Well, there’s nothing like some controversy to keep life interesting and my posts about the Ribbon keep attracting comments. Anna left a comment that caught my attention yesterday evening.

I hate the ribbon! It takes up way too much screen space and it is not intuitive at all. I consider myself an advanced excel and word user and it takes me three times as long to do things than it used to because of the ribbon. Why did Microsoft go to this silly design? Maybe it's good for graphic artists, but not hard core Office users like me. The prior tool bar had everything you need in one view; with the new one you must toggle between the various ribbons to get what you need, and many basic functions are "hidden" behind what simply looks like a masthead icon! Please Microsoft, with Office 14 bring back the old view!

I think what irritates me about the Ribbon is that lack of choice. That’s partly timing. About two months before Office 2007 came out I worked hard at customising the Office 2003 toolbars to my tastes (partly following the advice of Designing the Obvious author Robert J Hoekman, Jr.). As you can see I’ve pared it down to only show the icons I actually need*.

Sadly this isn’t possible in Office 2007. This doesn’t mean I don’t like the Ribbon. Nothing has got me using Styles like Office 07 and that’s a good thing.

I don’t think it’s quite as bad as Anna finds it. There’s a certain logic to the Office button and it is possible to pin some icons to the area just to the right of it. I’ve also found the automatic tab switching to work quite well.

Where the Ribbon doesn’t work for me is that it takes up a lot of vertical space. Given that the trend is towards widescreen monitors it isn’t always the best use of space, especially on a notebook monitor. Of course, I can minimise the Ribbon by double-clicking on one of the tabs, but then there’s less on screen than there was with the toolbars.

So, yes, I’m hoping that Office 14 will come with the ability to go back to the old menu system. But I’m not letting my hopes get too high.