You had me excited there for a minute. Are you telling me that I can only customise the toolbar if I pay out even more money than I already have for the Office suite?

I want to be able to have one toolbar that has all the things I use often instead of having them either spread out over many toolbars or hidden away somewhere. Is this possible within Word? I've had a quick look but can't seem to find a way to do it.

Sounds good, but $30 for a plugin is insane... another case where the developers think they can get rich selling a program in the short run. If users truly feel they need to customize the ribbon -- and I think they will, once they figure out its shortcomings -- then the devs could sell this thing in droves at half that price -- heck, maybe $9 per -- making money in bulk. $30 is simply far out of scale for this kind of "tweak".

MS should buy the rights and offer it for free. Maybe that's what the devs are thinking.

John in Norwaye:

Afraid that Word 2007 does NOT feature a customizable toolbar, thus the need for that plugin. You can add and subtract common buttons or commands to a mini-toolbar *above* the ribbon, but that gets cluttered fast, and with the ribbon the real estate is already encroached upon.

I've just gotten very fast using the ribbon as-is. Most people will not, though.

Warner,

You also had me going there for a moment too!!

For me customising the UI for tablet use so important and in this regard Office 2007 sucks. Why can't I move things around in word, excel & powerpoint as I can with one-note? I read that MS spent a lot of time and money researching users habits to produce the ribbon concept. They clearly didn't have a left handed tablet user in their focus group. The ribbon is limited for use on a conventional desktop only.

The UI customisation is more important to me than whether the tablet input functions are native to the OS or not. The tablet PC soon loses it WOW factor when you have perform gymnastics to peer under your arm & hand just to see the text you have written or to scroll down through a document.

Looks like I'll be going back to Word 2003. I only bought the Student office suite because it had Onenote anyway.

I have to say that I'm very disappointed with Microsoft. With my frustrating experience with Vista and now this. I'm sure they don't care though as they've already got my money, and you can't return software once you've opened, can you?

Makes me wonder why I don't become a pirate :) I'm sure I'd look good with an eye patch :)