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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

> Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more

I use Microsoft office 2000, because since then, no new features have been added to word or Excel that I care about. In fact, I couldn't even name a single feature added since then. What they did add, is the ribbon instead of the toolbar, which makes it impossible to find things you need, and a whole lot of bloat.

On modern machines, office 2000 opens faster than I can release my mouse button from clicking its icon.

That is to say, I entirely disagree with your statement.

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Me too! With the exception of Outlook, I stick with Office 2003. I'm so much faster and more productive with it.

The problem with the ribbon is I find myself constantly having to click back and forth between different tabs. It's annoying, and takes twice as many clicks to get things done. Microsoft lost sight of the purpose of a toolbar: to make commonly used functions ONE click away.

When the rest of the industry followed suit and emulated them, the result was a tragic loss of precious vertical pixel space for the content I actually cared about: whatever I was working on.

I also miss the elegant discoverability of classic menu bars. I loved being able to open a program and quickly become familiar with what tools are available.

They did a great job surfacing keyboard shortcuts. Hints were right there beside the menu items, subtly advertised every time you clicked them. You naturally learned the ones you used most. I worked alongside a younger guy for a few months who was blown away by how quickly I navigated around my PC and got work done, for many sequences using like 90% keyboard and 10% mouse.

Exactly. Modern UX seems to split everything into two categories: things that happen automatically, and things that take ten times as many inputs as they did two decades ago. For example, it's nice that modern Windows automatically switches between wifi networks. It's not nice that instead of being a checkbox on a settings menu, turning off the superfluous Lock Screen requires creating registry keys.

Menu bars are still alive and well on the Mac, but only as a design holdover from a previous era. Really appreciate how the menu bars on the Mac centralize all application functionality, while also surfacing keyboard shortcuts.

Would love to see menu bars make a return to the iPad and mobile, such as in this concept. You can really get a sense for how quickly a touch-based UI can be navigated using menus and toolbars: https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/12339911770803609...

> It's annoying, and takes twice as many clicks to get things done.

It's very strange that Microsoft does not care about this. It's very annoying to me as well.

I don't mind much the vertical space of the Ribbon, but the stupid back and forth between tabs is really annoying.

I just found out yesterday that you can import a picture into word and then remove the background, ala the selection tool in PS. Now while I'm sure most technical people would use PS or gimp or Paint.Net the fact that for 99% of other people there's an easy way to quickly edit photos is pretty incredible.

That feature is super handy, but it has been in word for a long time - I’m guessing about a decade.

So well after the 1990s, 2000 or 2003 alledged highwater marks of usability and feature completeness. Still an example of latterday improvement.

I distinctly remember using that feature on Windows 98

I always say MS Office reaches its peak right before they introduced the ribbon in 2003. Since then I haven’t seen many interesting new features. They just keep moving stuff around.

I think power pivot was only added in excel 2010? Pretty much every megacorp has people power pivoting all day long

> that I care about

Well there's the rub.

There are tons of users who do require critical new features like cloud integration. And the ribbon was designed because specifically more people find it easier to use, as Microsoft's user research showed.

Office 2000 may very well be better for you. But it certainly isn't for everybody.

And the ribbon was designed specifically because more people find it easier to use, as Microsoft's user research showed.

Not exactly. What Microsoft's user research showed was that people who were unfamiliar with Office found the Ribbon easier to use than the traditional menu bar. They did not test whether the same held true for experienced users. They also did not test whether the Ribbon had a higher "skill ceiling" than a traditional menu bar (i.e. if you take two users, one who is proficient with the Ribbon and one who is proficient with the traditional menu bar, and ask them to complete the same task, who is faster?).

Most of the complaints about the Ribbon came from the audiences that Microsoft failed to adequately test the Ribbon on. Microsoft, as far as I can tell, figured that experienced users would quickly get used to the new UI paradigm and adapt. That was not the case, due to the aforementioned tendency for the Ribbon to "helpfully" move things around in order to put the most recently used tools front and center. This broke many people's muscle memory and, more importantly, inhibited the formation of new muscle memory. It's the latter that was especially galling for experienced users. Changing the UI is bad enough. But changing the UI and replacing it with a constantly shifting toolbar that gives the user no indication as to where their controls nor any consistency with regards to their positioning is intolerable.

Imagine if your car radio shifted its buttons around every time you started it to put the last selected station in the first position.

Their research probably found people LIKED it more, not that it performed better. Computers went mainstream and functionality became secondary to seeming high tech.

>Their research probably found people LIKED it more, not that it performed better.

This internal survey seems to suggest otherwise. It asked a range of questions, not just "do you like it?".

http://video.ch9.ms/slides/mix08/UX09_Harris.pptx slide 140

I don't understand what you gain by asking people questions about how they think usability has improved. Users are notoriously bad at actually knowing what they want. If I were testing this sort of thing I'd give them tasks to do and watch what they do, when they look frustrated etc.

There was a lot of real-world usability research that went into the Office 2007 ribbon-- both qualitative and quantitative. Jensen Harris went into some of this in his blog; see, for example, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/more-... .

More here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/table...

Would've done this too, but then LibreOffice came along and IMHO, it's basically the same minus the proprietary issues, so it's even less hassle!

Recent Excel has a much more convenient interface for formatting pretty graphs than I remember from ~10 years ago. The available options are mostly the same, there indeed aren't really any new features in that, but it has live preview and more "visual" ways to modify the graph, compared to the gruesome modal interfaces that I remember where you have no idea what will happen until you "OK" it.

Excel 2007 introduced multithreading, which is very useful on large spreadsheets.

We are talking mainly about UI here. They could have added multithreading to the old UI.

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