Add Office 2003 tools and menus to your Office 2007 interface

Good news for all you old dogs who are disinclined to learn a lot of new Office 2007 tricks: Addintools is offering Classic Menu for Office 2007. This add-on re-creates the Office 2003 menus, adapted to present Office 2007 commands — for instance, the add-on's View menu for Word contains 2007's Draft and Full Screen Reading commands instead of the old Normal and Reading Layout commands.

The implementation is pretty clever: Classic Menu places a Menus tab on the Office 2007 Ribbon. You can select the tab to display the Office 2003 menu bar, along with the Standard and Formatting toolbar:

Click any of the regular Office 2007 tabs, and the Office 2003 elements disappear.
If you're rabidly anti-Ribbon, you can take things even further. Classic Menu provides an All item on the Office 2003 menu bar. Just right-click on All, choose Add To Quick Access Toolbar, and then minimize the Ribbon. A little green button on the Quick Access Toolbar will drop down the Office 2003 menu bar:

You can follow a similar procedure to add the toolbars to the Quick Access Toolbar. Another little green button will appear, and you can use it to turn on the toolbar display.
Addintools offers a free 15-day trial of the Office 2007 Classic Menu add-on (2.6 Mb). If you decide to purchase the product, you can choose from individual add-ons for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint ($15) or get all three in the Office 2007 Classic Menu package ($29.95).

Thanks to the folks at Office Watch for the heads-up on this product in their latest newsletter.