Add Classic Menu to Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon

I remembered there was a time when my cousin was using my laptop to set up a schedule with Microsoft Excel. I had Microsoft Office 2007 installed and there was a weird moment where she just kept on staring at the screen on a blank excel file for a very long time. I asked her why is she looking at the screen and not doing anything. Then she told me that the menu looked weird and she was trying to understand what is on the menu. Same case as me, I have two laptops, one with Office 2003 and the newer one with Office 2007 but I never touch the one with Office 2007 because I am not familiar with the new ribbon menu.

My mum who has been very familiar with Microsoft Office because she needs to do a lot of paperwork when she was working but now she is also not used to the Office 2007 ribbon menu. According to Wikipedia, it is not possible to remove the Ribbon, modify it, or replace it with menus with the normal Office 2007 functions without using third party add-ins. Most of the third party add-ins that can give back the classic menu cost money but here’s one that’s free.

RibbonCustomizer is an add-in for Microsoft Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word 2007. It allows you to customize the Ribbon User Interface with only a few mouse clicks! Microsoft did not include that ability in Office 2007, but with this add-in you are no longer stuck with a static User Interface!

There are 2 versions of RibbonCustomizer, the Starter edition and Professional. Obviously the Professional version cost money and offers more features than the Starter edition. However if you only want to have the Classic menu for Office 2007, the Starter edition should do it. Do note that this add-in does not transform the Ribbon menu to the Classic menu. It will add another tab called Classic IU where the old buttons will all be listed in the menu bar. This is good because it lets the user work with a familiar user interface and allows them to slowly transition into the new ribbon interface.

Simply download the installer, install it and run any Office 2007 component. Go to View tab, click the drop down arrow button on Customize Ribbon and then go to Customize Schemes. You can select either to show the Classic UI as first tab or the last tab.

RibbonCustomer was last updated 2 years ago but it worked perfectly on my Office 2007 with Service Pack 2. When a software hasn’t been updated for a long time, normally there are cracks for it. UnderPl has cracked the DLL files which you can replace the original ones and then enter any serial key to activate RibbonCustomizer.

[ Download RibbonCustomizer ]