Office "ribbon" to be included in Windows

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

Pawnless Endgame

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You first saw it in Office 2007. Now Microsoft are adament that they'll be including it in Vista and in future OSes. What do you guys think? I never embraced it myself and it's a nightmare when answering tech support calls regarding Office 2007. The File/Edit/View/Etc menu system worked. Why alienate people from something that they have worked since Windows 3.1? I mean... try adding a scanned image or a clipart into a DOCX document. You will find that you need to take a fair few steps to achieve it, where in Office 2003 and below, it was simply Insert > Image > From scanner or camera. I say bring back the menus (where all the options are accessible) and use the 1-line or 2-line toolbar that users can customise.
 
The ribbon is one of the best things ever to come to Office. People need to move on; traditional toolbars are cumbersome and dated.
 
The ribbon is really useful IMO
Find it much better to work with than the standard file menu.
 
It is quality, office 2007 is by far the best office ever and a HUGE improvement. Wouldn't mind seeing an interface update instead of just different skins
 
Ahh, it appears I quickly got outnumbered here :-D I thought I'd give the heads up. Knowing that we're all pretty technical here, it was my (obviously bad) assumption that the original file system was preferred because it had access to all of the options. I'm still yet to relate to all of the options via the ribbon.
 
There shouild be an option. I use it all the time and it's fine. However I hate the start menu in Windows 7. My classic start menu is much tidier and more logically organised than Windows 7 dual paged.

It's not that I don't want to move on. If something better was out there then fine. I don't want to have to use the keyboard all the time on a start menu.

It's no major giving us options so give them to us.



M.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
It isn't progress for the sake of progress. It's about making the right options available in an intuitive way. I think MS has gone a long way to achieve that.
Click to expand...

this. If you look at common (and not so common) operations the number of clicks required to get there has been drastically cut.
 
I can't fathom how anyone who isn't a grandma prefers fishing around the classic start menu with the mouse to the new direct keyboard entry.
 
Quite simply I use the mouse - two clicks and I can load anything I want - I know where everything is. There are thousands of people who prefer the classic start menu to having to click then type then press enter maybe start typing and move and click with the mouse - which sounds more intuative?

Click start, type something, move up and down or click with mouse or]
Click start move to what you want and click - No keyboard involved at all.

There are now several classic start menu programs in production so Microsoft has basically forced third-parties to create what should have been there in the first place. Imagine swopping from Windows XP to Windows 7 in a business - it would be a nightmare for staff to find anything and they would have to be almost retrained.



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
There shouild be an option. I use it all the time and it's fine. However I hate the start menu in Windows 7. My classic start menu is much tidier and more logically organised than Windows 7 dual paged.

It's not that I don't want to move on. If something better was out there then fine. I don't want to have to use the keyboard all the time on a start menu.

It's no major giving us options so give them to us.



M.
Click to expand...

As long as there is "an option" then things never move on.
Imagine if there had been an option to keep everything looking like Win 3.1 in 95, then 98, then 2000.....
We'd still have people using the old clunky interface.

MS spend a lot of time designing their UI and the majority of the time they get it right.
It must annoy them as much as anyone when they spend all their time designing something only to see people not using it.
This is one of the reasons why the ability to easily make Win7 look like XP was removed - it's time to move on!

The Ribbon was such a great invention - I do hope that MS gave whoever thought of that the rewards they deserved.
I still have users here who didn't want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it was "so different".
However I send them away, tell them to spend half an hour with the Ribbon and report back - so far 99.9% of people have reported back saying they like the changes.
 
If you give people the option and they use the older one then why is this?

Not every change is good. It's all down to personal preference and for the sake of putting in a very simple option to change it they have made a lot of third-party peeps very busy with actually selling the product.



M.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
The ribbon is one of the best things ever to come to Office. People need to move on; traditional toolbars are cumbersome and dated.
Click to expand...
While I agree with you, I think a lot of people resist this type of change simply because they cannot see any benefit. I resisted the new style Start Menu and put off using Office 2007 because I was so comfortable with the old methods. I honestly could not see how the processes I had been using for almost a decade could possibly be improved upon, they had become reflexive for me. It takes a lot of time to get used to the new Microsoft UI, at first it seems almost backwards.

Now that I am used to it, though, I struggle to adapt when I'm forced to use XP & Office 2k3. I imagine it's the same for most people...
 
I used to hate the ribbon bar but after now having used it and gotten used to it it is very intuitive. It's all about making the most use of screen estate space and the ribbon does this very well. If you think of the effective tabs within the ribbon as the old File Menu but with it being context sensitive then it starts to make sense.
 
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Sorry I agree with the OP.
I've lived in Excel and Powerpoint for two decades, and I'm at a loss with the ribbon. Where are my commands ? Each time I have to go back to the circle logo just to delineate a print area or save a file...really slows me down.
 
Phage said:
Sorry I agree with the OP.
I've lived in Excel and Powerpoint for two decades, and I'm at a loss with the ribbon. Where are my commands ? Each time I have to go back to the circle logo just to delineate a print area or save a file...really slows me down.
Click to expand...

Then why not add the commands to the Quick Access Toolbar then?
It's a simple couple of clicks process and then the commands are always either above or below the ribbon depending on where you have set the Quick Access Toolbar to be
 
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