"It's your workspace, and it's your Ribbon" - announced Microsoft. And now you can take control of that workspace and change it to how you need it to work for you.

We think nothing of customising our desktop, our mobile wallpaper, even our music players; so, when Microsoft listened to our comments about the Ribbon, they came up with the ideal solution: customise it.

Yes, a major modification in Office 2010 is that you can now customise the Ribbon. By applying customisations to personalise the Ribbon, it's easy to have it displayed the way that you want it. For example, you can create custom tabs and custom groups that contain the commands you use most frequently, and so that the commands you use often are all together.

You can change the Ribbon properties in by selecting Customize Ribbon. Now, you can change a whole range of things including the order that tabs appear, and the order that groups appear within tabs. You can also create new tabs, and new groups within a particular tab. And if you don't like the name of a tab, that's fine, too, just go ahead and change it to something else.

To create a new group in a tab, select the tab in the Customize Ribbon window or select a group within that tab and then click New Group. A new group is added into a position dependent on what you selected. When you create a new group in this way, it is given the default name of "New Group (Custom)". To give it a meaningful name, select it and then click Rename. Type the name you prefer and then click OK.

You can remove groups from the tab at any time by selecting them and then clicking Remove. The Remove button is situated between the Commands pane and the tabs pane.

Now that you have a new group, you can add in any commands you fancy. If you click on the '+' button to the left of an existing group it will expand to display the commands that are in that group. Simply add commands to groups using the command list in the left hand pane. Select the group you created earlier and then select a command from the command list. When you click Add the command will be added to the group. If you add a command while a command in the group is selected, it will be added just below the selected command. On the other hand, adding commands while the group is selected positions them at the end.

If you want to create a new tab with all your favourite commands collected in the same place, select an existing tab and then click New Tab. The new tab will be positioned immediately after the tab you selected and it will contain a new group. The tab is given the default name of "New Tab (Custom)" and the group is named "New Group (Custom)". You can rename both using the Rename button at the bottom of the window.

If you want to remove a tab, select it and click Remove. This removes the tab itself and all groups within it.

If you need to create a customised Ribbon for friends or work colleagues you can export all your settings as a file. It's easy for anyone to import the file so that their Ribbon set up will look exactly the same as yours. Obviously you can also import a Ribbon customisation, too.

And the best thing is, if you don't like it you can change it - it's easy to reset the Ribbon configuration by clicking the Restore Defaults button at the bottom of the window. You will have the option of restoring only the settings for the selected tab or for the whole Ribbon. With Office 2010 it's definitely time for you to get to know your Ribbon.