For months, I've been listening to gripes and whines about the new Office 2007 interface from people who don't like the new Ribbon and want their old menus back. My usual response was well, if you want it to look like Office 2003, why not just use Office 2003 instead?  After all, most of the folks who were complaining weren't really using most of the new features in Office anyway, so I figured their best solution was to just save a few bucks and not upgrade.

Alternatively, except for Outlook, you can run the Office 2003 and Office 2007 applications on the same computer. I did that for a while, until I found I was never opening the old apps anymore because I, unlike so many folks, actually do like the new Ribbon interface.

But much as I think the Ribbon makes most tasks easier, there were occasions when I wished I had the old menus back - not instead of the Ribbon, but in addition to it.

Well, it's possible now to have exactly that, with an add-in available at http://www.addintools.com/english/menuoffice/default.htm from a Chinese developer that I mentioned in last week's WXPnews. I have to admit I was a little wary of installing it at first. I've had bad add-in experiences before and after all, I'm not the one who's been longing for the old menus. But finally I decided to give it a try on a secondary machine. If it worked, I'd have an answer for all those folks who refused to get over the loss of the classic menus and move on.

Well, I installed the trial version on the secondary laptop and I fell in love. Suddenly I had the best of both worlds - all my Ribbon tabs were still there, but so was a new Menus tab that had the old toolbars on it, so I no longer had to go hunting for things like the Sort in Ascending order button. Way cool.

I tested it for a while to make sure it didn't cause application instability, but there were absolutely no problems. So I installed it on my primary desktop machine and paid to register it. I've been working with it for a week now and I love it. Here's what the interface looks like:

Click HERE for a larger version.

I'm using the add-in with Office 2007 Ultimate edition on Vista Ultimate. If you've been pining away for the old menus, it's well worth the $29. And even if you like the new Ribbon, you'll find it doesn't get in the way and it's nice to have the old menus there when you want them.

I have to say Microsoft could probably have increased the adoption of Office 2007 if they had built this in from the beginning.

deb@shinder.net     www.debshinder.com
"Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."