RE: Ribbon primarily designed to drive sales rather than improve usabi

As with all things UI some people will love a drastic redesign, and some will
hate it. My take on this is that, in Office 2007 as in Vista, Microsoft seems
to be trying to herd people into the habit of thinking logically about their
actions in the application and OS. There's a school of UI design that says
put all of the commonly used stuff where it's easy to get to, and there's a
school that says let's get this thing organized logically. I kind of agree
with the latter school, and here's why. I think that when you first start
using a new app or OS (assuming it's not like any you've seen before) you may
very well benefit from the logical arrangement of components and UI elements.
You stop and think a moment about where you should find it, and, if the
designers did their job right, that's where you find it. And after you get
used to the new app, well, then you already know where everything is at --
just like you knew where it was at when the UI was designed the other way. Or
-- I could be full of it.

From what I've seen many of the more common functions in the new Office apps
can still be used via the key combinations that called them up in previous
versions. I'm a keyboard guy, so I hardly noticed the change in organization
of the menus until I'd already been using the suite a month or so.

Actually, I'm a CLI guy, too. Now THAT is a user interface I like! Even for
applications. I guess I'm a Luddite.

"william.hooper@xxxxxxxxx" wrote:

I have just switched to Excel 2007 and was initially really impressed:
Trying a 45,000 row *** with some calculations in the columns and a
SUBTOTAL formula on the filtered range I am getting no occasional long
spikes in calc time due to the calc tree rebuilding which occurred
regularly with Excel 2003. Saving the workbook in the new XML format
sucks, but the new binary format kicks ***. By comparison Open Office
falls apart with complex sheets like this with terribly slow file open/
save times and memory in usage exploding to ten times Excel's level.
The 65,000 row limit and has gone at last and there is a new XLL
interface and a server side. It's a huge and impressive upgrade.

Well that's the good stuff, but then after a few minutes I got stuck
looking for, can you believe it, edit, replace!!! I searched around,
then typed edit replace into the online help but got nothing, and
finally after 20mins found the info on the web. So it's under the home
menu, then over on the far right hand side you click on find, then
click on replace... Am I the only one to think this is a dreadful
place to put edit, replace? Why is the font name over at the left and
find at the far far right? Surely we all use replace more than we
change the font in Excel? Is it me or is this literally insanity?

I see there is a tool to customize the ribbon which cost $30 at think
link:

http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/starter.php

which I will have a play with as soon as I can it (getting an error in
install due to firewall).

Even then forget the days of running Excel side by side with other
apps. Squeeze the horizontal size and the Ribbon - which is the entire
UI - is utterly useless!

Anyway I am thinking Msft is going too far with these changes. We know
that a completely new looking Office could potentially drive upgrade
sales, to what extent is the Ribbon a function of this rather then
genuine usability? Here is an article about it:

http://www.willyhoops.com/Office2007Ribbon.htm

Scary....


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