Only 15% of those are turbo-charged.  Building turbo-charged, manual-transmission cars makes it difficult for us to build standard cars quickly and cheaply.  For these reasons we will stop making turbo-charged, manual-transmission cars.

    Oh and by the way, we have a monopoly on cars.  Those professional drivers who make a living racing cars will just have to use an automatic transmission like everyone else.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Excellent post, Jensen.

    I guess I am a power user; I have customized my Word environment extensively, but in all cases this was to bring deeply buried commands up front-and-center where I could find them and access them quickly. In some cases I have added buttons for commands I couldn't locate in the menu structure at all (e.g. the Style Separator).

    I have not been able to try the Beta, but from what I've seen it looks like the new interface makes a sincere effort to make all commands more accessible. Between this and the Quick Access Toolbar (brilliant idea, btw) I think the new interface will make me very happy, and I will be relieved not to half to deal with the tedium of customizing my UI (and the difficulty of explaining how to perform routine tasks to other users who do not share my customizations).

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    I'll add my voice to the small chorus here of those who think your data might be skewed slightly in opposite direction to the one you assume, because power users are the most likely to disable the CEIP. I know I did it on my own 3 copies of Office because I had privacy and performance concerns. Average users are far less likely to share those concerns and, I'm guessing, are far more likely to leave CEIP activated.

    Perhaps a little rehabilitation PR campaign for CEIP is in order. If I could be convinced there's no downside, of course I'd like my usage patterns taken into consideration.

    But to convince me there's no downside, Microsoft would need to stop doing things like Windows Genuine Advantage (to name just the most recent doubt-inducer).

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Good grief! I had no idea so many people customize and feel so strongly about it! I think I and several other of my fellow employees (we are tech writers) are pretty advanced Word users, but no one I know has customized more than one or two commands. For one thing, we often work on different machines. For another, we are often expected to support the less expert users in our office, whose copies of Word are not customized at all.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    Tom - I respond to surveys. This is not a survey, it is spyware.

    Jensen - Do you have a policy on trolls?

    Bye bye.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    If the dialog asking you if you wanted to enable it had said:

    "Microsoft is planning to completely rewrite Office, and is going to use this data to determine which functionality can be dropped because it is very rarely used."

    then there would probably have been a lot more power users enabling it to make sure that their favorite functionality didn't get dropped.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2006
    What did you expect them to do with the CEIP data? Just pass it around the office for amusement at what some people do with Office?

    Seriously, a lot of "power users" think they are so clever by informing those that misguidedly listen to them that there is some big conspiracy, Microsoft is evil, yada yada. Of course Microsoft isn't stealing your personal information - you think a company of that size could get away with doing that? Well, you probably do. Conspiracy theories are fun, after all.

    Ah, sysadmins. Why do I picture the comic book guy when I think of you?

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    I second the calls for the Windows color scheme to "show through" in Office.

    Why not give us a "non-themed" option in Office? I.E., title bar, window frames, etc.--all UI elements (with the possible exception of the ribbon)--drawn by Windows instead of Office.

    Using Office 2007 with Windows Classic leads to an uncomely hodgepodge of window styles.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    The idea that Office 2003 data is skewed towards power users seems, well, skewed; it is turned on by default so all users who have it enabled have no idea how to turn it off.  The comments that by turning off Microsoft's spyware (what else would you call a service which monitors keyboard & mouse input?) power-users deserve the new UI's lack of customization seems short sighted.  For example, enterprise users will not want thousands of users sending corporate information over the Internet to Microsoft, not only because of potential security concerns but because of the increased network traffic and support calls when the service causes Office to crash.

    I understand wanting to limit easy customization - I work at a help desk as a specialist in Office and actually like the way 2007 manages the UI.  I know a number of people have expressed concern about the lack of floating toolbars, but I, for one, will not miss them.  Jensen, I'd also like to be fair to you - you are doing a great job that, as Abe Lincoln pointed out, is going to annoy a number of people no matter what you do.

    However, with almost 1,000 users I know without UI customization 2007 will not work in our environment.  Not only do groups within our company have specific needs that cannot be addressed, users with accessibility concerns are left out in the cold with the new UI.

    Another concern is the inability, even with RibbonX, to customize the Ribbon.  That's hubris, in my book, because you are assuming the organization of the Ribbon - placement of groups on the ribbon, inclusion/exclusion of tools in the groups, etc. - is perfect and needs no adjustment.  Users are not all the same and access features in different ways.  

    The sad thing about locking down the UI against any change is it makes the user an incovenience to be kept in the corner while it dolls out features it feels like.  Everything mentioned regarding why people do not customize the UI has one simple solution that does not involve locking everyone out - training.  Having provided Office training for 6 1/2 years, I have seen the positive response of inexperienced users when they learn how to customize Office, and how to avoid accidentally customizing it.  

    Mike

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Mike: You can customize the Ribbon using RibbonX. There are a few limitations though:
    1. You cannot modify MS groups. In a corporate scenario though where you have total control over a user's Office, there is nothing that stops you from making a new group that replaces an existing MS group. The issues arising from this (incompatibilities with newer versions, add-ins) can be dealt with sufficiently in such a corporate environment.
    2. You cannot reorder MS groups on their original tab. Let's say you'd want to change the order of groups on the Home tab. You cannot do that. However, you are free to place the Clipboard MS-group anywhere on any other tab.
    I can't think of anything else right now that you cannot do with RibbonX. What do you want to do, but seem unable to do with RibbonX?

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Hi!

    I have been looking at the new XL2007, and I like the extra rows and colums very much - especially if it will also handle larger files than today...

    The new UI is however not my taste - and worse it seems that the ability to change and add to the menus (all menus are now gone!) is no longer available! Maybe good the the mouse users, but not for a number cruncher like me, who mainly uses the keyboard (much faster, no pain in my hand or shoulder) - its a disaster! You can still use the keyboard (now as easy, but you can), but all my enhancements to be able to work faster and with more extra commands/functions is gone!

    It seems XL2007 will be able to take advantage of extra CPU cores - fine! And a lot of other functionality as well!

    But if the UI and the ability to enhance a menu structure doesn't come back in the final version, I think I will stick to XL2003!

    Soren

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Patrick:  I understand I can add items to the Ribbon, but by customize I mean modify the structuring of the Ribbon - as you state, you cannot move groups around, or replace items within a group.  This makes the Ribbon a one-size fits all solution.  

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Mike: As I said, the limitation in terms of moving only applies if you want to reorder groups on tabs. If you want to change the structure, you can do that. For example, I don't like the WordArt Styles group on all the contextual tabs (e.g. Drawing Tools) of PPT. Instead, I rather have the basic text formatting tools there. That is easy to do with RibbonX. What you cannot do e.g. though is to put the Clipboard group at the far right of the Home tab.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Patrick: I'm not only talking about the inability of rearranging groups on the Ribbon - already a serious problem - but the inability to customize the built-in groups themselves.  For example, the font group in Word 2007 has 14 items, any number of which may be useless for a given user, not to mention impossible for a user with vision problems to read because the icons are so tiny.  The only way to customize the group is to hide the built in group (which is strongly discouraged) and recreate a new group from the ground up.  For example - your style add-in (which I really like!) will, every once in awhile, just turn off; I can re-enable it easily enough, but it highlights the problem with attempting to hide a MS ribbon group.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Mike: Interesting that the add-in will turn off. I wonder what the problem could be. It could be something the add-in does itself and not something Word does. Hence I wouldn't take it as illustrative of problems with add-ins.
    I am trying to remember right now whether you can remove controls of an MS group. I think though you can set the visibility of MS controls in an MS groups. So you could hide some of those 14 items.
    I am well aware of the implications of being unable to truly customize an MS group. I have come to just accept it by now though.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2006
    Jensen, Microsoft must not forget about thier users!  2% customization you say?  I am proud to be part of that number! You need to make ALL your users happy.  It doesnt hurt to leave things as they are for us customizers. And the people who don't?  Well then fine...it works the way it is!

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    is it possible to change the "BLUE" background in the new UI (2007 beta) for another color, like the older Office "12" Pre-Release/Beta? from blue to silver?

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2006
    Jamie: I actually believe that PPT is one of the programs best suited for the Ribbon. I believe so, because if you make good use of the contextual tabs and mainly work with them, you'll  actually have most of the commands you need at any time just one click away. So you basically get the selection of your 100 buttons that you could use on any particular object you selected one-click away. The annoying exception are text &  paragraph formatting tools, as the contextual tabs feature WordArt also this prominently. You can remedy this situation to some degree by using the MiniBar. If you want the MiniBar to appear for sure, select an object by right-clicking it and then the MiniBar appears on top of the right-click menu.

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2006
    I just discovered this blog and I'm glad I'm close to retiring. I'm a power user of Excel, but not a developer. I work for a very large aerospace company, and if the IT staff had any input to Microsoft I'm in trouble. Our IT staff is concerned with managing distributions, they have no idea of what the users want; their main concern is making their life easier, not mine. Limiting the user interface is criminal.

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2006
    " I am well aware of the implications of being unable to truly customize an MS group. I have come to just accept it by now though. "

    Patrick: Do you work for Microsoft? Why do you accept this? I have not heard a good explanation why this shouldn't be possible, and it is a serious problem for me. Why shouldn't we be able to add buttons to the end of an MS group? What do you recommend doing, if we want to add a single button to the Home tab? Create a new group for it? Eurgh.

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2006
    Joe: I don't work for Microsoft. I have come to accept it as I just got tired of complaining over and over again. I have been at this since November, and eventually gave up and resigned to accept what's possible and what not.
    And yes, you add a new group with the one button to the Home tab. Naturally, your one button needs to belong on the Home tab and not just be there, because it is a prominent location.

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2006
    You reap what you sow.

    If you turned off the "I want the product to be better" feature and now its not, well, you had your chance.

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2006
    Joe: I'd go with the single group named after your add-in on the Home tab. This provides the best identification that the functionality is provided by your add-in and not MS (meaning that when users have a problem with it, they actually go to you and not MS). More importantly, replicating and hiding MS groups gets you in trouble with other add-ins which might rely on that functionality (and introduces some non-deterministic issues)
    For a lot more on this topic and reasons why MS groups should almost never be touched at all, read my RibbonX Style guide post: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/06/09/20
    I am guilty of actually having written an add-in that hides the Styles group on the Home tab. For an explanation of why I think I can get away with that particular add-in, see this post: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/06/16/23
    For the latest version of the add-in and its source code, see http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/07/02/27

    MS has been quite firm on keeping their groups off-limits. All requests to that matter have been denied. If MS actually were to open their groups up to RibbonX developers, it would be a surprise as big as if my birthday and Christmas fell on the same day. As my birthday is in September, you can figure out the likelihood of this actually happening for yourself.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    Patrick: Thanks for your reply. Your advice about people coming to me when they have a problem with my button is very good. Plus, if people like what my buttons do, I don't want MS to get the credit for it!

    Still not sure what to do with my lone Table button. Groups with one button look awful when the group name gets an elipsis. I'd still like to replace the Insert Comment button with a split button for extra comment options (the menu could have a heading "[MY PROGRAM] Comments") It's late, but I'll look at your links tomorrow. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    Patrick: Thanks for your reply. Your advice about people coming to me when they have a problem with my button is very good. Plus, if people like what my buttons do, I don't want MS to get the credit for it!

    Still not sure what to do with my lone Table button. Groups with one button look awful when the group name gets an elipsis. I'd still like to replace the Insert Comment button with a split button for extra comment options (the menu could have a heading "[MY PROGRAM] Comments") It's late, but I'll look at your links tomorrow. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    Joe: Make one large button in a group and give the group a different name than the button (giving the same name works too). Keep both names short, so that the group really only takes the width of one large button. None of the names need to include your program name, if you make a split-/menu-/dynamic menu button. For those, you can start the menu off with a labeled seperator that gives your program name.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    > If you turned off the "I want the product to
    > be better" feature and now its not, well,
    > you had your chance.

    One, given the current concern (in some cases paranoia) over spyware and privacy and phone-home behavior and so on, it is completely silly of Microsoft to expect that a representative sample of users will leave that feature turned on.  I don't know what protocols or whatever are used, but unless it's pure port 80 stuff a lot of corporate firewalls will block such activity (and some even then).  Further, it seems obvious to me that "power users," those who choose the non-default installs of Office for example, will be among those likely to be aware of "phone home" issues and therefore more likely to turn it off...

    Two, this is not just a matter of a feature here and a tweak there.  If a lot of us had known earlier that MS was going to throw the existing UI completely away and replace it with this "Ribbon" concept, that the Ribbon would not be easily customizable, and in some respects would be utterly NOT customizable, and would arguably result in reduced productivity, there would have been much more hue and cry...

    ...and apparently it wouldn't have done a bit of good, because the people who make these decisions at Microsoft don't care what we think.

    Three - this is not a democratic state we're talking about here, where the minority sometimes has to accept the tyranny of the majority because you some things just can't be done in more than one way. It's a computer program.  There's utterly no technical reason why it can't include customization.  There's no reason why it shouldn't be able to slurp up my existing ppt11.pcb file and comply.  It's just that the wants and needs of the people who might want this are not important enough.

    I somehow doubt that a few more users not turning off the phone-home behavior would have affected this.  

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    I lament the loss of customizability but I think the ribbon is a great idea. I agree that removing floating abilities from the ribbon is also a great idea. I will encourage all "office-for-dummies" based office users to upgrade to 2007 simply because I am fed up of searching for their "lost" toolbars.
    The ribbon provides much needed visibility and improved organization for the common user.  A previous post had complained about losing his keyboard shortcuts. Well actually they are all there and then some. I love the way pressing alt brings up all the letters on the screen under each of the tabs.  In some ways things haven’t changed a lot.  They just look different.
    In response to a previous post the buttons on the QAT are not any smaller than they used to be in 2003. They just look smaller in comparison to the new bigger buttons and icons
    I work in a research institution which has a lot of smart inquisitive people who like to experiment. Surprisingly though only a very small minority of these people come under the realm of power users. Most people are highly technophobic, I am sure have never done any customization and are easily befuddled by “accidental customization”.
    I have a feeling that the minibar is the next thing that is going to annoy common people.
    Here are my suggestions:
    1. Add an option to make the buttons on the QAT a little bigger when docked under the ribbon.  Sort of like the changes that you can make to the quick launch bar in XP.
    2. Have the option to  have upto two  rows of buttons in the QAT when docked below the ribbon.

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    I lament the loss of customizability but I think the ribbon is a great idea. I agree that removing floating abilities from the ribbon is also a great idea. I will encourage all "office-for-dummies" based office users to upgrade to 2007 simply because I am fed up of searching for their "lost" toolbars.
    The ribbon provides much needed visibility and improved organization for the common user.  A previous post had complained about losing his keyboard shortcuts. Well actually they are all there and then some. I love the way pressing alt brings up all the letters on the screen under each of the tabs.  In some ways things haven’t changed a lot.  They just look different.
    In response to a previous post the buttons on the QAT are not any smaller than they used to be in 2003. They just look smaller in comparison to the new bigger buttons and icons
    I work in a research institution which has a lot of smart inquisitive people who like to experiment. Surprisingly though only a very small minority of these people come under the realm of power users. Most people are highly technophobic, I am sure have never done any customization and are easily befuddled by “accidental customization”.
    I have a feeling that the minibar is the next thing that is going to annoy common people.
    Here are my suggestions:
    1. Add an option to make the buttons on the QAT a little bigger when docked under the ribbon.  Sort of like the changes that you can make to the quick launch bar in XP.
    2. Have the option to  have upto two  rows of buttons in the QAT when docked below the ribbon.

  • Anonymous
    July 10, 2006

    I'm glad to hear that floating things (like toolbars) are going to be appearing less often.  What I would REALLY like to see is a non-floating find/replace dialog.  I am forever moving this dialog out of the way so that I can view the document below it.  Take a look at how Firefox has the find dialog as a bottom-docked bar that pops up when needed.  

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2006
    > Assuming that a power user is the person who
    > uses the app for the most business, has
    > taken the most time to learn the app, and
    > has figured out that it can be made more
    > efficient by customization, it does not make
    > sense to ignore the power users requests
    > because the average user did not know how to
    > customize.

    Excellent point, Keith.  Let's expand it a bit:  It isn't clear exactly what MS is counting but it seems to be something called "sessions."  I assume that this means "startups of any major program in the Office suite."  

    What if they instead had counted keystrokes? Or documents saved?  Or slides created?  What would the "percentage of work done with customized toolbars" have looked like then?

    "Sessions" seems to me to be a remarkably poor way to determine the usage of a feature so obviously skewed toward power users.  Your power users are likely the ones who will be creating the most content per "session."  

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2006
    I wasn't going to post again until others replied, but since it's been over a week... here is a "ha ha, I was only serious" prediction for the future of Office 2007:

    Large numbers of people with heavily customized toolbars in Office 2003 and earlier will simply not move to Office 2007.  It's just too much of a productivity killer for all but the "Office for Dummies" crowd. So would be learning RibbonX.  So we'll just stick with 2003.  

    Of course since these users were such a small percentage of Office users, Microsoft will not notice.

    Later, Microsoft gathers O.2007 usage statistics and finds that the percentage of users with customized ribbons and QATs is even smaller than the percentage of toolbar customizers in previous versions.

    "Ah ha," they will say.  "We were right! Customization is not that important, and furthermore we must have gotten the ribbon design near perfect!"

    ...

    I think someone really needs to read How to Lie With Statistics, in particular the part about "the sample with the built-in bias."

  • Anonymous
    July 24, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 25, 2006
    All I want to be able to do is paste text without formatting, and without having to click "Paste Special" (whether on the ribbon or not) to get there. That's a pan-Office request. Having "Paste as Text" on the right-click menu would be nirvana to me.

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 01, 2006
    I have made an alpha version of my add-in to customize the ribbon available. See more details in this blog post: http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/08/01/35

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    Jeffrey Smith:
    Very good and hard job!

    With the last improvements done in the Ribbon, it is much better than in beta 2 but I still think that it would be considered an evolution for the menu bar not for both menu and tool bars.
    With the Ribbon the great majority of the user will not need toolbars anymore, but many, so many that MS think and like you job stands up, will miss toolbars and mainly their customization feature. Then I think the toolbars could continue like 2003 but all hidden as default.

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 02, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 03, 2006
    Jeffrey,

    don't make yourself any false hopes. Neither a radically different customization system nor a classic UI will happen in Office 2007. If any of these two will make it ever into Office, it will be in the version after Office 2007. Microsoft has made this very clear.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2006
    :Patrick:

    I do take your points and am neither waiting for nor overly optimistic about any near term "relief" coming from Microsoft on these issues.  I guess I've taken the time to comment here because: a) I think there's better ways to design UI's then the ones they've taken here; and b) if the Beta cycle is supposed to elicit responses from their user and partner community about the directions they are taking, I wanted to suggest ways the UI design process (and its result) could be improved and why I thought it was important to do so.  While it may well be that they are too far down this road and too far behind schedule to consider this input now, I don’t know what technical challenges they might face in building an optional switch to connect Office 2007 to the already developed classic UI – heck, it might even be easy, and maybe, with all the continuing discussion and expressed discontent, they’ll listen and see what might be done here (even before release to market).  

    If not, well, at least I’ve tried and perhaps (if they are still listening), they might realize that their CEIP project (as it is presently constructed) had no basis driving the UI design because it was too unrepresentative of the market they serve, and they’ll consider better alternatives on the next go.  I have to think they would have spent less money and gotten much, much better data if they had resorted to the random sample approach I mentioned in my first comment in this blog.  Certainly the sample sizes were within their means and the methodology much more inclusive than the narrow look they’ve taken with CEIP.  

    Well, I think it was you that said in another blog comment that you had “flogged that horse enough” and I guess I’m there, too.  They’ll either listen and respond if they can ... or they’re past that now and we’ll all just have to see how the market responds.  Since there’s only been about 3 million downloads of Beta 2 so far, it almost goes without saying that the other 99.3% of the 450 million users in the Office community haven’t “voted” yet and most of them aren’t even yet aware of the discussion.  I expect that “input” (when all our “votes” are counted in the marketplace) is the one source that informs Microsoft best.  If they’ve failed to anticipate their user’s needs as well as they should have, then maybe some of the dissenting comments offered in these blogs will have more cachet as they try to discern where they went wrong and how best to fix it.

    In the meantime, I’m glad for the efforts of people like yourself that are building “bridges” to the new technology and helping the rest of us develop a road map through this unfamiliar territory ... it may (eventually) become the only way to cope (at least once the life cycle of earlier Office versions expire and no longer receive Microsoft support against the hazards of viruses and such).

    Best regards.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2006
    Frank Eskridge (and maybe others)
    i'd guess that people who avoid customizing for portablity reasons, also tend to use keyboard commands, rather than "drilling" thru menus with the mouse?

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    I get the ideas here in relation to most of office - however I am a heavy user of Access - which is different. Access is essentially a development tools and REALLY NEEDS a capability to customise an develop the ribbon and for such  changes to be contextual. Most of the time you don't want users having access to ANY standard options.

    Comments please...

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2006
    Julian, Access actually has the most flexible customization system of all the ribbon apps from a developer point of view. After all, in Access, you can specify a ribbon via VBA, which you can't in the others.

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    December 19, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2007
    I missed this awhile back I think. Jensen Harris has a great post on customizing the Ribbon.

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