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Comment by eisa01 | Hacker News Reader

I didnt't seriously start using Excel until the 2007 version, but I must say that the Ribbon is much better than the old system. The discoverability of keyboard shortcuts are much higher when you only have to press the alt key to reveal them.

Of course I also use some other shortcuts that are not on the ribbon, but that's just a bonus.

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They aren't shortcuts, they're replacements for mouse clicks, and you have to do the same number of key presses as mouse clicks.

I don't have Windows open in front of me (still the holiday weekend). In Word, to paste text from the clipboard, unformatted, into the document by "pressing the alt key to reveal" the so-called shortcuts go something like this:

- alt

- H (I think, to further reveal or expose the Home "shortcuts")

- V (to expose the paste functions)

- S (because we want to paste Special)

- U (unformatted)

- and maybe U again to get the other flavor of Unformatted.

That's five or six keystrokes, and that's not a shortcut. It feels like passive aggressiveness on Microsoft's part: "Oh, you don't like clicking? ... There, I fixed it."

    CTRL + V
    CTRL
    T

Yes, those are shortcuts, but the thing you enable with the alt key are not.

Excel 2010 is certainly more novice friendly, but I'd take 2003's interface back in a flash - customising/grouping shortcut icons doesn't seem nearly as friendly in 2010 and it's a big drawback. I also find it much quicker to scan lists of vertical text when looking for a menu item than to scan horiztonal lists of icons/text.

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