ribbon/toolbar

FWIW - this response is not to my friend Jim Gordon but generally to all who read this thread.

I don't disagree with John's time estimate because I believe he's referring to full parity with all functions and user capabilities across the platforms. For those of us who remember the first version of Office 2007 on the PC and how long it took to get a more "user friendly" method of customizing/designing the ribbon, which was called Office 2010, 2-years seems like a reasonable guess. It also took 2 years in the Visual Studio world to move from raw XML coding methods to a "Visual Designer" approach for ribbon customization... I'm referring to what was available to developers like me in VS-2008 and then VS-2010.

A valid question that appears to be asked often is, "Why can't the code used on the PC for ribbon customization also be used on the Mac?" and the real answer is... that is what is being done but coding changes and testing still need to be made no matter what.

Due to the fact that each platform has a different Operating System, all of the coding that interfaces with the Graphic Card drivers and File I/O drivers of the OS must be changed. On the PC there exists an important Database called the Windows Registry, this is where Office stores among many things all of the User Options (called Preferences on the Mac) and on a Mac the Registry does not exist so Plist files are used instead. But access to them is slower and thus code has to be changed in an attempt to optimize performance. This is just a very small example of the hundreds and maybe thousands of things that have to be checked and modified.

Now comes the process of doing this and there are two ways. The first is to make a copy of all code related to the ribbon in the PC version of all Office applications and give it to a team of programmers who strip out all PC stuff and put in the Mac stuff. The second approach is to  work in one copy of the code and make it work on both platforms, which eliminates having to maintain multiple copies of the "same" code. This is generally what the Office Product Team at Microsoft is trying to do. One set of code, or at least as much as can be, handling all platforms... and it would probably be prudent to point out that by platform you have to consider all of them, from Mobile devices to the Desktop.

Commonize (sic) and optimize the code... that's the objective and it takes time because there are most likely hundreds of thousands of lines of code that need to be altered. However, month by month, bit by bit Microsoft is rolling out what is ready at that specific point in time. They have changed their 2-3 year package and delivery schedule to a monthly one of what's ready is released. It's not unlike what other software manufacturers are doing these days and either we consumers will love it or hate it. :-)

My point of sharing the above is only to provide some knowledge and perspective about software product development, which I am qualified to provide. It is not a defense of decisions that have been made by others. I do not work for Microsoft... and I will be offended if anyone subsequently wants to claim otherwise or nit pick any information I have taken the time to share.

Why would I be offended? Generally because illiteracy and ignorance offends me.

As for what can be done now... if you are technically proficient you can modify the Ribbon and here's proof of custom ribbon XML code running on Office 2013 for the PC and Office 2016 for the Mac.

As I said, this is the exact same code, in fact it is the exact same "DOTM" template opening on each platform. It's not perfect, visually you can see differences and a few buttons you can see don't actually work... meaning there are still bugs in the Mac ribbon coding, I have reported them and I am certain they will get fixed.

I'm sharing this because Mac Office 2016 users should be aware there are things they can do right now with ribbon customization. Just understand this is early "beta" code related to ribbon customization, which means you/they will find problems that should be reported. There isn't a "user friendly" interface yet for ribbon customization and right now you have to use a tool that only runs on a PC.

But if you have a critical need to make a custom ribbon button or menu appear, as of the October 2015 update, it can be done and John McGhie mentioned above in his posting the things you need to do and links you should explore. The November 2015 update has fixed a few issues that I saw in the first release and I'm certain over the coming months more issues will be fixed.