> I think you pulled this card to win the "consistent" argument
Actually, if you look at all the comments I've been making in response to my initial comment, the parent of the thread, I've been talking about accessibility the entire time, especially for visually impaired.
For the visually impaired and those with motor skills impairments, it's fairly easy to overshoot where the floating palette appears. If you shoot too far up, it disappears; it doesn't reappear when the mouse comes back to where the palette was, the text needs reselecting.
That's my main inconsistency.
> (B) don't always automatically change to the appropriate tab;
> They do
I stand corrected in one respect, but we still have inconsistent behaviour. Say you create a table, the Ribbon will change to Table Tools. Great.
Click away from the table and then click back. Still on the Home tab. Well, this makes sense since you're probably editing text — but again, that just reinforces my belief that those tools should be in a separate toolbar (à la Office 2003 and prior).
> What's confusing about this? It shows a header "table tools" so the purpose is clear
The technically minded may figure it out, but ordinary users have to rote learn what the tabs do. As an example, Table Tools shows two subtabs, Design and Layout.
Do you think you could get Sheila from accounting or Bob from packing to tell me the difference between the two tabs, or how the two Design tabs differ, without letting them click around the interface? I doubt it.
When there are two context-sensitive tabs shown, and they're both heavily related, you can almost bet money that an ordinary user, Sheila from accounting or Bob at reception, is going to cycle between the two tabs to find what they're looking for. This isn't intuitive.
> Note: I'm not saying this is the best interface there is, merely that it's not as inconsistent as you depict
That isn't high praise. A user interface shouldn't be inconsistent at all, especially the flagship product of a multi-billion dollar company, and especially the de facto standard in productivity software.