How do I get the classic Excel menu back in Excel 2010

Now who is trolling? This is a user peer group. Like the vast majority of correspondents here I neither work for nor speak for Microsoft. My opinions are my own. Nor do I hide behind an anonymous identity to make such comments.

The change to the ribbon was a marketing decision over which none of us has any control.

The question "Where is the Classic View?" has been answered time and time again. It has gone and has been replaced by the ribbon. It is not coming back and the variety of add-ins available are not going to fix that. Given that it is now around six years and three product versions since the ribbon was launched, most of us have moved on.

However while you can pay to have a lashup like -  http://www.addintools.com/documents/office/where-office-2010-classic-view.html that creates a ribbon with drop down menus that loosely emulate the classic toolbar, you can do it yourself and that was the point of the link to Greg Maxey's web site,  which demonstrates how. It also includes a ribbon created for Word as an exercise in coding such a ribbon.

Seconded.

I found this thread while looking for a "classic menu add-on" for Office. Unfortunately we've finally been forced off of Office 2003.  What a disaster and productivity nightmare. with this new ribbon menu.  I've used MS-Office since Windows 3.11.  The ribbon menu would have been a great "option". But instead it was rammed down our throats. Very frustrating.

We will not touch Windows 8 for the same reason.  It would have been sensible to offer users an option to choose between a touch screen enhanced menu and a traditional "classic" windows. We have no use for touch screen in our company.

Open Office (MS-Office competitor) has a very traditional menu format and is completely compatible with MS-Office.  We're migrating from Office 2003 to Open Office for many of our offices.  The users have spoken!  Did I mention Open Office is 100% free?  We are now recommending it as an option to all our clients.

We couldn't switch before, because our veteran and highly respected end-users refused to move away from the familiar MS-Office.  Thanks MS for allowing us to shop around to more affordable solutions after 20+ years of MS-Office.

You may come to regret recommending the switch to O/LO to others, as from what I understand you cannot translate all formatting and layout features from MS Office.

I jumped from MS Office 2000 to 2010 (in late 2010) and much prefer the latter, ribbon and all.  However, in the meantime I have seen the 2003 interface and must say it is much nicer than 2000.

I can understand your frustration in being, in effect, forced to move out of 2003 but do bear in mind that in 2010 you do not just get an interface change, you also get many technical changes, not least the change to a file format that is much smaller than before, especially in Word.  File sizes are significantly lower.

All that said I still think that, as regards the text app, WordPerfect is superior to Word for a number of reasons and, if I had my way, MS would acquire WordPerfect and rebuild Word around its file format and layout philosophy, which are quite different.  And introduce the brilliant Reveal Codes feature...

(I am basing my comments on WordPerfect 2000!)