Most of the items you can see in the command list on the left side of the Customize Ribbon category in the Excel Options dialog box are buttons. That is, clicking the command button on the ribbon executes the associated command immediately. You can see that some items also have a small icon to the right of the command name in the dialog box. These are called command modifiers, and they tell you that although the item may still be a button, it is also something more, as detailed in Table 3-1. (Note that this also applies to the Quick Access Toolbar category in the Excel Options dialog box. The controls are almost identical to those in the Customize Ribbon category.)

If you want a little more information about the commands in the command list, rest the pointer on any command to display a ScreenTip.

You can add custom groups to existing tabs, but if you have limited screen real estate, creating your own tabs might make more sense. To do so, first right-click the ribbon, click Customize The Ribbon, and then click the New Tab button. This creates a new top-level outline item provisionally entitled New Tab (Custom). Select New Tab (Custom), and then click the Rename button to display the dialog box shown in Figure 3-4. The new tab is inserted below the selected tab in the outline.

Figure 3-4. Create a new ribbon tab by clicking the New Tab button, and then click Rename to give it a sensible moniker.

After you create a tab, you need a group, because commands can be added only to groups. Helpfully, a custom group is created automatically whenever you create a custom tab, as shown in Figure 3-4. Even after you rename a tab or a group, (Custom) continues to appear, appended in the outline to any title you provide, which helps to quickly identify your own tabs and groups.

You can reposition any tab or group in the outline by simply dragging it to a new location, or you can select it and click the arrow buttons located to the right of the list box. You cannot reposition commands within preset groups, but you can move groups around from tab to tab all you like.

Creating custom command groups is similar to creating custom tabs. First, select the tab where you want the custom group to live, and then click the New Group button in the Excel Options dialog box. (If you created a new tab, a new group already appears on the new tab.) Select your new group, and click the Rename button to display the dialog box shown in Figure 3-5.

Figure 3-5. Clicking the Rename button with a group selected allows you to select an icon for the group as well.

As you can see, you can rename your new group and also assign an icon to it, which is visible only when you add the group to the Quick Access Toolbar. If you look at the Home tab on the ribbon, you’ll notice that most of the commands do not have labels displayed; they appear as buttons. For example, Paste is the only command in the Clipboard group that displays a label; there are no command labels visible at all in the Font, Alignment, and Number groups. The ribbon shown at the top of Figure 3-6 displays a custom Formatting tab populated with border-specific commands with their command labels visible. If you want to create a tab filled with other kinds of Formatting commands, you’ll need a lot more space, and hiding the labels helps a lot.

To hide command labels, right-click the ribbon, click Customize The Ribbon, then right-click any custom group in the outline and click Hide Command Labels. Note that this command appears on the shortcut menu only when you click a custom group. You cannot change the command labels of default groups. The ribbon shown at the bottom of Figure 3-6 shows the result—now there is plenty of space left on the custom Formatting tab for more groups. Notice that hiding the command labels does more than what the command’s name implies; the button icons become considerably smaller as well.

Figure 3-6. It is a good idea to hide the command labels when you create new groups.

After hiding the command labels so that they are not visible on the ribbon, you can still easily see the command names by resting the mouse pointer over the buttons.

When constructing custom tabs, you can take advantage of predefined command groups. Microsoft decided to make the built-in groups noncustomizable partly because a lot of sweat and tears went into creating them as they are today. Decades of usability studies and real-world usage of menus and command trees went into the design of the ribbon, and as such it makes sense for 80 percent of our needs. But we’re talking about the other 20 percent here. Because you can create your own groups anyway, there is no harm in having the default groups fixed—and plenty of good reasons for you to take advantage of them.

Right-click the ribbon, and then click Customize The Ribbon. In the Choose Commands From drop-down list, click All Tabs to display an outline of all the predefined command groups, as shown in Figure 3-7.

Figure 3-7. Displaying All Tabs reveals all the predefined command groups.

First, select a tab or group in the outline on the right below which you want to insert a preset group. Next, in the All Tabs list on the left, click the plus sign icons to expand the outline and locate the group you want. Select it, and click the Add button to insert the group into the outline on the right. If you decide you want your inserted groups somewhere else, you can always move them up and down the outline by using the arrow buttons. A well-populated custom Formatting tab is shown in Figure 3-8, along with the outline in the Excel Options dialog box that created it.

Figure 3-8. The modified outline in the Customize The Ribbon list and its custom tab.

When you customize the ribbon, it stays customized; everything is still there the next time you start Excel. But if you ever joke about “hitting the reset button,” well, now you actually have one. In the Customize Ribbon category in the Excel Options dialog box, the Reset button does the eponymous trick, discarding your customizations and returning the ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar to their original states. The button is also a menu, offering the dual options of resetting only the selected tab (if one is selected) or resetting all customizations (which resets both the ribbon and the Quick Access Toolbar). Before you reset either, though, you might want to save your customization work so that you can retrieve it later. Below the Reset button, the Import/Export button allows you to reuse and recycle your work. This button is also a menu from which you can choose to import or export a special file containing all your customizations. Figure 3-9 shows a version of the File Open dialog box that appears when you choose Import Customization File from the Import/Export menu, with a couple of saved customization files. The first file—Excel Customizations.exportedUI—is the rather clunky default name offered. The proprietary extension for the resulting file—.exportedUI—is appended to any file name you supply.

Figure 3-9. You can export any number of ribbon customization files for retrieval later.

Using these exported customization files and a Web storage location such as Windows Live SkyDrive, you can store your custom tool sets as well as your workbooks, making them available from any Internet-connected computer in the world running Office 2010.