The guys over at LifeHacker wrote up an excellent article on how to revert back to the Office 2003 menu in Office 2007. For those of you who do not like the new Office 2007 ribbon interface, you can go back to the original classic menu using a free tool.
Earlier, I wrote about a Chinese add-in that makes Office 2007 look like Office 2003, but it costs $29! That’s great and all, but frankly, there is always a program out there that can do the same thing for free.
UBitMenu is a free tool that can emulate the Office 2003 interface in Office 2007 without any performance loss. It’s basically for anyone who can no longer find the same functions in Office 2007 that were easily findable in Office 2003.
What I like about this program is that it does not actually get rid of the ribbon interface, but instead just adds the classic menu as a new ribbon. So you can continuing using the ribbon interface, but when you want to find something quickly the old way, just go to the classic ribbon.
Other features that make this add-in really useful:
- No active code elements, so it won’t mess with your anti-virus program
- No dependencies
- Very small and has no impact on performance
- No need for Administrator rights to install the add-in
- All files are registered with Windows, so you can uninstall it via Add/Remove Programs
The program works with Excel, Word, and Powerpoint only. Also, not every last function of Office 2003 is not in the UBitMenu, but it is should be enough for most people.
Overall, it’s a cool program to use if you want the latest and greatest version of Office, but don’t like the interface yet that much. Once you are settled into using Office 2007, you can just uninstall the add-in. Could be useful for IT Administrators that have users who hate the new Office look! Enjoy! [via LifeHacker]
Really, like or dislike, you are not learning how to use 2007 when you ‘revert’ to the 2003 interface.