Microsoft Word Menu Tools Cut Ribbon Delays

Toolbar Toggle, on the other hand, is more clearly designed to let users rearrange the ribbon to their own satisfaction.

Rather than adding another tab to show the classic menu commands, Toolbar Toggle recreates the whole top menu of Office 2003 applications and tacks it on under the Office 2007 ribbon. That makes the difference pretty clear but also eats up a ton of screen space. Minimizing the ribbon helps, but that still leaves you with four lines of command terms and icons, which gets cluttered quickly.

The basic tool bar recreates the Office 2003 method of customization, as well: Right-click the tool bar, scroll down to customized and shift commands around to your heart's content. Once you get used to the extra layer of command lines, it's fairly intuitive. You can even push and pull different parts of the tool bar around to different positions. There's just the slightest delay to everything you do on the Toolbar Toggle commands, though. Not anything dramatic, just enough to be noticeable. I was running it in Word 2007 on a dual-core Pentium machine with 2GB of RAM; the delay would probably be greater with older machines.

A features checklist on the Toolbar Toggle site said it's possible to make it part of the ribbon, but I couldn't figure out how, except to dock it right up against the minimized ribbon. The Toolbar can also float to wherever on the screen you prefer, and the premium version allows you to customize the existing menu, create new tool bars and save several versions from which to pick, depending on what you're doing.

Just as with Ribbon Customizer, all those features would be perfectly applicable and probably desirable in companies that have decided they can no longer hold off migrating to Office 2007 but don't want to deal with the learning curve.

But 80 percent of the benefit will come from simply being able to use the older menus and cutting yourself loose from the ribbon.

Toolbar Toggle's Lite version costs $12.95 for a single license. The full version costs $19.95. Volume discounts are available for both.