Why is it called the Ribbon? (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Why is it called the Ribbon? (2005)

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38 pointssusam23 comments

Whatever its name, it's what drove me away from MS Office. I found the traditional pull-down menus to be intuitive and to organize functions in a discoverable way.

Every time I have to deal with ribbon-like interfaces, I'm lost. It's like walking into a supermarket and trying to find the roasted in-shell peanuts. They aren't with the snacks. They aren't with the nuts. They're on an end cap in the produce area, and the only way you find them is to just wander the whole store.

As someone who likes ribbon interfaces, I have an issue with your metaphor, and it's that you're claiming the one item you're looking for happened to not be in any of the actual aisles, but on an end-cap display. The problem is that the ribbon pages are the aisles. There are no hidden "aisles" in between the end-cap display tabs you're equating with the ribbon.

Personally, I found I was able to accomplish visual tasks quicker with the ribbon than with the pull-down menus. Things as simple as creating a graph in Excel or choosing heading levels in Word are easier to do with a one-click picture button than with a pop-up menu with drop-downs. (And more advanced stuff that requires a pop-up, like changing paragraph formatting options or manually formatting a graph, have single-click buttons on the ribbon, or can be just as easily accessed through the right-click context menu.)

Bringing it back to your metaphor, the classic drop-down system seems more like I'm walking through aisles filled with text-labeled drawers, and I have to open a shelf's drawer to see if it actually has the specific item I'm looking for or not. As opposed to the ribbon, which is just seeing the things I want directly on the shelves.

I'm saying this as someone who experienced Office '97/XP/2003 as a young child, and got the 2007 ribbon in middle school. While I was obviously only a basic user in elementary school, I've also gone back to the drop-down system for a while with OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, and now use LibreOffice's ribbon mode (which still isn't as visual and consistent as Microsoft's ribbon yet). I usually get the sense that people who hate the ribbon were simply at an advanced level of proficiency with the drop-down menus, and were understandably thrown off when things suddenly looked different; but I don't think anything about the drop-down menu is inherently easier or better than the ribbon (if anything, I'd think it would be the opposite).

Each to their own - if the ribbon works for you, that's great.

I'm not the poster you are replying to, but my problem with the ribbon is that it's just so much harder to remember where things are than a traditional hierarchy of menus. I think it's that items can change their horizontal position (based on context), and also that the combination of icons and text is harder to internalise than just text (I also dislike icons in menus too). Plus, sometimes the thing you want is in the overflow area (chevron), so you do have to 'open the drawers' to find things if you don't know whether they are in this part of the ribbon or somewhere else.

> Things as simple as creating a graph in Excel

Selecting the same graph style from the ribbon: the 2 graphs are different.

The ribbon was invented when we had 4:3 monitors. Recently I helped my sister on a 16:9 laptop, yikes. The actual content of excel is left in a narrow long strip. Luckily it can be collapsed pretty easily.

What would you think about a vertical ribbon? I've seen some programs offering sidebars that partially replicate the functionality of the ribbon, but I don't think I've seen any yet that let you just move the entire ribbon to the side.

Office v.X on OS X, back around 2001 had a command pallet, as many OS X apps did in those days. It was basically a vertical ribbon, but in its own floating Window. It’s my favorite version of Office to this day.

Oddly enough, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote still work this way (with the pallet as part of the windows) and I don’t like it as well now.

I guess it’s all a matter of what a person gets used to over time.

Given the "ribbon" happened around the same time as screens getting wide, it probably was one of the worst sins against usability ever committed. Before, on a 4:3 screen with 1280x1024 resolution, you could see or work on a full page (A4 or letter) directly. With 1920x1080 and the ribbon, this regressed to ~ 2/3rds of a page. With lots of useless space around.

Maybe it doesn't matter as much for spreadsheets. But for all else ... I can't curse snd swear properly, not in English nor in my native German, to express what I really feel about this pile of badness.

The ribbon has a fixed height. All it's elements have the same height, so you can arrange them side by side. If you have a ribbon on the side, the elements would need to have a fixed width. If you look at an office ribbon, it's going to be tricky. Probably better to use a single icon width, something like a photoshop toolbar.

I thought it was invented to propel touch-screen usage, but I doubt it works well there

I find the ribbon to be a horrible interface as well. Perhaps the worst possible option. Despite having to use it for a very long time now, it still takes ages of hunting to find what I'm looking for. And it takes up far too much screen space.

The menu, at least, makes it obvious where to find stuff and doesn't move things around.

Agreed. It's much easier to scan an orderly list of text than a mixture of text and images that also change positions depending on how wide the window is.

The little area at the far right end of the Windows taskbar with the clock and tiny icons was referred to officially by Microsoft as the "notification area".

But enough people mashed Ctrl+Alt+Del in Windows 9x, saw a process called "Systray", and figured out that it controlled the notification area that eventually the area became known as the "system tray", even in non-Windows environments like Linux DEs.

The "system tray" was supposed to be a pop-out thing that resembled a shallow drawer (hence the "tray" name) and have some of the functions of the taskbar, but it was abandoned early in Windows 95's development. The Systray.exe program which was repurposed was the last vestige of that name and it kind of stuck. I think even Microsoft have given up on getting people to say "notification area". The "system tray" terminology is official in other environments like XFCE.

Relevant Raymond Chen article: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...

You can see the original system tray in action (not just a mockup) in the early Chicago betas http://toastytech.com/guis/chic58.html

It even looks like a tray in the versions of Windows before the UI got flattened, a slightly recessed area.

It's referred to as the system tray in the Windows 11 UI.

After being a heavy Excel user for a few years, I was away from using Excel while this change took place. It's been a long time, but as I recall it, when I then sat down to do something more intensive in Excel, I found a bunch of "muscle memory" actions failing; they'd also changed a number of shortcut key combinations!

Serious Excel users could work the keyboard like an experienced Vi/m user. For example, when extensive manual data entry, editing, cleanup was necessary.

A curse on those responsible for these interface changes.

Serious Excel users, for one, bitched for good reason.

Legacy keyboard shortcuts are still supported in Excel for menus long gone. For example Alt EAF is clear all formatting, and Alt EAA is clear all (values and formats).

One place I worked started giving intentionally bad names to products in development so that nobody would ever call it that publicly. This was after two products were known too well by their mediocre internal name for anything marketing came up with to stick.

On the other hand, sometimes internal names just turn out to be better than anything marketing can come up with, so using what was an internal nickname (as long as it’s good) can sometimes be the best way to name a product!

That’s perhaps more of a reflection of the competence (or lack thereof) of the marketing departments concerned, but it’s happened for a couple of products I’ve worked for now!

There is a really great talk on how the ribbon was invented: https://youtu.be/Tl9kD693ie4?si=3o0PiiipTgqVQiYC (first of ten parts)

Jensen's blog or parts of it are still archived on different URLs, though not this post for some reason.

Here's a related post about a talk he did The Story of the Ribbon with slides and video

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/the-...

Its funny because I never thought about the name not making any sense. Somehow it just felt right.

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