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Do you like the Office ribbon?
Office 2007 was quite a radical move for Microsoft because they made a big change to the interface. The traditional toolbars were discarded in favour of a dynamic ribbon.
Bigger than the old toolbars the ribbon change the icons on show depending on what you happen to be doing at the time. For example, move the cursor into a table to see all of the table options.
Some programs have now followed the example of Office, MindManager being one of them.
I've found myself warming to the ribbon. It needs more screen space to really shine, otherwise it takes up too much room that I would rather use for editing.
Thankfully there is a solution as a quick double-click on the ribbon makes it hide away leaving the tab titles at the top. Click on a title to reveal that part of the ribbon.
But so long as my screen is at least 1024 pixels high, I leave it on as I've found it to be an improvement on the old windows, and certainly one on the personalised menus of Office 2003. Turning those off is one of the first jobs on a new installation.
So what do you think? Is the ribbon an aid to productivity or just a clever gimmick?
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I loath the ribbon! In fact I bought some software that allowed me to go back to the old style menus. i cant find the functions I want easily anymore. It might be Ok for people new to computing but to an old windows hand like me its terrible.
posted-by Gillian Drysdale | March 17, 2008 7:23 PM
I didn't take to the "ribbon" at first, but with use I find it a great help with all my documents. It just needs patience just like Vista!
posted-by Isobel Swade | March 19, 2008 5:26 PM
The Ribbon is a terrible waste of vertical screen space and it's ridiculous that I cannot make it display vertically to take advantage of wasted horizontal space.
posted-by Anonymous | March 28, 2008 6:09 PM
I dislike the ribbon. Contrary to Microsoft's claims, it is unintuitive and clunky, and if you want to do anything more than just the basics, it takes hours to do instead of seconds. Also, why would turn "Help" into a tiny white question mark inside a tiny blue circle? Really. Radically change the interface, and then hide the help? I read another blog about the author's and author's wife experience with Office 2007. His wife could not find the help files. In fact if I had not known about the "F1" shortcut (thankfully Microsoft did not screw that up), I would not have been able to find it for days either.
posted-by Brandon | April 7, 2008 5:33 AM
I hate the Ribbon -- after a year of trying to get used to it I still cannot work as fast with it asI could in previous versions... Maybe if they would allow the ability to create custom floating toolbars on which I could put the commands I actually need rather than what Microsoft thinks I need, and then minimize the Ribbon, I wouldn't be such a hater of Office 2007 but they specifically forbid us, through the removal of that customizability, from configuring the software for usability.
In fact, I detest the Ribbon so much I would actually say that it would be a major reason why I would NOT buy a particular application.
posted-by Mike | June 5, 2008 6:05 PM