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