RibbonCustomizer: Conversation with Patrick Schmid

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Patrick Schmid is a Microsoft OneNote MVP who works with several other Microsoft Office programs including PowerPoint. He can be frequently found in the public newsgroups for Microsoft Office products. At other times, he fine-tunes and works on his RibbonCustomizer product, about which he explains more in this conversation.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and RibbonCustomizer. How did this product evolve?

Patrick: I am a Ph.D. student in computer science. Through pure luck, I made it into the Office 2007 Technical Beta, which began in November 2005. Customizing the ribbon became a much-discussed topic almost right away with beta testers complaining that it wasn’t possible and Microsoft pointing to this new XML-based language called RibbonX. Eventually, I decided to give RibbonX a chance. The first add-in I wrote simply loaded RibbonX into an Office program. I made it available to all beta testers, but it was barely used. The main reason was that people just didn’t want to deal with RibbonX. Why? In Office 2003, we have a user interface that allows us to customize everything we wanted, whereas in 2007, we need to learn the XML-based language RibbonX. I would bet that most of your readers probably don’t want to know about RibbonX, because all they probably care about is being able to customize the Ribbon.

For the second beta release (Beta 1 Technical Refresh), I decided to write a new add-in that featured some user interface in addition to the ability to load RibbonX. That taught me RibbonX pretty well, but it also presented a major struggle with it. If you just read the Microsoft documentation, you get the impression that you can do more than the product actually allows you to do. I discovered those things as I was writing the second add-in, and the code ended up being a mess. With the release of Beta 2, I started over a third time. The result of that is RibbonCustomizer today. Microsoft finished making changes to RibbonX with the last beta release in September 2006, Beta 2 Technical Refresh. In October, I became a OneNote MVP and with that access to better development tools. I took advantage of that and incorporated everything that was only possible into the first release version of RibbonCustomizer.

RibbonCustomizer is far from done. One feature, namely the ability to add individual commands to the Ribbon, is probably the most requested one and I will be starting the design work for it soon. Beyond that, I still have a very long list of things that I would like to realize in RibbonCustomizer.

Geetesh: What do you think about Office 2007’s new ribbon-based interface?

Patrick: I love it. I have been working exclusively with Office 2007 since November 2005, and I would not want to go back to menus and toolbars. With the Ribbon UI, I get things done faster and better. Also, I have been using features that I never even thought of using in earlier versions. The major downside of the Ribbon UI though is its focus on beginner and intermediate users. Power users simply feel left out. That’s where RibbonCustomizer comes in. If I don’t like something on the Ribbon, I change it.

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