How does one create a custom Menu on the Menu Bar in Word 7?

That is good news!

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP



"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:54:05 -0800, kaoinla
wrote:

Actually I did exactly mean the Menu bar. It was the bar at the top in
2003
with the commands File, Edit, View, etc. I do see what Suzanne is saying
now
in Word 2007, the formerly customizable bar menus have now become just
dumb
tabs for the ribbon.

I hid the ribbon almost immediately, and I've filled up the quick access
toolbar. I wanted to add some macros into a menu listing as I had done
previously. Now I'm beginning to think I will have to create a control
toolbar or something to hold them.

I will also look into customizing the Ribbon. I think that should really
be
as easy to do that as it is to customize the QAT and was to customize the
2003 Menu bar. If I could create an additional QAT that would be helpful.
Two QAT's would still take up less room than the ribbon.

Thanks for all of your replies!


Hi kaoinla,

You're only about three years late this party. The customizability --
or rather the lack of it -- in the ribbon and other parts of the
so-called Fluent Interface has been discussed since Office 2007 was in
beta release in 2006.

Jensen Harris, the head of the UI group that designed Office 2007, had
a quite extensive blog
(http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/pages/...-contents.aspx) that
included a few articles on customization, such as
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archiv...27/648269.aspx. He
explains how the team decided to limit easy customization to the Quick
Access Toolbar. Most of the MVPs felt, and still feel, that the data
the designers relied on were skewed and incomplete, as they make no
allowance for templates that are customized by specialists and then
distributed to thousands of other users.

Three years of complaints have led Microsoft to conclude that making
people use raw RibbonX to do ribbon customization was a mistake. Since
the public beta of Office 2010 was released this week, I can happily
tell you that it has a Customize Ribbon dialog that works a lot like
the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog. You can reposition or hide
the built-in groups, and create custom groups containing whatever
commands you want.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so all may benefit.

Thanks Jay I know I am 3 years behind you all, but very encouraging on the
one hand.

Knowing that my workplace only adopted usage of Office 2007 this year in
2009 makes me think that I won't see Office 2010 until 2013 which is
discouraging.

I will be looking into customizing the Ribbon for now. But At least I have
hope for the future. Thanks so much to Graham and Greg and all of you!

"Jay Freedman" wrote:

Hi kaoinla,

You're only about three years late this party. The customizability --
or rather the lack of it -- in the ribbon and other parts of the
so-called Fluent Interface has been discussed since Office 2007 was in
beta release in 2006.

Jensen Harris, the head of the UI group that designed Office 2007, had
a quite extensive blog
(http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/pages/...-contents.aspx) that
included a few articles on customization, such as
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archiv...27/648269.aspx. He
explains how the team decided to limit easy customization to the Quick
Access Toolbar. Most of the MVPs felt, and still feel, that the data
the designers relied on were skewed and incomplete, as they make no
allowance for templates that are customized by specialists and then
distributed to thousands of other users.

Three years of complaints have led Microsoft to conclude that making
people use raw RibbonX to do ribbon customization was a mistake. Since
the public beta of Office 2010 was released this week, I can happily
tell you that it has a Customize Ribbon dialog that works a lot like
the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog. You can reposition or hide
the built-in groups, and create custom groups containing whatever
commands you want.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.
.

On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:47:05 -0800 (PST), Greg Maxey
wrote:

On Nov 19, 1:41*pm, Jay Freedman wrote:
[snip]
Three years of complaints have led Microsoft to conclude that making
people use raw RibbonX to do ribbon customization was a mistake. Since
the public beta of Office 2010 was released this week, I can happily
tell you that it has a Customize Ribbon dialog that works a lot like
the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog. You can reposition or hide
the built-in groups, and create custom groups containing whatever
commands you want.

Jay,

Thanks for this update. Can you tell us if the availability of built-
in icons as been enhanced or is there a feature to create custom icons
for either the QAT or the Ribbon?

As far as I can tell, there has been only one change in the Customize
QAT facility, a button for exporting or importing a file of
customizations. There doesn't seem to be any change in the requirement
to use one of the supplied icons or in the number of icons in the
selection. I don't know whether any changes are planned in that area,
but at this late date it wouldn't seem likely.

It also appears (from a short experiment; there's woefully little
documentation about this) that the Customize Ribbon dialog offers only
the same selection of icons as the Customize QAT dialog. It looks like
it might be possible to hack the result to add a getImage callback for
an external image, but that wouldn't be part of the quick-n-easy
toolset.

Bear in mind that we're getting more customizability than we have in
Office 2007, but it seems to given grudgingly.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.

They just don't get it, do they? Looks like I'll be sticking with my custom
icons from Word 2003 in a blob on the QAT.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:47:05 -0800 (PST), Greg Maxey
wrote:

On Nov 19, 1:41 pm, Jay Freedman wrote:
[snip]
Three years of complaints have led Microsoft to conclude that making
people use raw RibbonX to do ribbon customization was a mistake. Since
the public beta of Office 2010 was released this week, I can happily
tell you that it has a Customize Ribbon dialog that works a lot like
the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog. You can reposition or hide
the built-in groups, and create custom groups containing whatever
commands you want.

Jay,

Thanks for this update. Can you tell us if the availability of built-
in icons as been enhanced or is there a feature to create custom icons
for either the QAT or the Ribbon?

As far as I can tell, there has been only one change in the Customize
QAT facility, a button for exporting or importing a file of
customizations. There doesn't seem to be any change in the requirement
to use one of the supplied icons or in the number of icons in the
selection. I don't know whether any changes are planned in that area,
but at this late date it wouldn't seem likely.

It also appears (from a short experiment; there's woefully little
documentation about this) that the Customize Ribbon dialog offers only
the same selection of icons as the Customize QAT dialog. It looks like
it might be possible to hack the result to add a getImage callback for
an external image, but that wouldn't be part of the quick-n-easy
toolset.

Bear in mind that we're getting more customizability than we have in
Office 2007, but it seems to given grudgingly.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so all may benefit.

Here's a little more information:

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/...bbon-mine.aspx



Pam

Suzanne S. Barnhill wrote:
They just don't get it, do they? Looks like I'll be sticking with my custom
icons from Word 2003 in a blob on the QAT.

--
Message posted via OfficeKB.com
http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...ement/200911/1

We saw this demonstrated at the MVP Summit last spring, but of course we
couldn't talk about it. I had hoped that there would be more progress in
that direction before Office 2010 was released, but any feature not present
in beta 2 will not be in the shipping version.

I find it incredibly disingenuous to say, "Office is used by approximately
one billion people worldwide, and we know the default organization of
commands can’t possibly match the preferences of every single one of our
customers." But when Office 2007 was designed, the designers claimed that
the vast majority of users never customized anything and that most corporate
customers wanted an immutable interface (to facilitate Help Desk support)
and most users also wanted a predictable environment (MS had been stung
before by "adaptive menus" and wasn't about to repeat that debacle). That
was the rationale for making Ribbon customization the province of developers
rather than most end users (as compared to the relative ease with which
menus and toolbars could be customized in earlier versions. This is not a
complete about-face, and I'm glad they've been shaken up and have waked up
to reality, but I still believe it doesn't go far enough.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

"Pamelia Caswell via OfficeKB.com" u43222@uwe wrote in message
news:9f6166ba1e594@uwe...
Here's a little more information:

http://blogs.technet.com/office2010/...bbon-mine.aspx



Pam

Suzanne S. Barnhill wrote:
They just don't get it, do they? Looks like I'll be sticking with my
custom
icons from Word 2003 in a blob on the QAT.

--
Message posted via OfficeKB.com
http://www.officekb.com/Uwe/Forums.a...ement/200911/1

I think they are right. Few people customize the interface, and IT people are
mostly against it. Still, MS probably just used that conclusion to help them
decide what to do and when to do it in their development schedule.

I'm not sure I'll use ribbon customization. I'd want to carry the
customization with me in my editing.dotm add-on just as I do with the QAT.
It's not clear yet that that is possible.

Pam


Suzanne S. Barnhill wrote:
We saw this demonstrated at the MVP Summit last spring, but of course we
couldn't talk about it. I had hoped that there would be more progress in
that direction before Office 2010 was released, but any feature not present
in beta 2 will not be in the shipping version.

I find it incredibly disingenuous to say, "Office is used by approximately
one billion people worldwide, and we know the default organization of
commands can’t possibly match the preferences of every single one of our
customers." But when Office 2007 was designed, the designers claimed that
the vast majority of users never customized anything and that most corporate
customers wanted an immutable interface (to facilitate Help Desk support)
and most users also wanted a predictable environment (MS had been stung
before by "adaptive menus" and wasn't about to repeat that debacle). That
was the rationale for making Ribbon customization the province of developers
rather than most end users (as compared to the relative ease with which
menus and toolbars could be customized in earlier versions. This is not a
complete about-face, and I'm glad they've been shaken up and have waked up
to reality, but I still believe it doesn't go far enough.

Here's a little more information:

[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
custom
icons from Word 2003 in a blob on the QAT.

--
Message posted via http://www.officekb.com

Pamelia Caswell via OfficeKB.com wrote:

I'm not sure I'll use ribbon customization. I'd want to carry the
customization with me in my editing.dotm add-on just as I do with the
QAT. It's not clear yet that that is possible.


How Office 2010 will change things I haven't a clue, but you can certainly
apply changes to the ribbon in Word 2007 with add-ins and document
templates. There are some examples on my web site e.g.
http://www.gmayor.com/EnvelopesAndLabels.htm and
http://www.gmayor.com/individual_merge_letters.htm . It is just relatively
complicated to achieve. If Office 2010 gives more access to the process, I
don't see why the general premise of templates having priority should
change.

--

Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org

That's a help. Thanks.

Pam
Graham Mayor wrote:
I'm not sure I'll use ribbon customization. I'd want to carry the
customization with me in my editing.dotm add-on just as I do with the
QAT. It's not clear yet that that is possible.

How Office 2010 will change things I haven't a clue, but you can certainly
apply changes to the ribbon in Word 2007 with add-ins and document
templates. There are some examples on my web site e.g.
http://www.gmayor.com/EnvelopesAndLabels.htm and
http://www.gmayor.com/individual_merge_letters.htm . It is just relatively
complicated to achieve. If Office 2010 gives more access to the process, I
don't see why the general premise of templates having priority should
change.


--
Message posted via http://www.officekb.com