Although in the main, I'm in favour of the Office 2007 ribbon, it can be frustrating to have lost control over how the toolbars work*.

There is more scope for customisation than first appears and it is possible to create tabs for the Ribbon. A video on editing the Ribbon can be found on the MSDN Office Developer Centre in various video formats along with all of the code used, so there's no need to type it all by hand.

It is rather techie, and you will need a copy of Visual Studio to edit the code (sadly the Express Editions of Visual Basic or C# don't appear to be enough - I'd love to be proved wrong if I've missed something). But even if you don't want to get your hands dirty, it's a fascinating insight into the way that Office works.

Editing toolbars in Word 2003

* For example I spent a few minutes removing the icons and toolbars I never use and adding in some that I wanted. For example, there was no point having icons for copy and paste because I always use the keyboard shortcuts. On the other hand I do need the word count box so that in. The rulers were also turned off because I rarely have to pay attention to layout, only the content. This is what I came up with.