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by criddell 3061 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.)

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

Paste as values: alt h v v

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.
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.
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.