Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

Fifteen years ago, one of the Microsoft fanboy arguments against both Linux and LibreOffice (then OpenOffice.org) was that neither worked exactly like Windows / Office.

Then Microsoft comes along and changes everything. The Ribbon instead of the pull down menus. Now which office suite works more like what users have used for a couple decades?

Windows 8 comes along with a totally different UI. So different that ordinary users don't know how to do the most basic tasks like print, or even how to shut down the computer.

Windows 8 UI (no matter what you call it) "fixes" things by adding back a start menu, but not calling it start.

No search box in the start menu -- you just have to magically know that you can start typing.

And magical key combinations to type in commands.

IMO, it really is change for the sake of change. And generally change for the worse. The interface we had with classic Mac, and Win 95 was pretty usable. And stable. (Nevermind the underlying tech it ran on top of, no real kernel, etc.)

Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing.

I still hate that change.

Weird thing to think about too was that it came out right as we were seeing 16x9 monitors become the standard. So you have more real estate on the sides but MS decides to just take a big old chunk of the top away on all of their Office products. I still haven't bothered to relearn all of the shortcuts since then either, used to be nice since you had the pull-down menus as a sort of training wheel.

> I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing.

The search button in Office apps is super useful. Type in a vague suggestion of what you want and it'll pop up a button for the appropriate feature!

The ribbon is very nice for some things. It is meh for others. In Excel I'd argue it was a dramatic improvement. I remember spending forever digging through Excel menus trying to find out where some feature had been crammed in 10+ years prior before the concept of good UI even existed. The ribbon was a nice opportunity to reorganize things into more meaningful categories.

But yeah, there are still some things I can never remember quite were they are at.

The search feature is a good improvement. You see it used to various degrees in other complicated programs with lots of features (eg emacs, blender, even jira). It’s good because it can make things better for people looking for a function they don’t know and for advanced users looking for something they do know. And it provides a good intermediate level of speed between digging through menus and knowing the keyboard shortcut.

On the other hand, the built in help system before 2007 or so worked out pretty well (maybe it was slightly dying by 2003. I remember the vba help worked well and maybe the rest didn’t work so well), whereas the help system in 2007 was completely awful and I think it was getting worse. I haven’t used office recently enough to know if they ever fixed it or if it was just replaced by incomplete documentation, google searches, and obscure forums.

Office can do many things that I wouldn't be able to even begin to describe as a search query. They are all well-hidden. Dig a little under the facade and look at the VBA methods. Most of that functionality is or was available somewhere in the UI.

Indeed. Search is no substitute for a solid, discoverable information architecture.

I guess I feel a bit less stupid now for never getting comfortable with the ribbon. Anything beyond the basics that I use frequently, I'm maximizing my window then digging through every menu. I thought the old menu system was so much more intuitive. I generally embrace change for dumbing down software, but even after all these years, I still think this went in the wrong direction.

This really shows the power of habit. Now that it's been 12 years, a whole generation has grown up with the ribbon UI. At 22, I'm one of them. Office 2003 and earlier (+ LibreOffice) feels clunky and arcane to me. 2007 was the first Office version that I seriously used, and I remember being confused as to why my parents complained about the ribbon.

Sometimes I wonder if UI design matters at all beyond what users are already acclimated to.

It goes beyond habits. I know what Office was capable of many years ago. Many of those features became completely hidden by the ribbon. Once I managed to find them again, I would be looking at the unchanged dialog boxes from Office 97 inside the pretty Ribbon interface.

Let me put it this way - I am qualified to write a book about Microsoft Outlook. One of my presentation interaction points when talking about Outlook was to tell the person asking the question "This was already a feature introduced in Outlook __".

Outlook got especially destroyed by Ribbon. It is capable of so much more than is exposed by the UI. The same is true for Excel, especially once you add various add-ons.

Ribbon made it easier for novices to learn a handful of shortcuts using multiple key strokes (press alt and follow the letters that appear). It also destroyed workflows of countless power users.

I'm a zoomer and actually grew up on the regular UI because my first laptop was an iBook G3 I got second hand that came with Microsoft Office 2003

When the ribbon was introduced, I went from a semi-expert (not quite power user) with Office to a newbie, struggling to find even the most basic functions such as indent-outdent! Now, after a few years of occasional use (I'm usually editing in Emacs or an IDE) I can sort of wing it, but in my opinion the ribbon is simply Wrong.

I get what another commenter said, who grew up with the Ribbon, but it's very difficult to adapt to if you've memorized the old menus and dialogue boxes. Thus, Libre Office now feels like a much more familiar and accessible tool.

Similarly, when Windows pivoted in v. 8 to a tiled interface, the more traditional UI's like KDE and Mac remained familiar and comfortable. Now Win10 is okay; it feels like Win7, only slicker and with lots of hidden power features (such as power shell, Linux subsystem, better copy-and-paste in cmd, etc.).

Putting back the things that worked was the right thing to do, and clearly someone with some sense of listening to the users is still in charge there.

i liked the ribbon! it expanded out the nonsensical menu dropdowns from the previous excels. most users memorized shortcuts because they didn't want to remember functions they needed four levels deep. it's not like the ribbon destroyed old excel shortcuts; you could still use them, as you type them out they show up as small text box above your ribbon.

the one thing i thought was nice about the ribbon is that they remind me of the old 123 / commands. as you slash through the 123 menus they popped up where the input box is, changing across the screen. the ribbon is sort of like that? if you type out the ribbon shortcuts the ribbon changes across the screen.

Fifteen years ago, Windows 95 was only 9 years old. I think changing something 9 years old over the course of 15 years is probably an acceptable speed.

Why after 9 years don't we change from a steering wheel to a steering tiller. Marketing thinks it is the bestest idea.

After 9 more years, let's change to steering pedals and use hand controls for acceleration and breaking. (pun)

After 9 more years . . .

Maybe you see a problem with this progression?

You might want to go look at some actual early cars. A lot of stuff that’s now standard was not for decades.

After not having used Windows for a couple of years, I installed Windows 8 on my old computer before giving said computer to my mom. Out of the box, Windows update was broken. Known bug, the fix for it was to download a patch, and the said patch, after being downloaded could only be installed with network access disabled (???). What garbage. How did Windows update ship broken out of the box? How did this pass quality control? I don't know how anyone can trust Microsoft and let themselves get sucked into their vendor lock-in.

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