As I have mentioned before, I was intending to replicate the look and feel of the ribbon interface in previous versions of Word and PowerPoint.
It’s official now. I can implement ribbons on Office 2003
After working on this idea, I think I have got a good solution to implement the idea as can be seen in the screen shot below:
The upper half is the ribbon tab of PowerMerge, as seen on PowerPoint 2007.
The bottom half is my new "custom" ribbon tab, as it looks on PowerPoint 2003 (and older versions).
As you can see, the effect is not perfect, but sufficient for my purposes, especially since the PowerPoint 2003 users can’t make a direct comparison between my ribbon and Microsoft’s ribbon.
Now that I think about it, it is funny because people hated the ribbon so much that a product was created to bring back the menus and toolbars of Office 2003 to 2007 while I am doing exactly the opposite.
To be frank, in the particular case of PowerMerge, probably I could make it work using just the toolbar. But PowerTOC will become much more usable when I implement my new custom ribbon system.
[...] my previous post, New interface for Office 2003 add-ins, I commented that I was excited by the prospect of using the exact same UI in PowerPoint 2007 and [...]