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Comment by k3n | Hacker News Reader

We just "upgraded" to office 2010 at work, and....it still stinks. I admit that many Windows applications are very well designed, but the Office suite suffers from the worst of the worst -- whether it's the horrid options menus, where the menu layering goes 4-5 levels deep at times, or the complete trainwreck that is the "ribbon" and everything associated with it.

They could certainly take some design cues from products like those from Apple and Google.

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I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among themselves for screen real estate (the UI version of how this article describes MS, I suppose). The ribbon came along with the expressed intent of unifying all of those UIs so that people could actually use all of Word's features without clobbering the space allocated for, you know, editing their documents. I think it's pretty successful at that, but you have to go back to those old versions of Office to remember just how awful it was.

Sure, it's different. It takes getting used to and that's unfortunate (if only they'd gotten it right the first time!). Ultimately, I realize that some people will never like it, and that's reasonable but I hardly think it qualifies as a "train wreck."

In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.

I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that problem with the older versions.

Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking generally good.

It's a train wreck. It's not discoverable (some of those ribbon buttons are god-awful small) and is a huge burden for any existing users to accomodate to (now that it's 7 years old, it's more tolerated and understood, but is still reviled by most users I talk with).

Seriously those who know how to use it, don't use the ribbon, or the old toolbar. Those who don't know how to use it, whinge.

Double click a ribbon tab to hide and use the keyboard.

I will say that I actually had word 97 and word 2010 side by side a few months back with toolbars off and its not all that different. Makes me wonder what I've been paying for all these years. Same with the excel versions.

> Double click a ribbon tab to hide and use the keyboard.

Best advice I've gotten in a long while! It's now gone.

Also, just realized that doing so put's it in auto-hide mode (at least in 2010); when you click a tab, it shows up only long enough to let you select something, then it hides again. Great compromise.

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