Add Office 2003 Menus to Office 2007 or 2010

The free software UBitMenu adds the classic Office 2003 menus to Office 2007, 2010 or 2013. Many people spent years using Office 2003, gradually learning how to find the most relevant options amongst the toolbars and menus in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For those people, upgrading to a later version of Office may have been a nightmare of Justin Bieber proportions!

What’s So Different About Office 2007, 2010 and 2013? The ‘ribbon’ – a new set of toolbars placed on tabs in a tab bar. If you have a newer version of Office you will know just how different they are to the old Office 2003 menu system. Newcomers to Office may like the ribbon but more experienced users may hate it.

It is almost as if Microsoft tried to justify the price of upgrading by purposely moving and changing every possible option on every toolbar and menu just so that it ‘looks’ new…

Can I Get The Office 2003 Menus Back? Microsoft are wedded to the concept of the ribbon and are unlikely to ever go back to the old menu systems. However, there is another way of achieving the same thing using the free software UBitMenu which adds ‘classic’ menus (similar to 2003) as a second tab under the ribbon.

UBitMenu is a small program that works with all versions of Windows from XP and Vista through to Windows 7 and Windows 8 – it adds classic Office 2003 type of menus to Office 2007, 2010 or 2013 as shown in the example below.

The new menu will appear in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Note that UBitMenu doesn’t delete the actual Microsoft ribbon (it simply adds a new one below the main one) and so it can therefore be uninstalled later if you change your mind.

There are many different downloads for different languages but, if you’re reading this, you probably want the English download which is available near the top of the official download page here. Simply download the program and install it – make sure you have closed any open Office programs before installing it.

No more ribbon :-)