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

[kaoinla]

It was quite simple in Word 2003 via Tools Customize.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There is no Menu Bar in Word 2007, only the Ribbon, and the only
customization permitted is of the QAT.

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

 

[Graham Mayor]

That's a bit sweeping? - http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Customize_Ribbon.htm and
http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Customize_Word2007_SC_Menu_Programatically.htm

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't think it's much of a stretch to assume that anyone who calls the
Ribbon the "Menu Bar" probably isn't going to want to learn to use RibbonX.
<g>

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

 

[Greg Maxey]

It was quite simple in Word 2003 via Tools Customize.

kaoinla,

I think Suzanne Barnhill must be having an off day. She doesn't
normally let her opinions influence the accuracy of her posts. Please
accept my apology on her behalf.

 

[kaoinla]

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!

 

[Greg Maxey]

kaoinla,

You will not be able to create a toolbar in Word2007 or a second QAT.
Considering your apparent goal of keeping the Ribbon hidden while having
access to multiple commands (more that your QAT currently can hold), an
option that you might consider is customizing your Ribbon to add a custom
tab, containing custom groups, containing custom menus that are populated
with your custom macros or built-in Word commands. You could then add these
custom groups to your QAT. Once the groups are added to the QAT you can
again hide your ribbon.

For some examples of custom menus see:
http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Ribbon_Menu_Controls.htm

 

[Jay Freedman]

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/table-of-contents.aspx) that
included a few articles on customization, such as
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.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.

 

[Greg Maxey]

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/table-of-contents.aspx) that
included a few articles on customization, such ashttp://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.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 newsgroupso all may benefit.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

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?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm looking forward to learning that as well. One of the features I lobbied
hardest for was the ability to create custom button images (if only for the
QAT) or at the very least to have a wider selection of alternatives for all
those "green ball" buttons that have no built-in icon. Or perhaps they could
get their artists to design a built-in icon for every available button!

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

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/table-of-contents.aspx) that
included a few articles on customization, such
ashttp://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.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.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

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?

 

[Stefan Blom]

That is good news!

 

[kaoinla]

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]

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.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

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

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

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

 

[Graham Mayor]

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

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