Don’t like the ribbon? You will
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Office, Microsoft on
You have to get used to the Office 2010 ribbon - and now it’s a lot easier to get used to.
The statistics from Office 2007 users show that the ribbon does what it was designed to do in terms of exposing more of the features that are in the application (because 80% of new feature requests were for features that are already in Office, just not where people were finding them). More people use more of the features in Office 2007 than ever before, says Chris Bryant from the Office team.
Not everyone likes the ribbon and for some people, Microsoft learned the lesson of how multiple interface options increase support costs rather too well with Office 2007 and Windows 7. Having gone to the effort of developing a logical user interface that’s more productive than the old muddle, Microsoft didn’t allow users to stay with old and inferior if they wanted the features that went with the new and improved interface. Quite where users who want new versions of Office without the ribbon think the new features would go is a mystery - and personally speaking, I embraced the ribbon, even though not all of the commands were quite where I thought they should be, on the grounds that I’d been nagging Microsoft for years to tidy up the old Office interface and find logical places for the extra commands and features they’d been cramming in to the old dialogs like pushing socks into a drawer you haven’t been able to close for months.
I know where every feature in the old Office interface was and sometimes I have to look in two tabs to find a specific command so you might expect me to complain about it - but I don’t (much). In Office 2003 the ribbon isn’t perfect but it is still a huge improvement and if a feature is in the wrong place on the ribbon I put it on the quick access toolbar.
And Office 2010 addresses almost every complaint about the ribbon (although if you’re one of the people who hate the ribbon because you have laboriously learned the obscure location of commands that are now clearly and logically arranged in the tabs, then your issue is more about forgiving Microsoft for past sins, abandoning the time you invested and stepping out of your comfort zone - and Microsoft can’t do much about that). If you don’t like features you never use taking up screen space, you can remove commands from tabs - or entire tabs. If your issue was that, say, proofing tools don’t belong under Review with the tools for working with comments on someone else’s document, then you can either move them to the tab where you think they fit better or create a whole new tab and put those commands in what you think is a logical group. And if you dislike the ribbon because you have to switch between tabs (which is no more work that opening menus and dialog boxes, but may feel like more work because you’re comparing it to clicking buttons that are right there in front of you on the ribbon), you can make your own ‘home’ tab for each application that has the tools you use at the full size of the ribbon rather than crammed onto the quick access toolbar. You can completely customise the ribbon and make something that increases productivity generally increase your own productivity too.
Mary
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