Excel 2007 - Custom menus is missing!

[Søren Thade Petersen]

I have looked at Excel 2007, and the major thing I miss, is the ability to
changed / customize the menus, as it is possible in Excel XP (and 2003 i
think).

I am a keyboard user of Excel (working with the mouse is much slower, and
gives me pain in my arms/hands/shoulders and neck), so I have customized my
Excel with a lot of extra functionality in the menus, so that I don´t need
the mouse very often. And that is great! And very efficient!

In Excel 2007 the menu are gone. The ability to customize them is much
poorer.

Is MS only thinking of mouse users (and not of number cruchers like me).

If MS does not make the menus and customiziation available in Excel 2007, I
will stay at Excel 2003 !!!

By the way: The extra colums/rows in 2007 is great (I hope this also means
that it can handle much lager sheets - with more than 65.000 formulas...).
And also I can see that the functionality has also improved.

 

[dgp]

From my limited experience with Excel 2007 Beta:
1) I miss the menus. The Ribbon is a iconized cartoonish replacement
for menus. I think it was meant to be pretty rather than usable. The
Ribbon might be a little better if I could at least customize the
contents.
2) I use a couple of personal Add-in's that add menu items under some
of the pre-2007 default menus. Since the menus no longer exist in 2007
(replaced by the "Ribbon") all the menu items get thrown into a Ribbon
tab called 'Add-ins'. So they are now no longer grouped with similar
built-in menu items.
3) I don't know how a completely custom menu header would show up on
the Ribbon. I'll have to give it a try.
4) My custom keyboard shortcuts still work. However, other users of my
add-in may not know the shortcuts, and since the menu items are
converted to ribbon buttons they don't show the keyboard shortcut
anymore.
5) The ALT key still gives keyboard access to the "Quick Access"
toolbar and the "Ribbon" tabs. When the ALT key is pressed keyboard
access keys are displayed in relatively large, high contrast icons
floating over each toolbar and ribbon item. I like this much better
than the small, hard to see underscore of pre-2007.

 

[Nick Hodge]

Soren and dgp

It is one of the issues giving the most angst among the beta (and alpha)
testers. That is that the ribbon is not customisable or that there is no
'classic' view. The ribbon is 'fairly' easy to add tabs too and once you can
master the xml needed it helps a little towards customisation, rather than
'dumping' old commandbars on the add-ins tab, where they are
non-discoverable by normal users. This of course will mean existing apps
being re-written...good/bad??????

The whole layout of the ribbon is the result of SQM Watson data collected
via the 'customer experience' program. Most advanced users disable that
feature, so the data collected is mainly from light users and I think it
shows.

I suspect a ribbon customization 'tool' will be developed and I suspect the
next release will improve on this greatly. I should be remembered that XL4
had two toolbars, where as XL2003 has 32! It had to be rectified.

I think the product, outside the UI has a hell of a lot to commend it, but
the UI is so radically different it is getting all the headlines, great
additions such as file format (zipped xml), charts (still being developed
before RTM), name manager, pivot table improvement, function intellisense
and new functions, larger grid, better sorting, improved conditional
formatting, etc, etc are a little lost.

I do feel that XL2007 - XLNext version, will see a great deal of
improvements from the learning's, like XL97 - XL2000 was a huge step forward

BTW: If you are concerned about the screen space taken up by the ribbon,
Ctrl+F1 hides it or double clicking any tab. (It's a toggle feature too, so
repeat to undo)

Just my £0.02

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
www.nickhodge.co.uk
(e-mail address removed)

From my limited experience with Excel 2007 Beta:

1) I miss the menus. The Ribbon is a iconized cartoonish replacement
for menus. I think it was meant to be pretty rather than usable. The
Ribbon might be a little better if I could at least customize the
contents.
2) I use a couple of personal Add-in's that add menu items under some
of the pre-2007 default menus. Since the menus no longer exist in 2007
(replaced by the "Ribbon") all the menu items get thrown into a Ribbon
tab called 'Add-ins'. So they are now no longer grouped with similar
built-in menu items.
3) I don't know how a completely custom menu header would show up on
the Ribbon. I'll have to give it a try.
4) My custom keyboard shortcuts still work. However, other users of my
add-in may not know the shortcuts, and since the menu items are
converted to ribbon buttons they don't show the keyboard shortcut
anymore.
5) The ALT key still gives keyboard access to the "Quick Access"
toolbar and the "Ribbon" tabs. When the ALT key is pressed keyboard
access keys are displayed in relatively large, high contrast icons
floating over each toolbar and ribbon item. I like this much better
than the small, hard to see underscore of pre-2007.

 

[JLatham]

As mentioned by others - this is a big point of concern by many people who've
seen Excel 2007, and it's almost a show stopper for many. They have 'legacy'
Excel packages that are heavily dependent on custom menus and the lack of
support for them is causing many to say "so much for upgrading to
Excel/Office 2007". And they don't want to have to learn a new language in
order to move to the new platform.

I agree - many of the other improvements are true improvements (extended
number of columns and rows, extended length for number of characters in a
formula, etc) but the move to 'ribbons' seems to outweigh all the other
benefits to many.

You are not alone in your disappointment.