Sounds like an early beta of Office 2007 Sp1 has been released to some preview testers.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=648
Please please please let it have a UI compatibility option. Don’t hold your breath for a broad release though, O2007 was about a year in various betas I think.
cheers
Simon
Smurf on Spreadsheets 
Monday, 20th August, 2007 at 5:58 pm |
If the new UI was under development for years, without consideration of a compatibility option, there is no way a compatibility option will be built in a few months. Especially since the effort now devoted to Office 12 has to be less than before the release. I have no special knowledge of this, but common sense (and observation of MS) should tell anyone that there will be NO interface backwards compatiblity option.
What you’re likely to see are the various things that have been released as hotfixes. Updates that fix the poor chart performance in 2007 or fix the spell checking across Office, security updates, updates that improve file (not UI) compatibility between versions.
Monday, 20th August, 2007 at 7:53 pm |
There’s a way to hide the ribbon. What’s needed is the revival of CommandBars, possibly without interactive modification, since the old menu was just a CommandBar.
I’d guess they took code out of Excel for CommandBars. Open question whether they could put it back in easily (unlikely). Agree with Jon that it’s not an open question whether they have any inclination to do so.
I believe I’ve seen mention of some way of putting a menu-like object into the QAT that could be customized via VBA. If there were just some way of hiding the ribbon entirely and leaving just the QAT and the Office marketing, er, menu button visible that’d be OK with me.
Monday, 20th August, 2007 at 10:41 pm |
Jon, I’m sure you’re right, I just need to get over it.
I think the lack of a compatibility option and the removal of commandbars is a marketing/UI/management thing not an engineering thing. The way they hijack commandbars messages and divert them to the ribbon, makes me think its a fairly thin wrapper around what we know and love as commandbars. I reckon they could put them back pretty easy if they wanted, which I accept they don’t.
Dont forget Office Commandbars are still there in most of the other products (so far…), so that code is sitting on all those O2007 machines somewhere.
cheers Simon
Tuesday, 21st August, 2007 at 6:00 am |
Simon…
I agree ..the command bars are not completly dead in Excel 07. You can customise the right click… which is the “Cell” command bar.You can customise the Cell “drag drop” Command bar….
If the QAT was made multiline…and we could have multiple QAT’s which could float and could be docked … then we could just hide the Ribbon…
But if you are ready to spend 20$ then we could use ….
Application.ExecuteXL4Macro(”SHOW.TOOLBAR(””Ribbon””,FALSE)”) in an Autoopen macro and run Toogle Toolbar…
Sam
Tuesday, 21st August, 2007 at 10:38 am |
Sam
thanks for the toolbarToggle tip, thats looks like the best of these sort of things I’ve seen so far, from the site info anyway, I havent tried it.
The whole idea of add-on UIs is dangerous though – does this mean that if targeting 2007, we can’t know what UI the client is using? Thats going to make integrating add-ins pretty tough. Not that they integrate properly with the ribbon.
Tuesday, 21st August, 2007 at 12:09 pm |
“Not that they integrate properly with the ribbon.”
I agree, I’m a bit leery of these UI replacement schemes. The tools that help customize the ribbon without hobbling it seem more practical (Patrick Schmid’s Customizer, for example).
In my experience any legacy toolbar customization is likely to fail in 2007, despite the claims by MS that all such customizations go to the add-ins tab. As soon as you have a line of code like .FindControl, so you put a button where in the toolbar you want it, the code goes tits up.
However, for my one Excel 2007 client (who still works mostly in 2000-2003, but has proactively developed a version of his stats add-in for his nonexistent 2007 customers), I put together an elegant custom ribbon tab. Basically all I did was copy and paste XML snippets from around the web. Not much different than my first few commandbar and menu procedures in VBA.
The new interface can be used. I don’t like it, I think it makes me work much harder than the old, and I’m even pretty familiar with the new by now. It’s not as flexible as commandbars, and not as dynamic, but at least it can be dealt with.