Dawn of the new ribbon
When the new Office ribbon interface was introduced in the 2007 version, Microsoft took the decision not to provide any built-in capability to customise the individual ribbons or their components.
This was in considerable contrast to the old menus and toolbars interface which allowed you to re-arrange existing toolbars and add items to new and existing menus. Microsoft’s argument for the change was that few users intentionally changed their toolbars, and accidental (and even deliberate) changes often created problems for users and those supporting them. To ensure the same issues didn’t plague the new ribbon interface, Microsoft restricted its customisation tools to a single area outside of the ribbon – the Quick Access Toolbar.
This is not to say that it was impossible to edit the Office 2007 ribbon. Several third-party add-ins are available to do exactly that, including some that include the rather backward step of replacing the ribbon with a close approximation of the old menus and toolbars.
Office 2010 sees a dramatic change to the situation. A right-click on the ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar reveals a new ‘Customise the Ribbon’ option. Although you can turn off whole tabs and remove whole groups from existing tabs, you can’t add commands to, or remove commands from, existing groups. Mind you, the ability to remove whole groups and to change the order of groups, means you can substantially change even the built-in ribbons. In addition, you can’t just drag ribbons to new positions or drag tools to new ribbons or directly into oblivion as you could with the old toolbars. To customise the ribbon you need to deliberately choose the ‘Customise the Ribbon’ option. Hopefully this will be enough to prevent the support issues that Microsoft had originally foreseen.
Home extension
We’ll demonstrate how customising the ribbon can improve your productivity by adding a modest extension to the Excel Home ribbon. Although Microsoft has been persuaded to replace the enigmatic Office button with the much more obvious File ribbon tab, you might still feel that it would be nice for the main File options, such as New, Open, Save and Print, to be more visible. One option would be to add a File group to the existing Home ribbon:
After choosing ‘Customise the Ribbon’ from the ribbon right-click menu, we have clicked the plus sign next to ‘Home’ in the ‘Main Tabs’ area at the right of the screen. This displays the groups within that ribbon. We have then created a new group by clicking on the ‘New Group’ button immediately beneath the list of tabs. We can use the up/down buttons on the right-hand side of the screen to move the new group to the required position, or just drag it to where we want it. We can now go to the left-hand side and decide where to find the options we want to add to our new group. In the ‘Choose commands from’ dropdown we have chosen ‘File Tab’. We have then clicked on each of the commands we want to see in our new File group and pressed the ‘Add’ button to include them – again we can use the up/down buttons to manoeuvre them into position. Alternatively, we can just drag items from the left-hand list to the required position in the right-hand side list.
We can give groups and commands the description we choose, either by selecting each one and using the ‘Rename’ button, or by right-clicking on them and choosing ‘Rename’ from the menu:
For individual commands we can choose both the name and the symbol that we want to use.
Here is our resulting Home ribbon with our new File group:
Useful as the ability to customise the ribbon can be, it’s worth considering whether it’s best to add the commands to the ribbon or to the Quick Access Toolbar. The Toolbar restricts you to a symbol with no description and you’ve only got one long toolbar to work with. On the other hand, the Quick Access Toolbar is static so the options will be in the same place, and available, whichever ribbon is currently displayed.
Additional commands
We’ll be a little more adventurous with our File group and add some other useful commands including a New button that opens a default blank file rather than displaying the full range of ‘New’ options:
We have renamed the second ‘New’ command and changed the symbol to differentiate it from the other New button.
Not all of the commands we have added are on the File tab, but we can change the ‘Choose Commands From’ option to ‘All commands’ to see a full, alphabetical list of the Excel commands available. We can also use the ‘Macros’ option to include commands to run any macros that we might have written or recorded.
Sharing and removing customisations
The Import/Export button at the bottom of the right-hand pane allows you to make your customised ribbons and Quick Access Toolbar available to someone else or to create a ‘library’ of different customisations. Exporting a customisation saves a file in your chosen location that contains details of all your ribbon and toolbar customisations. Those customisations can then be applied to another computer, or restored to your computer, by using the ‘Import customisation file’ option from the Import/Export button.
Finally, if you need to reset your ribbons and toolbars to their original state then the ‘Reset’ button gives you the option to ‘Reset only selected Ribbon tab’ or, more drastically, ‘Reset all customisations’.
