Windows Vista: Death to Menus?
I still havnt figured out if I like the ribbon yet. Pressing alt is amazing tho, little letters pop up over all the buttons so you can easily use the keys instead of using the mouse on a menu bar, or navigating a menu bar with arrow keys. Its the same as the hit a hint firefox extension which is very nice:
http://users.tkk.fi/~psillanp/hah_hp/
I often hear people saying that the new interface is no better for habituality than before, when Office tried to adapt to your most commonly used commands. However, as far as I can see, nothing goes away. Nothing in the UI layout changes or adapts. The current focus will change to help you get at the most likely functionality quickly, but the layout doesn’t, so motor habituation will not be affected.
At best you have everything at your fingertips, at worst it takes a quick retake as to what tab is selected and you may need to select a different tab.
Good! Finally - the most annoying piece of the WIMP interface (the pull-down menu) is finally dying - if only Apple would realise!
In the UK in the prime of the home computing market (1990s) there was an OS released by Acorn called RISC OS. The major point of difference 'twixt this and MAC OS or Windows was that it had no pull down menus - all menu interaction was due to pop up menus. This lead to faster and more exact interaction with the application.
Pity it’s taken Microsoft 15 years to realise this!
Personally I hate the ribbon for two reasons.
First is the fact that almost all the functions are revealed, but not some of the important ones are not easy to find. It took me two hours to find out how to make the default format Word97-2003 rather than “open” (huh!) office xml or whatever they call the new format - partly because the menu you have to access doesn’t look like it is anything other than a logo (Fix: Make an “extras” or “tools” menu button, or something that is easily discoverable).
Second is that I have certain functions that I use a lot that are not on the default ribbon. With earlier versions of word I could simply add them to the toolbar. How do I do this with their predecided ribbons
but I hope that they improved the core editor
in Word and the way it handles scientific expressions
You know what, the Microsoft Equation Editor
in Office 2007 is now tightly integrated
and has a context-Tab, too!
I am very happy that they took away the "OLE Interface"
for editing equations. Editing Equations is as seamless
as editing Pictures in Word 2007.
When you think of the ribbon think ‘New Coke’.
Big companies can make big mistakes with core products.
We can hope for Office classic, because sometimes companies admit mistakes.
Wrong link url. Instead of
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/microsoft_word_v2.html
it should be:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/microsoft_word_v2.png
