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Comment by BobbyTables2 | Hacker News Reader

It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

Earlier Word/CorelDraw/etc had a thin toolbar with lots of functionality. Barely occupied any space at just 800x600 resolution.

Nowadays, the ribbon and all other junk occupy a huge portion of the screen, even at 1920x1080.

It’s amazing how little screen area today actually shows the useful part of a document.

Instead of the Ribbon, a thin context sensitive toolbar would have been more useful.

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> It’s also stupid in terms of screen real estate.

You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.

The whole "UIs got smaller because the aspect ratio got more rectangular" thing never really made sense to me because 786 > 600. The screens got bigger in both dimensions, regardless of them getting bigger in one more than they got bigger in the other.

Pixels aren't physical space. The number of square inches remained similar.

A wider aspect ratio means that a horizontal line takes up a larger percentage of the overall screen and is more costly.

You know the ribbon can be collapsed so that it behaves more like a drop-down menu, right?

It doesn't really act that way, as (1) it can't be accessed with keyboard shortcuts and (2) it's difficult to scan for the desired feature as it's a visual jumble of buttons and text. Oh, and it might not be visible! Sometimes features can only be found in pop-out dialogs.

Having used Office products for 30+, my most-used feature of the Ribbon is Search, because I don't have time to waste hunting through a poorly-organised heap.

To your (1), if you tap Alt all of the alt keys current available show up next to their associated buttons. (Top level menu). Hit the letter for where you want to go and it than will show you the next set of alt keys (available items on the ribbon itself). You can also use the arrows to move around the menus or tabs when in this mode. It isn't obvious but the ribbon, as office implemented it, is very keyboard accessible.

But then, you have to learn the sortcuts (if there are any) or click first to open it, then click button/funciton, which is 50% slower.

Also, classic button bars were customizable. You could add/remove/group buttons in any order you like. And there were lots and lots of buttons that were not present in any of the default toolbars. The ribbon is fixed AFAIK.

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