Jensen Harris reports some very welcome news on his Office blog - Personalized Menus will no longer be switched on by default when Office is installed. Since the introduction of this feature, the default preference in Microsoft Office has been to have the Personalized Menus feature - one of Microsoft's most ill-advised attempts to be helpful IMO - turned on by default.

Personalized Menus truncate every menu in Office applications in an attempt to make navigating easier. The theory was that, over time, Office would learn which menu items you used most often and would present those options in the shortened menus. The very first thing I do when I do a fresh install of Office is turn this feature off.

Now you might be thinking this isn't such a big deal - what with the new Ribbon UI in Office 12. Yes and no. Many of the Office applications (the main Outlook UI, Visio, Publisher, Project) are not getting the new interface in Office 12. There are a number of reasons why and Jensen has written some great posts explaining the reasoning behind these decisions. The long and short of it is this - beginning with the next build, Personalized Menus will only show up if you want them to.