|
|
|
|
|
|
by dmccarty
1081 days ago
|
|
|
That was one of the ostensible reasons, although the real driver likely had more to do with commercial than technical reasons. There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started. The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho. The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today). [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ (unfortunately as with all old blogs, sans images. Raymond Chen was right once again) |
|
|
I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.