Good news for all you old dogs who are disinclined to learn a
lot of new Office 2007 tricks: Addintools is offering
Classic Menu for Office 2007. This add-on re-creates the
Office 2003 menus, adapted to present Office 2007 commands — for
instance, the add-on's View menu for Word contains 2007's Draft and
Full Screen Reading commands instead of the old Normal and Reading
Layout commands.
The implementation is pretty clever: Classic Menu places a Menus
tab on the Office 2007 Ribbon. You can select the tab to display
the Office 2003 menu bar, along with the Standard and Formatting
toolbar:
Click any of the regular Office 2007 tabs, and the Office 2003
elements disappear.
If you're rabidly anti-Ribbon, you can take things even further.
Classic Menu provides an All item on the Office 2003 menu bar. Just
right-click on All, choose Add To Quick Access Toolbar, and then
minimize the Ribbon. A little green button on the Quick Access
Toolbar will drop down the Office 2003 menu bar:
You can follow a similar procedure to add the toolbars to the
Quick Access Toolbar. Another little green button will appear, and
you can use it to turn on the toolbar display.
Addintools offers a
free 15-day trial of the Office 2007 Classic Menu add-on
(2.6 Mb). If you decide to purchase the product, you can choose
from individual add-ons for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint ($15) or
get all three in the Office 2007 Classic Menu package ($29.95).
Thanks to the folks at Office Watch for the heads-up on this
product in their latest newsletter.
<!-- /entry -->
Jody Gilbert has been writing and editing
technical articles for the past 20 years, including a stint with
The Cobb Group/ZD Journals. She's been with TechRepublic since Day
One. Read her
full bio and profile.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/msoffice/?p=116