How-to enable the Developer tab in the Ribbon bar

I am a new user to Office 2007 (Beta 2) and I am having fun discovering things around. If you already downloaded the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 and you are ready to start experimenting with Office, here is a nice trick related to the very cool Ribbon bar.

The Ribbon provides a Developer tab that groups a set of commands related to Office programmability and extensibility. The following figure shows the Developer Ribbon (Word 2007).

By default, the Developer tab is disabled. Why? My personal guess: Regular end-users don't know about Office programmability and extensibility, so they might never use the Developer tab. On the other hand, developers are a different set of users that have a completely distinct way of working with programs, solving problems, and discovering things. Developers have a great research spirit and will easily find how-to enable the Developer tab. Here's how...

To show the Developer tab

1. Open a 2007 Office System application, for example Word 2007.
2. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.
3. In the Top options for working with Word section of the Word Options dialog box, click Personalize.
4. Select Show Developer tab in the Ribbon, as shown in the next figure.
5. Click OK.

   

   Note   When you are in developer mode, you see the Developer tab in the Ribbon UI.

Once you get this running and start playing around, the next step is to start researching about extending the Ribbon. You can extend the Ribbon to show custom tabs and command chunks. The new Ribbon page inside MSDN contains great resources (blogs, videos, articles and downloads) that will allow you to get started with extending the Ribbon.

Don't miss Frank's articles and blog, he is a great writer and will be sharing more on extending the Ribbon with you guys.