Microsoft Office the old way. Classic Menu in Office 2007-2024 and 365.

During my adventures with computers, I have gone through various versions of Microsoft’s Office suite. I wrote my master’s thesis in Office 2003.

With Office 2007, Microsoft introduced the so-called ribbon menu, which not everyone liked. This menu is still in use in Microsoft Office up to 2024 and the 365 suite.

A large group of users have become accustomed to the ribbon. New users of the Office suite do not even know that in the past, the suite was navigated completely differently.

A more experienced generation of users remembered where everything was in the “old” menu, and switching to the new ribbon required relearning. However, old habits remain and it would be good to be able to continue using them.

Over the years, various developers have created Office add-ins that restore (add) a tab in the application that allowed access to the “old” menu.

These add-ins still work today.

A large number of these add-ons require a license, however, there is one, UBitMenu, which is completely free for home users. Business customers can purchase a license, which ranges from £8.32 for the software and £0.54 per user. This is not an exorbitant price.

Personally, I got used to the ribbon and eventually forgot about the “old” menu, but from time to time, I look for a selected option that I know I had available. Clicking between ribbons (tabs), wasting some time to find it, then the “old” menu comes to the rescue.

All this confusion caused an increase in users of the LibreOffice package (LibreOffice is, in short, a slightly better OpenOffice). LibreOffice has remained with the classic menu to this day, and for good reason, because it is faster and more intuitive for my generation and older people.

UBitMenu, as I mentioned, allows you to add a tab with the classic menu known from Office 2003 to the Microsoft Office suite. The program is cool in that it does not remove the ribbon menu, so our suite is still fully functional, which cannot be said about solutions from other companies.

To add a classic menu, simply close the Office programs (Word, Excel, etc.), download UBitMenu from its creator’s website and install it.

After a short while, we can re-launch Word or Excel and a new tab called Menu will appear before our eyes.

From now on, we can successfully use the Office suite using the classic menu, while also having access to the new one.

Best regards.