Review of ribbon design tool

I truly hope that Access14 will not require third party tools such as this. It is certainly not directed at end users is it? I don’t believe that a non professional user will buy a product in order to have to buy some more products in order to be able to use the first one. A professional, on the other hand, would also prefer to have a nice user interface and the ability to code ribbons, or toolbars for that matter. I think it is relevant to point to a recent post from this blog that appeared on Feb-09-2009 titled “What self-taught users do with Access”. There, Clint copied testimonies of happy self thought users of Access. I think it is informative to note that none of these, not one, seemed to be written about Access 07. I too am happy with Access and could have written my testimony there as well, but I am concerned that the true benefits of the product were actually developed years ago, and that the recent 07 version was a step backwards rather then forwards. And I do acknowledge the interesting additions that were introduced, notwithstanding. If the Access team is authentically keen on listening to its customers, then the product should be robust enough not to require third party tools. You can listen to the customers, or you can just pretend to listen. Listening requires some sort of reaction as well. You can hold conferences in which you delineate to the users some questions about some new functionality that you introduced. But then you would be influencing their answers by not letting them pose some questions of their own, maybe about missing or lacking more basic and crucial functionality that is more important. In my eyes that would be only pretending to listen. I assume that it could be easy to make us customers happy at this stage, because the added functionality that is needed to make the product more complete is probably relatively easy to develop because it does not include radical change or new directions. I read many posts here expressing the need to make it easy to distribute applications, and the need for backward compatibility. I share these requests. I hope Access14 will actually make these issues possible. Access is a great product. My remarks are with some criticism because I do care for it, and because I do need it. Gilad