I'm still using the free Leafcreations Office Ribbon Editor and those ribbons work happily in Word 2007, 2010 and 2013. I usually put a single 2007 ribbon into my templates and that displays in the later versions. You can also create specific 2010 version ribbons to display in Word 2010 but IMO that is more trouble than it is worth.

There is an ugly learning curve to work out how to customise the ribbon but it is a whole lot easier to find online resources than it used to be. I have seen RibbonCreator that allows you to avoid the guts of the xml but I don't use it now I have been through that pain of learning the xml already.

I haven't used Visual Studio to do ribbons so I can't answer that query.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia