We all know how difficult it was to customize (or personalize, if you prefer) Office 2007. That changed a lot in Office 2010 and everything has become much, much simpler. A major change in this customization of the Ribbon is related to the scaling of groups. Previously, only the standard groups in the Ribbon could collapse. Now, Microsoft introduced the autoScale attribute, which is used to determine if a custom group should or should not collapse when we reduce the size of the Ribbon or the resolution of the screen is reduced.

Check out the picture below (I am actually using Office 2010 in Portuguese, but you will get the picture, if you forgive me the pun):

Figure 1: A Ribbon custom Group expanded

The group "Minhas Ferramentas (My Tools)" at the moment is expanded as usual. But assuming that the configuration of your screen or monitor is changed, you would get the following result with the autoScale set to "true" (autoScale="true"):

Figure 2: Custom Ribbon Group collapsed

If we keep reducing the Ribbon, the group is continuously reduced in size, and it further collapses the elements of our group:

Figure 3: Buttons collapsed to a splitButton

To implement this customization / personalization of the Ribbon just add the attribute autoScale and set its value as "true". Note that this attribute must be determined for each group separately, it does have a global effect on other groups in the Ribbon.

Microsoft Office 2010 (Beta) has come with a nice new feature that allows any earthling to change the looks of his or her user interface, aka, the Ribbon. When Microsoft Office 2007 came into existance, changing the user interface meant getting one's hands dirty in XML code. In Office 2010 things changed for the better, although you still need XML for a more professionally looking customization.

Here’s how this new feature looks like:

Figure 1: Microsoft Office 2010 Ribbon Customization

This looks great and certainly makes life much easier when it comes to customizing the user interface. However, I think that this adds layers to our task. An alternative would be to add an option to the right-click such that we could easily remove a tab, group or button. Also, there should be a button to reset the Ribbon from the same right-click. Here’s how my Ribbon Customization idea would look like:

Figure 2: Remove/Reset Ribbon button straight from the right-click

The other day I had to teach a Word course and I normally take a text with me so that people can replicate what is being taught. This time, however, I decided to use an old trick from Word whereby you can use the =rand() function to get the following:

On the Insert tab, the galleries include items that are designed to coordinate with the overall look of your document. You can use these galleries to insert tables, headers, footers, lists, cover pages, and other document building blocks. When you create pictures, charts, or diagrams, they also coordinate with your current document look.

You can easily change the formatting of selected text in the document text by choosing a look for the selected text from the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. You can also format text directly by using the other controls on the Home tab. Most controls offer a choice of using the look from the current theme or using a format that you specify directly.

To change the overall look of your document, choose new Theme elements on the Page Layout tab. To change the looks available in the Quick Style gallery, use the Change Current Quick Style Set command. Both the Themes gallery and the Quick Styles gallery provide reset commands so that you can always restore the look of your document to the original contained in your current template.

Besides the traditional =rand() function, we can also use the =lorem() function to return the ubiquitous "Lorem ipsum..." text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas porttitor congue massa. Fusce posuere, magna sed pulvinar ultricies, purus lectus malesuada libero, sit amet commodo magna eros quis urna.

Nunc viverra imperdiet enim. Fusce est. Vivamus a tellus.

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Proin pharetra nonummy pede. Mauris et orci.

In both cases we get a set of three paragraphs, but you can change that by adding arguments to the functions. If you type =lorem(6) you will get six paragraphs whereas if you type =lorem(3,6) you will get three paragraphs with six sentences each.

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PS: You can also use this in other Office applications such as PowerPoint. Enjoy!

Microsoft Office 2010 new features include "cancel on load". This is a little "Cancel" button on the right-hand bottom corner of the application splash screen which can be used to cancel the loading of the application:

Figure 1: Cancel on load