[MagnumOpus]

Raises hand As a power user of Office before and after that change - the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time because things jump around from version to version).

[Steve44]

> the menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

And someone else here too. We moved about a year ago to the 'the ribbon' and I detest it. They have hidden much of the functionality and it's a more laborious process to get to any feature which isn't immediately available.

Another little annoyance I have is in Outlook. Pre Ribbon you could right click on your mailbox root and select Advanced Search. This control was set up to search everything in your mailbox. The Advanced Search option has gone from the right click, I've added an icon on the Quick Access toolbar and it's also available as Ctrl-Shift-F.

What's wrong with that you think! The problem is it's no longer configured to search your entire mailbox (presumably as it's not got the context of the right-click), just your Inbox. I now need to do Browse, tick the Root using the mouse, then tick "search subfolders" using the mouse, and then OK back to the Advanced Find control. A complete PITA and step backwards in functionality.

[Nexxxeh]

If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.

[vetinari]

Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars disappeared.

Best of both worlds.

[maxxxxx]

Me too.

[palotasb]

> who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious

How are keyboard shortcuts worse than in old Office? I still have the common shortcuts and everything is accessible vie accessible Alt+... access keys (easily discoverable if you press Alt once). True, you cannot add custom shortcuts. Is that it?

> the buttons take up half the screen

On a decent-sized screen that extra size doesn't matter much, and not just novices benefit from applying Fitt's law.

> discoverability is non-existent

Could you elaborate? I don't have data but I would guess that making common options larger and/or putting them on the home tab makes them more discoverable.

[jobigoud]

> I don't have data but I would guess that making common options larger and/or putting them on the home tab makes them more discoverable.

At the expense of non common options, which become undiscoverable.

When I open a software for the first time I'll often scan all the menus once, to get an idea of supported features and their categorization. I'll randomly rescan the menu from time to time when I feel like learning something new/want to further my expertise.

[oblio]

That's an interesting approach but it seems invalid for Office. The have thousands (!) of features. Going through the old menus wasn't much help. More than that, they're actually exposing more functionality through the Ribbon. For the truly hidden commands, they have the Options menu, under the Office icon.

[slantyyz]

Add me to that list too. I hate the ribbons, they just eat so much real estate and as I age, it's slower for me to scan, differentiate and spot the icons for the commands I want to perform.

[dm319]

Not age, just harder. A list of text is far easier to interpret than a zillion icons.

[dm319]

Jesus add me to this list too.

Trying to find a little used feature is a minefield of hovering for tooltips and clicking endless drop down button menus...

[criddell]

If you are a power user, does the graphical UI even matter to you? Aren't you all keyboard, all the time?

I didn't like the ribbon interface for a long time. Then I watched a video of Joel Spolsky doing some stuff in Excel and it was the first time I really saw somebody that knew what they were doing using the ribbon. That converted me.

[Mithaldu]

> Aren't you all keyboard, all the time?

No. Keyboard for the things i know by heart and use every few seconds, mouse for the things that happen from time to time, and explorability for everything else.

Also, link to that video?

Edit: I think you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Very first thing i notice is he rides hard on the "Paste as Values" option being the one you want to use most of the time. However since he has the ribbon on top he has a gigantic paste button and needs to use the drop down every time to call it.

With normal toolbars you'd just add a "Paste as Values" button next to the normal paste button and skip the error-prone, slow dropdown process.

(I also note he has no keyboard shortcut for it.)

[eisa01]

New ribbon has very discoverable keyboard shortcuts, opposed to the old layout

Paste as values: alt h v v

[Mithaldu]

He never uses that in the video. The video also doesn't show the availability of it. Also a sequence like that for something that he uses all the time is not very good huffman coding.

[criddell]

But he also starts the video saying this is at a basic to intermediate level. Plus, picking things from the tool bar rather than just using keystrokes is a little more video-friendly.

[Mithaldu]

This is getting into tea leaves reading, but i am fairly certain that he isn't aware of or simply never uses a shortcut for it and clicks through the cumbersome dropdown every time. My evidence being that he's happy to show off multiple access modes for "fill down", but does not do that for "fill by values". Possibly he might also be aware of the keyboard chain to reach it, but doesn't mention it because it's fairly cumbersome itself too.

[nxc18]

Can you really call yourself a power user if you haven’t adjusted to the new UI in over eleven (11) years?

I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that doscoverability is nonexistent... everything is there, except now everything has icons, is in logical groups, and has a keyboard shortcut (exposed through alt key). If you hover over any option you get a tooltip that often includes an illustration along with text. Much of the UI is wired up with live hover preview so you can see the effects before you commit.

When office 2007 came out, there were a lot of people who thought they added a ton of new features. Aside from live previews, hover tooltip, smartart, contextual grammar, and the new formats, there was practically nothing new. The UI made things so discoverable that people just thought there were thousands of new features.