MVPs for Office and SharePoint 2010: Ribbon Customization

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by MVP Doug Robbins as part of the MVP Award Program Blog's "MVPs for Office and SharePoint 2010" series. Doug Robbins is a long-standing Word MVP.

Customizing the Ribbon

When Office 2007 hit the street, many experienced users of the Office products bemoaned the fact that it was no longer possible to customize the Ribbon via the user interface in the way that it had been possible to modify the menus and create custom toolbars in earlier versions of the software.

Well, they heard you!

In Office 2010, simple customization of the Ribbon is now an easy task.

If you right click on the Ribbon, you will see the item “Customize the Ribbon”. (See below)

Left clicking on this item takes you to the Ribbon Customization dialog shown below:

The above dialog can also be accessed by clicking on the File button and then on Options and then on Customize Ribbon.

Now, when I am working in Word, I always have the Apply Styles dialog (Ctrl+Shift+s) displayed and I hardly ever use the Styles section of the Home tab of the Ribbon, so I can expand the Home item in the Customize Ribbon dialog and select the Styles item and if I want to, remove it completely, I can click on the Remove button and it will be removed from the Ribbon. (See below)

I do however often use the Page Setup feature, and it would save a mouse-click (there and back) if I had that on the Home tab of the Ribbon. That can be done, by expanding the Page Layout item in the Customize Ribbondialog and the click on the Page Setup item and drag it into the position where I would like it in the Home tab group. (See below)

After making these changes, I now have a Ribbon with the Font, Paragraph and Page Setup groups all on the Home tab of the Ribbon, just where I want them.

Another feature that I often use and would like to have right on the Ribbon itself is the Paste Special facility, which is by default, buried under the Paste item in the Clipboard section of the Home tab of the Ribbon.

While I can access that item in the commands list of the Customize Ribbon dialog, if I select that item and in the commands list and is select the Clipboard item of the Home tab items and click on Add, I receive the following message:

So I need to add a custom group to the ribbon by clicking on the New group button and then I can use the Rename button to change the name from New Group to Paste (the word “Custom” that appears in the dialog, does not appear on the Ribbon itself) and then I am able to add the Paste Special item to the custom group by either selecting it and the custom group and using the Add button, or by clicking on it and dragging it onto the custom group.

This then gives me a new group named Paste on the Home tab that contains Paste Special.

Office 2010 however, makes simple customizations dead easy!