Office 2010: How to Backup Your Ribbon Customization Settings

Contributed by Rob Rogers  
Tagged: Microsoft Office  

The Ribbon on the Office 2010 apps can be customized to meet your various needs. To prevent having to redo the entire customization process once you have the Ribbons looking the way you want, you should make a backup of the customization settings for each app. By saving the customization settings to a flash drive or other media, you will have the backups in case disaster strikes and you have to reload your computer, plus you can share your customizations with others.

1. Open the desired Office application (in this example, Outlook 2010).

2. Go to the Ribbon and click File.

3. Select Options.

4. In the left pane of the Options window, select Customize Ribbon.

5. Go to the lower-right corner and click the Import/Export button.

6. Select Export all customizations from the dropdown menu.

7. Browse to the desired location that you want the file saved to and click the Save button.

Repeat the above steps for each Office application that you have pertormed any customizations to the Ribbon. Put the customization files on a flash drive or other media for safe keeping. You can also share these files with others who want to use your customizations. To use the file, follow the above steps, but on step 6, you need to select Import customization file, and browse to the desired file. Make sure to select the corresponding file for the desired application.

We have discussed how to perform ribbon customization in a prior article.