[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.