[Word 2013] Floating toolbar?

[New Daddy]

Is it possible to emulate floating toolbars in Word 2013? (e.g., http://www.macworld.com/article/1158396 ... lbars.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)
BTW, Mac 2011 looks more like Windows Word 2003 than Word 2013.

I used to have all the frequently used toolbars float on the left side of the document to save vertical real estate, like the article mentions.

[HansV]

No. The ribbon interface in Office 2007 and later for Windows displays custom toolbars in the Add-Ins tab of the ribbon. There is no way to change the position of custom toolbars.

Remark: the Add-Ins tab of the ribbon will only be displayed if you have custom toolbars, otherwise it will remain hidden.

[New Daddy]

No. The ribbon interface in Office 2007 and later for Windows displays custom toolbars in the Add-Ins tab of the ribbon. There is no way to change the position of custom toolbars.

Remark: the Add-Ins tab of the ribbon will only be displayed if you have custom toolbars, otherwise it will remain hidden.

Are you saying that the ribbons (or toolbars or whatever they are called in Word 2013) are stuck where they are at the top??? That is inexcusable.

[HansV]

Microsoft decided to do away with the "old" menu / toolbar interface in Office 2007. Both menu bar and the toolbars were replaced with a single immovable ribbon.
As a concession to the many existing documents/workbooks etc. that used customized menus and/or toolbars, the Add-Ins tab was added to the ribbon. Here is an example:

S0793.png

There is no way to move or rearrange the custom menu items/toolbars.
Microsoft has received lots and lots of complaints about this, but that hasn't made any difference, and there is no chance whatsoever that they will relent. On the contrary, more and more Windows applications are getting a ribbon too.

[Jay Freedman]

The Office UI team made a devil's deal (sometimes called an "engineering decision" ) when Office 2007 was being designed, and now they're stuck with it -- unless the new management team decides to spend a whole lot of money reversing it.

Open an Office (2007 to 2013) program, restore it down to a size less than full-screen, and drag the sides of the window toward the center while watching the ribbon. Notice how at first some of the buttons that are side-by-side become stacked top-to-bottom. Then some of the buttons that have text labels become icons only, and finally the all the buttons in a group collapse into one button with a dropdown.

According to what the MVPs heard from Jensen Harris, the head of that UI team, all of that movement and rearrangement was hand-tuned before being turned into code. It would have cost too much and taken too long to do it all again for a vertically oriented ribbon.

The team made two misjudgments (IMNSHO, both major): First, that people would find the Quick Access Toolbar to be sufficient for their customization needs, and second, that the various "panes" (Document Map, which became Navigator; Styles; Research; eventually Spelling/Grammar) would need the sides of the window next to the document page.

There were other factors involved; for example, help desks and IT for MS's largest corporate customers hated how user-customized Office programs in 2003 and earlier cost them time and money trying to figure out "what did this idiot do that we have to straighten out?" That was/is the driver behind the near lock-down of the UI.

The pressures that led to this design are still very much active, plus there's a lot of capital tied up in the current design. Unless the sales of Office fall off considerably and it can be proved that it's because the competition has a much more usable UI (plus feature parity or better), it isn't going to change very much.

I'll leave you with one more thought: The panes that I mentioned can all be undocked (dragged away from the edges of the window) and floated in, or even outside, the Word window. I don't know how difficult it would be to build a customizable "toolbar" inside one of those objects, but MS has done some much more difficult things. What it takes is a clear business case saying how many more copies they can sell with such a feature -- and that's harder to do than the engineering.

[New Daddy]

Open an Office (2007 to 2013) program, restore it down to a size less than full-screen, and drag the sides of the window toward the center while watching the ribbon. Notice how at first some of the buttons that are side-by-side become stacked top-to-bottom. Then some of the buttons that have text labels become icons only, and finally the all the buttons in a group collapse into one button with a dropdown.

No, I hadn't noticed. I almost always use Word -- or other office apps -- in the maximized size. I just tried what you said, and it's nice. But it's just an eye candy to me.

There were other factors involved; for example, help desks and IT for MS's largest corporate customers hated how user-customized Office programs in 2003 and earlier cost them time and money trying to figure out "what did this idiot do that we have to straighten out?" That was/is the driver behind the near lock-down of the UI.

I can certainly understand the business involved in the decision. But why not let there be two modes? A "dumbed-down" mode where all the customization is disabled for corporate users, and an "expert" mode for long-time users who are familiar with customization?

I'm beginning to like Office 2013, but I think this is the most limiting aspect of Office 2013 I've discovered so far. I probably won't go back to Word 2003 for this, but I'm docking lots of points for this.

[PJ_in_FL]

In "Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA" by John Walkenbach, John describes using a USERFORM as a toolbar in Chapter 15.

There are previews of his book on Google books Excel 2007 Power Programming with VBA By John Walkenbach and other web sites that show the simulated toolbar.

The code from the CD is copyrighted, so I cannot post anything that's not shown in the previews, but it's amazingly clever stuff.

[edit] I imported the userform and code into Word 2007 and it works the same in Word as in Excel.