Ridiculous: Windows 8 explorer is to get a ribbon.

[Van Rijn]

I just saw this article at Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...explorer.ars/1

where they're apparently saying that the reasonable menus are to be replaced by a ribbon. I *HATE* the Office 2010 ribbon UI because it is so much harder to find things through the ribbon than with a menu. I was actually looking forward to Windows 8, because it has a feature I'm very interested in (a smart way to pool heterogeneous drives into a single pseudo-drive - I already have a server that does that, but it looks like they have a better approach) but unless there's a workaround for the stupid ribbon, I'll probably avoid Windows 8 for as long as possible.

Quoting the article:

Since its introduction in Office 2007, the ribbon has been a polarizing user interface. The ribbon's purpose was to make a package that was feature-packed but unwieldy more approachable—to enable people to find more of those features when they wanted to use them. Microsoft says that it has broadly succeeded at this goal, and there is evidence that all but the heaviest Office users regard it as an improvement.

That's ridiculous. I'm not a heavy user, and my primary complaint with the Ribbon is that it made it MUCH HARDER to find features I only use occasionally. I used to be able to read the text of the menus and quickly follow them down to the function I wanted. Now I'm faced with icons that mean nothing to me, so I'm usually forced to Google search for the sequence of icons I'm supposed to click to get to the function I wanted. I get used to the icons for the stuff I use the most, but for the less common stuff I usually forget by the time I need it again. If I was a heavy user, I would probably have better luck remembering them all.

I hate the entire approach. Give me text, not meaningless icons.

[publius]

I've been playing with the Developer Preview of Win 8 for some time under a virtual machine. There's a registry tweak that allowed you turn off the new "Metro" UI and that included the Explorer ribbon (there's a number of tweak tools out there that can selectively turn stuff on and off). The beta, which they're going to call a "Consumer Preview" is due out Feb 29th, and we'll see what changes they made.

I'm assuming they'll add a way to go back the old classic look, or at least disable most of the Metro crap (seems tailored to tablets) for old fogies like me.

They've got a new file system (which was available in some of the leaked builds, but disabled in the Developer Preview) which they're going to called "Resilent File System" as well, but from what I've read lately, it's going to be Server only (maybe "Ultimate" will have it there as well). The file system was code-named "Protogon" in the early leaked builds.

[PetersCreek]

I'm not a fan of the ribbon, either. Since I started using MS Office Professional 2010 at home, I've gotten better at navigating the darned thing but we still use 2003 at work, so I haven't been able to make a clean break from the menus.

[Nowhere Man]

(Haven't used the latest Office apps yet, but...) I dislike the ribbon because it takes up far more space than the menu bar. Is there no way to revert to the menus?

Fred

[Trebuchet]

I hate the entire approach. Give me text, not meaningless icons.

Sometimes, a word is worth a thousand pictures.

[orionjim]

(Haven't used the latest Office apps yet, but...) I dislike the ribbon because it takes up far more space than the menu bar. Is there no way to revert to the menus?

Fred

There are add in dropdown menus that run from free to around $30 and they usually include all of the Office products. I’ve gotten used to using the ribbon and as far as space there is a show/hide button that gets the ribbon out of the way and it behaves like menus except when you click on a tab the ribbon appears instead of a dropdown.

The thing I find annoying is trying to find the oddball options, say in Excel trying to unhide the sheet tabs. The other day I spent about ten minutes trying to find out how to do it (I had to Google it).

Like Brett I use both 2003 and 2010, and to be honest I find, in general, I like 2010 better.

Jim

[DonM435]

I'm not a fan of the ribbon, either. Since I started using MS Office Professional 2010 at home, I've gotten better at navigating the darned thing but we still use 2003 at work, so I haven't been able to make a clean break from the menus.

I have the opposite situation: I refuse to upgrade ("upscrew" would be a better word, if you know what I mean) my Office 2003 at home, but my office is using 2007 and I'm stuck with it. I'm slowly learning the new interface, but still don't like it.

I used to use MS Word for writing segments of program code, things where I'd load a a list of data and mash it into code by turning it to a table, adding columns, back to text, find and replace, repeat ... Sounds crazy, but it beat typing in something over and over, and it always worked. I knew all the keyboard shortcuts. But walking the Ribbon makes this approach impossible.

Those of us who can read words (like "File, Close") are sacrificed on behalf of those who need a picture of an ashtray or whatever it is.

[publius]

I have the opposite situation: I refuse to upgrade ("upscrew" would be a better word, if you know what I mean) my Office 2003 at home, but my office is using 2007 and I'm stuck with it. I'm slowly learning the new interface, but still don't like it.

2003? Wow, you're running a late model. Me, I'm still using Office XP.

To me, a word processor (and spreadsheet, database) is a word processor. You do a certain task with it, and once you have something that has all the features you want, there's no need to upgrade. It's sort of like a simple tool like a hammer or screwdriver. Not much to "updgrade" there and the only reason to get a new one is when the old one breaks. Software doesn't wear out, so once the hammer has been perfected, why bother.

[Solfe]

You guys may be amused by this... I am taking a pair basic computer literacy classes covering Word and Excel. I needed two easy credits. The first projects were to create a flyer in Word and a 7x7 cell spreadsheet with a chart in Excel. The time frame was one week for each project.

The expectation was that we were to read the first 50-75 pages of a book on Excel and Word 2010, then use a 45 page Power Point presentation that contained step by step instructions in the form of pictures of the ribbon thingie in each program.

Having used Word and Excel for years, I skipped the reading and just looked that the last page of each Power Point doc to see what each document needed to look like. It took me two hours, most of that time was spent SCREAMING at the ribbon, then kicking my printer because it ran out of ink on the wrong day.

After handing both in 6 days early, I read over the Power Point presentation... And released that if I had simply pasted the final slide's image into Gimp, I could have printed both with enough resolution to be indistinguishable from the actual Word and Excel documents I turned in. Doh! I decided to be honest and mentioned to my teacher that she might want to back off on the resolution or otherwise edit the image so students don't do that.

[Van Rijn]

I have the opposite situation: I refuse to upgrade ("upscrew" would be a better word, if you know what I mean) my Office 2003 at home, but my office is using 2007 and I'm stuck with it. I'm slowly learning the new interface, but still don't like it.

That's similar to my situation. At work, we were forced to move to Office 2010 (we skipped over 2007) because Microsoft is dropping support for the older products, and we must have support. It's also hard to buy old MS Office these days, so at best we'd have different versions of Office running, something we try hard to avoid.

At home I don't have those issues, so I can run the older software.

[pzkpfw]

What burns me also, is that they're pushing this fancy icon driven GUI style into products used by people who you'd expect to know their way around - and as noted above, it's darn slower.

In IIS 6.x one could right-click a web site or virtual directory, up pops a tabbed window. The tab names pretty well described what was in each tab... and we could drill into what we needed to change.

In IIS 7.x we get a field of icons. The icons have titles, but the icons distract from those titles. And weirdly there are still some text-menu type things over on the right (did the icon designers run out of ideas?).

"Save", for example, is a nice simple word that clearly indicates what it does. An icon showing a disk, or an arrow pointing at a filing cabinet, or whatever, needs much more interpretation.

I admit I'm simply resistant to change, but I really don't see how the new interface styles are really "better".

[Van Rijn]

Having used Word and Excel for years, I skipped the reading and just looked that the last page of each Power Point doc to see what each document needed to look like. It took me two hours, most of that time was spent SCREAMING at the ribbon, then kicking my printer because it ran out of ink on the wrong day.

Heh. Soon after the 2010 upgrade I remember one time that at very short notice I was asked to put together a quick spreadsheet for upper management to take to a meeting. I had maybe twenty minutes to put the thing together, but it was a fairly simple spreadsheet. If I'd been using Office 2003, I'd have been able to do it easily. This time, though, I couldn't find half the stuff I needed. When you're up against the clock, that's not fun. So instead of doing the spreadsheet I was spending most of my time trying to find where they had stuck things. First I'd try to find things just by looking at the ribbon myself (that never worked), then I'd try looking up search terms in Excel help (that usually didn't work - either my search term wouldn't bring up anything or what I'd find wouldn't be detailed enough to let me find things quickly). Finally, I gave up on trying to find anything myself or looking for anything in Microsoft Help, and just googled everything. That always worked. It appeared that my questions were common ones and that the search terms Microsoft Help didn't understand were often used by others. The only issue with the Google search approach was that I often would need to go through a few sites before finding all the information I needed.

Anyway, I did manage to get the spreadsheet done, but had to walk into a meeting a few minutes after it started. I can tell you that I had fantasies of punting the computer down the hall and beating it with a chair. If I had been at home instead of work I would have been swearing a blue streak, telling nobody in particular what they could do with their ribbon and icons. As it was, I kept my in-office comments down to a low hiss.

[Van Rijn]

"Save", for example, is a nice simple word that clearly indicates what it does. An icon showing a disk, or an arrow pointing at a filing cabinet, or whatever, needs much more interpretation.

I admit I'm simply resistant to change, but I really don't see how the new interface styles are really "better".

Yes. An example case from Office: I remember looking around for "undo." I looked all over the screen, clicked on some of the buttons, and no undo. I googled it, and it turned out that instead of the text "undo" they now have a little curly arrow pointing left. In hindsight I can sort of see how that might fit "undo" but it would never occur to me just looking at it. They might as well have left it off the screen if they couldn't show that little bit of text.

Give me text and even if I'm not familiar with the function there's a good chance I'll be able to figure it out. Give me an icon and I'll probably have no idea what the function is supposed to be without trying it, and even if I do try it, unless I use it regularly, I'll probably forget what the icon means.

Change is fine with me, but not when it makes something harder to use. I think a lot of the push on icons is that they make it easier for the software writers. Rather than have text in different languages, and having to handle things slightly differently with different word lengths and so forth, they can avoid dealing with all that.

[Ara Pacis]

I think I like the ribbon now, though I didn't at first. Of course, some people don't like change... but I'm not that old yet. I like how it seems easier on the eyes compared to the start contrast of Office 2000. This is even more evident when using the outline feature (which I use most of the time) and the side frame. I don't mind the undo arrow icon, since I use lots of programs that use a curving back arrow icon for Undo, one of which is from the late 1990s.

[Van Rijn]

I've been playing with the Developer Preview of Win 8 for some time under a virtual machine. There's a registry tweak that allowed you turn off the new "Metro" UI and that included the Explorer ribbon (there's a number of tweak tools out there that can selectively turn stuff on and off). The beta, which they're going to call a "Consumer Preview" is due out Feb 29th, and we'll see what changes they made.

I'm assuming they'll add a way to go back the old classic look, or at least disable most of the Metro crap (seems tailored to tablets) for old fogies like me.

I hope so. Even if they don't, somebody will probably come up with a hack of some kind.

They've got a new file system (which was available in some of the leaked builds, but disabled in the Developer Preview) which they're going to called "Resilent File System" as well, but from what I've read lately, it's going to be Server only (maybe "Ultimate" will have it there as well). The file system was code-named "Protogon" in the early leaked builds.

Yes, they've been looking at that for awhile. There are some interesting database-like ideas there.

The other thing though is what they're calling "Storage Spaces" that let you create large virtual drives with a mix of drives (far more flexible than typical RAID setups). That has an interesting history: Windows Home Server 1.0 became pretty popular because it has a feature to pool drives, it's easy to set up, and it's easy to set up flexible back up procedures. So someone can have a mix of different sized hard drives as well as different types (USB versus SATA, for example) for the pool. It's possible to set up different backup options for different folders, so you can have, for instance, some things always duplicated across drives while others are not. It's also pretty easy to add drives to the pool, and if you want to remove one, you tell WHS first, and it moves files off of the drive.

The drive extender sold WHS. There are people with 20-30 terabytes on WHS 1.0. Still, while it's nice, there are compatibility issues with some newer software, so Microsoft was going to come out with a redesigned version in WHS 2.0. However, a bit before WHS 2.0 came out, they announced they were pulling the new Drive Extender, claiming they were having too many problems during development. Some people think that Windows 8 "Storage Spaces" is what came out of that. Either they worked out the problems with the WHS 2.0 drive extender, or maybe they pulled it off of WHS 2.0 because they decided they wanted to save the feature for Windows 8.

[pzkpfw]

Yeah, the undo icon requires the user to know that left (sinister!) is undo, and right is re-do. It may be common, but it's an odd thing to attach to an action.

And in Word and Excel, I now have a hard time remembering what the keyboard shortcut for them are. (Mousing and clicking is slower than alt+a few letters; so I want those letters to be easy).

[John Mendenhall]

Wow, and I thought I was the only one that intensely disliked icons. I put in a lot of time when I was only six years old learning how to read; give me words, please.

[Strange]

I just saw this article at Ars Technica:

The ribbon's purpose was to make a package that was feature-packed but unwieldy more approachable

They might have been better off pruning some of the features. What frustrates me most as a professional writer who wants to use a word processor "properly"(defining and using character and paragraph styles for each type of information, for example) is that, with every release, Microsoft have made these features harder to find and use. Instead they make it not just easier but almost unavoidable to just format text "on the fly". This makes it harder for me to use the tool productively. It also means I have a huge amount of reformatting work to do when importing documents from other sources.

The ribbon also makes it much harder to discover the keyboard shortcuts for commands, which means I spend a lot time pointing and clicking than I used to.

Microsoft have an add-on which finds commands, which helps a bit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en....aspx?id=28559

(Never mind that Word is a bug-ridden, almost unusable piece of excrement to start with.)

I dislike the ribbon because it takes up far more space than the menu bar. Is there no way to revert to the menus?

On the later versions there is an option to minimize it. There is still almost no customization available.

[Nicolas]

Strange, I have a hugely strong déjà vu while reading this thread. Was it moved or merged or something? The posts say "today" though...

Anyway, I'm not a fan of the ribbon but I like the idea of the future generation of tablets running a full OS (and full Office etc) instead of "light" versions. Saves the cost of buying a tablet and a "real" computer.

[Jim]

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But, it helps if you know which specific word it represents.

When I was using earlier versions of MS Office, I'd add commands to the menu bar and would choose icons to represent them. But, I selected the icons so I knew what they meant. Some programmer at Microsoft selected the icons in Word (Excel, etc) 2010 and while s/he knows what they mean other folks have to learn... which sometimes means unlearn as well.

And the commands don't seem to be where they once were, so you have to dig around.

I'm sure for somone brand new to Office, the new ribbon features are great. And to someone who uses it a lot, they'll learn soon enough. But as someone who uses Office daily but not all day, it can be frustrating.

(BTW, one feature that is useful is F1 for Help. This now provides a Google-like search function but specific to Office programs. The help articles are either MS or a very knowledgeable outsider, and includes some workarounds.)

Oh, one continiuing pet peeve is that Word was created to compete with Word Perfect (is that still around?). However, even though it's been more than a decade, there are still some very useful WP features that never made it to Word. One was Reveal Codes. If you were having a format problem, this would show you all the coding in the document and allow editing it directly. With Word, it's always been guess work as to why that stupid word/paragraph/list/whatever refuses to look right.

[DonM435]

They're trying to put the things that a "typical" user needs up front. I guess that a lot of people just need to know how to type a letter or other note, and then print it out.

So, we have the fonts and colors and boldface stuff taking up 80% of the default menu space.

I almost never print anything on my system. I have a dusty old printer that I connect two or three times a year when I need hard copy of something. Usually, the ink has dried up, so I send the file to Mrs. M for printing, or take it to work with me.

The commands that I routinely need are buried several levels deep.

I think that you can move the deep stuff to the surface menus via some customization, but I'd rather they provide a "classic" menu option.

[DonM435]

...
there are still some very useful WP features that never made it to Word. One was Reveal Codes. If you were having a format problem, this would show you all the coding in the document and allow editing it directly. With Word, it's always been guess work as to why that stupid word/paragraph/list/whatever refuses to look right.

In MS Word, there's that icon with a "paragraph" symbol on it [ ¶ ]. It turns on and off the display of the line feeds, return marks, blank spaces and such. That may provide some of what you need.

[Strange]

Perhaps they need to create different "flavors" of UI for different types of user. Rather as Adobe does with its tools; e.g. you can choose "developer" and get a different set of menus and tools displayed by default than someone who selects "content generator".

Nearly everything that is displayed on the ribbon in Word is of no use to me. All the things I use regularly are buried several clicks deep (and some in really obscure places like under the "Office button"). I have moved some to the "quick access toolbar". I suppose it might be possible to write some Visual Basic to remove/add things on the ribbon but I haven't found the time to look into this (apart from adding some custom commands to the ribbon).

[DonM435]

I figured that I could use MS WordPad for quick 'n dirty work, but the Windows 7 version of that has a ribbon too!

However, I found that I could copy the old XP WordPad .exe file to the Windows 7 system, and it works there!

[NEOWatcher]

NOOOOO !!!!!

They go into some discussion about how people don't change the default ribbon preferences, I've got one answer for that...
I don't like it in the first place, and why are you making me try to figure out how I will be using it, how to customize it in the first place, and not give me a way to shrink the context ?

The icons are too big and there's little need to have icon's and text coexist except for learning what they each go with.

What was wrong with customizable icon bars and menus where you can dig deeper and see more options under a catagory that you may be thinking of?

[HenrikOlsen]

In MS Word, there's that icon with a "paragraph" symbol on it [ ¶ ]. It turns on and off the display of the line feeds, return marks, blank spaces and such. That may provide some of what you need.

Doesn't help to untangle the godless mess of formatting you can have in documents from other people, especially with the "intelligent" current format dependent reinterpretation of new formatting that's done on-the-fly which encourages messing up things even more in the attempt at getting to the desired result.

Sometimes I get the impression the very best and very first function to find in Word is one to clear all formatting from the document so it's possible to start from a clean slate.

For text processing I loathe WYSIWYG and am a very large fan of YAFIYGI, what you see is never what you get anyway so I much prefer to get what I asked for instead.

[Strange]

the "contextual" tabs that aren't permanently enabled

That is another thing I hate. For example, the "drawing" menu is not normally displayed on the ribbon. So to start a drawing you have to use the "insert" tab; but then the "drawing" tab appears and you can use that. Similarly with tables and other things.

[Swift]

That's similar to my situation. At work, we were forced to move to Office 2010 (we skipped over 2007) because Microsoft is dropping support for the older products, and we must have support. It's also hard to buy old MS Office these days, so at best we'd have different versions of Office running, something we try hard to avoid.

At home I don't have those issues, so I can run the older software.

That's what is happening at my work. The entire corporation (over 25,000 employees just in North America, I think well over 100,000 world-wide) is moving from Office 2003 and Windows XP to Office 2010 and Windows 7 (also skipping over 2007). They started pushing it out mid last year and will be done some time early next year (I'm unclear as to why it takes so long). It hasn't hit at my office yet, but we've started training (which is semi-worthless without the actual program to play with).

My greatest hope is that the change will be neutral, that for all the pain of changing and all the "features" that actually make my job harder, there might be a couple of things that are improvements. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he.

Honestly, I can't think of a version upgrade that has really been a big improvement since about Office 95. The added features never seem to be anything that I actually really want.

[Trakar]

I just saw this article at Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...explorer.ars/1...That's ridiculous. I'm not a heavy user, and my primary complaint with the Ribbon is that it made it MUCH HARDER to find features I only use occasionally. I used to be able to read the text of the menus and quickly follow them down to the function I wanted. Now I'm faced with icons that mean nothing to me, so I'm usually forced to Google search for the sequence of icons I'm supposed to click to get to the function I wanted. I get used to the icons for the stuff I use the most, but for the less common stuff I usually forget by the time I need it again. If I was a heavy user, I would probably have better luck remembering them all.

I hate the entire approach. Give me text, not meaningless icons.

If you are just talking about your personal machine, simply customize the tool. The best feature of PC/microsoft software is that the interfaces are nearly infinitely adjustable and customizable to suit individual users, the only problem I ever have is trying to show others what I am doing and they are running a default setting interface so it takes me time to locate all the tools and script the macros that make it so easy for me to do what I do on my system.

Beyond this, the only primary difference between Win 7 and 8, is that 8 is designed to handle touch screen input much better and is in someways more a special release version of 7 made to run cleaner on smart phone and tablet hardware.

[Jim]

Doesn't help to untangle the godless mess of formatting you can have in documents from other people, especially with the "intelligent" current format dependent reinterpretation of new formatting that's done on-the-fly which encourages messing up things even more in the attempt at getting to the desired result.

Exactly. (Or something you did, don't know you did it, and really mess things up trying to "fix" it.)

Sometimes I get the impression the very best and very first function to find in Word is one to clear all formatting from the document so it's possible to start from a clean slate.

I've done that, not fun.