I'm always happy to be breaking new ground!
But seriously, without trying to start a religious war, I now prefer to use
my Excel add-in based application under Excel 2007 (with ribbon) than under
Excel 97- 2003 (with menu and toolbars). The ribbon has certain very nice
qualities for our application such as the:
immediacy of live preview
accessibility of functions that comes from having essentially a
non-modal control panel always present
visibility of the applications functionality
With regard to Excel's built-in ribbon tabs, they're growing on me. As long
as I don't find myself having to switch between tabs to often (which
admittedly can happen a lot more than I like) I'm OK with what MS has done.
I can still get around faster when using older versions of Excel but I
suspect this will change over time.
Anyway we'll see what happens with this project!
josh
"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
Of the thousands of posts I've read about Excel's ribbon, this is the
first time I've ever seen someone wanting to retrofit the ribbon to a
version of Excel that had the familiar menu and toolbar system. It is
inconceivable to most who have tried Office 2007 that anyone would want to
intentionally inflict the ribbon onto users of an earlier version.
- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______
"Josh Sale" <jsale@tril dot cod wrote in message
...
Sadly I'm not kidding and I'm not sure what kind of plant this would be
...
I'm off evaluating the 8 or 10 3rd party ribbon controls to see how much
work this would be. I already mocked up a screen shot using SnagIt
showing how our custom Excel 2007 ribbon tab appears in Excel 2003 below
the standard Excel 2003 menu and toolbars. I thought the reality of
seeing it would turn them off but quite the reverse!
josh
"Jon Peltier" wrote in message
...
You're kidding, right? Or is this a plant?
To mimic the productivity gains of the ribbon, you could unplug users'
the keyboard and mouse.
- Jon
-------
Jon Peltier, Microsoft Excel MVP
Tutorials and Custom Solutions
Peltier Technical Services, Inc. - http://PeltierTech.com
_______
"Josh Sale" <jsale@tril dot cod wrote in message
...
I have some users who are totally enamored with the new XL 2007 ribbon
interface (doesn't matter why ... they just do) and they now want my
Excel based application to use a ribbon even when running under XL 2003.
So I'm thinking of picking up a 3rd party ribbon control (say from
Infragistics) and hosting it in either a taskpane or a non-modal dialog
that is kind of docked below the XL 2003 toolbars. So this "ribbon"
would reside below the XL2003 menu, toolbars, etc.
I'm just curious if anybody has been down this path already? If so any
advice? Taskpane vs non-modal dialog? Choice of 3rd party ribbon
control? Other?
TIA,
josh