earthsound

That will hide the ribbon, but it is still accessible. The macros I posted above completely remove the ribbon from Excel, and I think the other one is for Onenote. They remove everything; Office Button, Tabs, Ribbons, and the Quick Launch Toolbar (though that can be brought back through using RibbonX from what I've read). You can get an idea for what it does by reducing the height of a document window until the ribbon vanishes. In Excel the macro does the exact same thing but just makes it work with a larger window. I was hoping that there is an equivalent for Word, for I find it strange that the Office Team wouldn't have standardized this sort of thing. Have you read the information presented in Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 1 of 3), specifically the "Ribbon Customization Scenarios for Other Applications section"?

There are several methods to bring up the Search Companion: pressing the Windows key + F while in Windows Explorer, you can either press Ctrl+E or click on View > Explorer Bar > Search click Start > Search You can click on Start > Search > Change Preferences to see whether the Indexing Service is used