Office 2007 Ribbon To Be "Tweaked"

Source Gregg Keizer, TechWeb July 26 2006

Microsoft has announced that the Technical Refresh of the current Beta 2 of Office 2007 will make changes to the operation of the RibbonBar. See my post of July 2 on my take on the Access 2007 RibbonBar.

This is news to me: you can use Ctrl-F1 to collapse the RibbonBar since the first beta to provide more viewing and working space for documents. Microsoft Office 2007 GUI program manger Jensen Harris has outlined changes on how the RibbonBar will be invoked in future builds. In the latest builds, you can right-click anywhere in the Ribbon to bring up a context menu which includes an option to minimize the Ribbon. This is in addition to Ctrl+F1 and double-clicking the selected tab. Jensen has also posted a short video showing the new feature in action. The Menu Tabs also activates a tab as a pop-up in a minimized Ribbon with a left-click. When users finish with the tab pop-up or click away from it, it disappears, and returns the interface to a ribbon-minimized state. The new feature can be seen in another video clip posted to Jensen's blog.

But from what I can gather all this does is return some screen real estate to the GUI, and still does not allow Access developers to implement a classic menubar/toolbar navigation paradigm.