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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

I always thought menus had icons so they could be matched to the same functionality on the toolbar. If a menu lacks an icon, then it's probably not on the toolbar. This falls apart when there is no toolbar. But I have definitely found an action in the menu, looked at the icon, and matched it to a a button elsewhere.

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I believe Microsoft Office 97 for Windows was the first time I saw icons next to menu items. Office 97 had highly customizable menus and toolbars. Each menu item and toolbar item could be thought of as an action with an icon and a label, and that action could be placed in either a menu or a toolbar. Not every menu item had an icon associated with it. Additionally, each icon was colored and was clearly distinct.

This is definitely where I would this pattern - MS Office 97’s customizable toolbars necessitated this model where every single thing you could do in the application had an icon.

It then got copied into Visual Studio, where making all of the thousands of things you could do and put into custom toolbars or menus have visually meaningful icons was clearly an impossible task, but it didn’t stop Microsoft trying.

I assume Adobe, with their toolbar-centric application suite, participated in the same UI cycle.

By the time of Office 2007 Microsoft were backing off the completely customizable toolbar model with their new ‘Ribbon’ model, which was icon-heavy, but much more deliberately so.

I still regard Office '97 as the best UI it ever had. I spent a lot of time inside it, including a couple of years at a bank reconciling corporate actions before I got my first programming job. The ribbon version was awful in comparison.

2003 was the best/final iteration of it - I still miss old excel

new excel is just garbage instead in virtually every way

Yeah, after that they started nuking VBA too. Sad times!

But…LAMBDA()! And LET() and friends.

Also, the Excel Labs formula editor. But it needs a way to tell it "I know I have too many cells! Just let me trace over the 100 nearest rows."

The old scripting language can still be handy if you can keep people from opening the online version of Excel. Especially if you have a certain debugger addin[1]. Excel's JavaScript features are of limited use, if you're offline.

I keep wishing for a spreadsheet to implement all its scripting and formulas in something like Forth behind the scenes, so that every time a competitor announces n-more functions, we can just be like "Oh, really?" and add it.

[1] Related to waterfowl of the plasticised yellow variety. I'm not sure I can mention the name in a post anymore, since ages ago when I tried multiple times to post a properly-referenced (overly-hyperlinked?) message while my connection was very flaky. Note to self: should probably mail dang about this, some day.

Office 97 went pretty overboard on customization. It could be awesome if you know what you're doing, but I saw countless examples of where somebody had accidentally changed something and got stuck. Deleted the file menu? tough luck!

I believe some programs used to let you even drag menu items to the toolbar.

Many KDE apps (Dolphin, Kate, Okular, etc.) let you configure their tool bars (or get rid of them entirely) and set them to show just icons, text, or both (with the text to the side or below). It's the kind of thing most people won't bother with, but for frequently used applications it's nice to be able to customize it to suit your needs. It's done via a config option though, not by dragging menu items to the toolbar (which strikes me as something you could initiate by mistake).

MS Office’s fully customisable toolbars, complete with built-in icon editor.

…ripped out when the Office Ribbon was introduced in 2007; the now-limited customisation is now considered an improvement because of the IT support problems caused by users messing up their own toolbars.

I mean, yes; but that’s what Group Policy is for! And the removal of the icon editor is just being downright mean to bored school kids.

You made me feel old by saying "I believe".

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