Change is often stressful. When I first installed Classic Menu for Office 2007, I was concerned that I might rely on it as a crutch. I had been using Office 2007 for months on my home systems, while using Office 2003 at the office; and despite some of the nice new features in Office 2007, I had been finding the older version to be more productive -- because I continually had to search for the functions on the newer version that I had been using for years in Office 2003.

Yet, while it could be very easy to rely too heavily on Classic Menu, it actually provides a nice mix of both worlds. Classic Menu is an add-on for Office 2007 from Addintools, a small company based in Haikou City, China. It addresses one of the biggest problems with Office 2007: the extreme difference between its interface and those of older versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Office components.

With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft replaced the ubiquitous Tool Bar and menus with a concept called the Ribbon, a space-hogging, graphical set of on-screen commands, using tabs to navigate between the commands. While the Ribbon does a great job of showing you what will happen to your document before you make your changes, it is not very customizable, and those who had been using the Office suite for years easily can get lost looking for the functions they want. Months after the introduction of Office 2007, I still hear complaints about how people haven't been able to find their favorite Office buttons.

Classic Menu for Office 2007 creates an additional tab called Menus. Click on that tab to find a nice complement of the Toolbar buttons that you had been using in Office 2003 as well as File, Edit and other menus that were not included in the new version of Office. To the user, clicking on the Classic Menu tab makes the Ribbon look more like the traditional Office 2003 toolbar.

There are differences between Classic Menu and traditional Office 2003 menus and buttons -- both good and bad. If you are a former Office 2003 user who had never customized your Toolbar, you'll feel right at home, because the layout is a lot like what you'd see with Office 2003 right out of the box. But if you had created your own custom Toolbars in Office 2003, you still don't have a way to re-create them in Office 2007. That's really not much of a problem because you can still use the sparse customization capability of Office 2007 to supplement Classic Menu with those other buttons you might have missed.

Adding the old menus and buttons doesn't keep you from using the Ribbon, so you still can take advantage of the nice visualization of the newer Office products. Even better, on the Classic Menu selections you get to choose some of the newer Office 2007 menu choices. For instance, if you select Format and then Page Color, you can roll your mouse over various color swatches and see your page change color before you click to commit to the color. The menus also are longer because you have more choices -- functions from Office 2003 and Office 2007. There's even a selection right on the File menu to save as an Office 2003 document -- a function that is hidden on Office 2007.

You can download and purchase Classic Menu for $15.99 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Access at addintools.com; $29.99 gets you the whole bundle in a single download. You can try Classic Menu for 15 days before buying.