Part III Adding More Functionality to Office
Patrick Schmid on Access 2007 Ribbon Customizability
T
he best discussion of Access 2007 Ribbon customizability (or the lack thereof) is from the
October 18, 2006 entry on MVP Patrick Schmid’s blog:If you ask me about the customizability of the new Ribbon UI in Office 2007, my answer would be:
too little, too difficult. Compared to previous Office versions, especially Office 2003, 2007 simply
has a serious customization deficiency. In fact, most users will probably conclude that the Ribbon
cannot be customized at all.In contrast, Office 2003 is the most customizable Office ever. You can locate your menus and tool-
bars anywhere you want on the screen, create your own menus and toolbars, change icons and
labels, modify toolbars and menus, and so on. There is almost no limit as to what components of the
UI a user can alter. Customizing Office 2003 is also easy to do, as alteration can be achieved with a
few mouse clicks.The Ribbon UI of Office 2007 though is a completely different story. Static with very limited cus-
tomizability is probably the description most users would give this new UI. Most users probably only
discover the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) and then conclude that this must be it. Is that really all
there is? How did we end up with such a lack of customization?Why Office 2007 has a customization deficiency
Microsoft had to create the Ribbon UI completely from scratch. If you have read through some of the
Office UI Bible, you can get an idea of the huge amount of resources that went into creating this new
UI. However, even at Microsoft resources are limited. Therefore, the need for every feature of the
new UI had to be justified. Real customizability was unfortunately a feature that didn’t make the cut.As the Office UI Bible explains, the UI team could not make the case for customizability, if only
~1.9% of the Office 2003 sessions of roughly one hundred million users were with customization.
The case is even weaker, as 85% of those customizations involve four or fewer buttons. Therefore,
Microsoft decided to support the case encountered by 99.7% of all users: no customization or four
or fewer buttons. That left the remaining 0.3% in the rain. Those 0.3% represent around 1.35 million
people, as there are 450 million paid Office customers, and are also the ones who are most likely to
participate in the Office development process, e.g., through participation in the beta. My opinion
about this approach can be found in my designing with statistics post.In addition to this argument, a highly customizable UI unfortunately presents a massive support
issue. You can see this, if you try to remember how many times you accidentally moved a menu or
toolbar in Office 2003, or customized it otherwise by accident. You probably know how to undo
your accident, but many, many users do not.