Ribbon Hero is an add-on for Microsoft Office that can be used to learn new features of Microsoft Office in a playful way. The Microsoft Office add-on offers two modes. The first mode is basically showing a score that can increase or decrease depending on the user’s command of the Office program. Formatting text for instance will raise the score.

That alone is an interesting feature but not the core of what Ribbon Hero is about. The Office add-on comes with challenges which are small tasks that it asks the Office user to complete. It displays a document to the user and asks the user to edit that document in a certain way, e.g. changing the orientation of it to landscape mode.

Many Office users might feel helpless at this point but help is directly available on the same page in Office meaning that every step of the process of editing the document is explained to the user, if necessary.

Every completed step is visualized to the user who receives a congratulations message upon finishing the task. Ribbon Hero uses an achievement page, like one used in many computer games, to show the overall progress to the user. New tasks can be selected from that screen to increase the tasks that have already been completed.

Ribbon Hero is being offered for Office 2007 and Office 2010 users who run a 32-bit or 64-bit edition of Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 or a 32-bit edition of Windows XP. The Office add-on is only offered in English currently and integrates itself into Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The installation of the Microsoft Office add-on is straightforward. It can be downloaded as an executable from the developers homepage. The setup will install the classic Office menu in the three Office programs Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint. The changes are visible immediately after installation and first start of one of the supported Microsoft Office programs.

The Microsoft Office add-on can be uninstalled from the software uninstallation menu of the Windows operating system. The add-on will bring the classic Office menu known from Microsoft Office 2003 to the supported programs of Office 2007. Below is a screenshot of how Office 2007 looks like after installation of the add-on.

It should be noted that the Microsoft Office add-on Ubit Menu will leave the current Office ribbon interface as it is. It does add a new entry to that menu on the other hand called menu which combines all the menu entries known from Office 2003.