Ribbon Flexibility

One aspect I am glad to see has been addressed in 2010 is the ability to create and interact more with the ribbon environment and customize it. This was a big problem with Office 2007. Although the arrangement of tools and features may not be perfect in 2010 at least we have some degree of customisability with the ribbon environment. (As well as the Quick Access toolbar but since that was customisable in 2007 I’ll mention it no further here.)

The only problem I can still see is the inability to customise the default ribbons we can make them not visible and create our own instead, but we cannot seem to affect the prelayout of existing ribbons. (Maybe that’s being saved for a future version of office) At least we can create our own macro ribbon now and arrange our macro types in groups and export these items for deployment across a number of machines. This was a big problem in 2007 as we could only add our macro’s to the Quick access toolbar which, dependant on screen size and resolution has a very finite number of spaces and no organisation.

The ability to Minimise the ribbons as we work and only have them appear when we need them is useful for those with limited screen size or a large resolution where the ribbon could use up to a third of the screen, leaving very little space left to work with your document.

Contextual tabs in 2007 and 2010 are for me the best feature of the ribbon environment  because why have the tools displaying and cluttering your screen when you don’t need them the ability of the office applications to determine the object type and display the appropriate tools in the contextual tabs is great. In previous office versions it was normal to see the toolbar area crowded with 10 – 15 toolbars that were used very infrequently but still around ‘Just in case’. I have seen many mentions on the web from people saying they can’t find things and they hate the whole ribbon idea but I believe that given the chance to use and work with the 2010 features for the ribbons and toolbars for a while they will be converted and actually start to appreciate the improvements and will eventually wonder how they managed before.