14 DAY TRIAL // Resources offered free of charge by Microsoft are designed to streamline the personalization process of the graphical user interface of various Office 2010 components.
There are no less than three downloads up for grabs from the software giant: Ribbon customization for InfoPath 2010 - Favorites tab; Ribbon customization for Visio 2010 - Favorites tab and Ribbon customization for Project 2010 - Favorites tab
All three offer users of the Office 2012 components they’re associated with the chance to import a customized tab.
“When you import a ribbon customization file, you lose all prior ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar customizations. If you think that you might want to revert to the customization that you currently have, you should export them before importing any new customizations,” Microsoft explained.
On the support area of the Office 2010 website, the Redmond company is offering information on how to customize the Ribbon / Fluent UI.
As far as I’m concerned, the flexibility in terms of customization is perhaps one of the key examples of why the Ribbon UI is clearly superior to the old Menu style of the productivity suite.
It’s in fact extremely easy to manually customize the Office 2010 Ribbon lfor a range of components, not just Visio, Project and InfoPath, but also Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.
In order to make my work easier I built custom tabs and custom groups where I placed the commands that I reuse on a daily basis. This way I don’t have to dig through the entire interface, or access the Ribbon menu, when I can have the commands I need right on the Home tab.
“Ribbon customization is specific to the Microsoft Office program you are working in at the time. Ribbon customization does not apply across the Office programs,” Microsoft explains.
“You can rename and change the order of the default tabs and groups that are built-into Microsoft Office 2010. However, you cannot rename the default commands, change the icons associated with these default commands, or change the order of these commands. The default commands appear in gray text.
“To add commands to a group, you must add a custom group to a default tab or to a new, custom tab. To help you identify a custom tab or group and to distinguish from a default tab or group, the custom tabs and groups in the Customize the Ribbon list have (Custom) after the name, but the word (Custom) does not appear in the ribbon.”
Ribbon customization for InfoPath 2010 - Favorites tab is available for download here.
Ribbon customization for Visio 2010 - Favorites tab is available for download here.
Ribbon customization for Project 2010 - Favorites tab is available for download here.