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

Excel 2010 reinvents the conditional format for data bars. We now have more control over the conditional formatting as a whole and not only databars; however, with data bars we now have the option to plot negative values as well.

Here’s how it looks like:

Figure 1: Excel 2010 Conditional Format Data Bars

Once we apply one of the built-in conditional formats for data bars, we can access the Conditional Format Manage Rules dialog box in order to edit the new conditional format rule:

Figure 2: Determining Negative Value and Axis...


Finally, you can determine various aspects of how the value are displayed as well as the axis:

Figure 3: Determining data bars aspects such as axis settings

Excel 2007 introduced Icon Sets to Excel Conditional Formatting. Excel 2010 introduces No Cell Icon to Conditional Formatting. In Excel 2007, after applying your Icon Set Conditional Format, you would get something like this:

Figure 1: Icon Set Conditional Format

The problem, of course, is that the whole this is a mess. If the idea is to identify poor grades, you’d need to create extra Conditional Formats so that you could hide the undesired icons. Excel 2010 introduces No Cell Icon which removes the need for extra formulas and extra Conditional Formats. Here’s how it looks like:

Figure 2: No Cell Icon

By choosing No Cell Icon, Excel 2010 will omit the icons for the selected conditions saving you all the hassle of extra conditioning:

Figure 3: Result after applying No Cell Icon

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