How to customize the Ribbon menu in Microsoft Office 2010

This week's series of tips will be focusing on handy little features for Microsoft Excel and Word. To see the previous tips, check our Tips index.

While earlier this week I've shown you how to keep the Ribbon from getting in your way, that's not all you can do with it in Office 2010. Back when the Ribbon interface first came out, in Office 2007, it wasn't really customizable. You could modify it if you were lucky enough to know VBA (Visual Basic for Applications, Office's built-in programming language), but otherwise, you were pretty much stuck with the stock arrangement of tabs and buttons.

Fortunately, with Office 2010, Microsoft introduced a simple way to customize the Ribbon, requiring no programming at all. Simply go to the File menu, click Options and then select Customize Ribbon. You'll get a two-pane dialog, showing all available commands versus your existing ribbon, and letting you toggle things on and off and re-arrange them as you see fit.

The best part is that once you're done customizing your setup, you can easily export it for backup or to take with you to your other computers. Just click the Import/Export button and select Export all customizations.

How to customize the Ribbon menu in Microsoft Office 2010 originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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