Office 2007: An iconoclastic view
The infuriating aspects of Microsoft Word are legion, and whenever possible I prefer to write in a plain-text processor. But sometimes you have no choice but to work in Word, scratching your head over its stubborn peculiarities and gradually, over the years, acclimating yourself to its interface.
Now, as Walt Mossberg details in his column today, Microsoft is about to throw out years of tradition in Word and the rest of Office. In the new Office 2007, it seems, there are no menus. That’s right — the basic tool for controlling the screen since the early days of the Macintosh is gone, replaced by a newfangled, multifaceted toolbar called the Ribbon.
Mossberg gives it a mixed review (though he admits to “cursing it for weeks”). No doubt Microsoft has invested millions in testing it. I haven’t used it at all yet, so I could be off-base. But thinking about this change, or even just looking at the screenshots, makes my head hurt.
Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean. Either you wait for the “tooltip” to pop up (but why should the text have ever been relegated to this second layer?) or you go to the menu, where at least the function will be represented by an English description that has some relationship to what it does.
From now on, sorry — no more menus. Maybe there’s an option to flip the Ribbon to text descriptions, but from Mossberg’s description, it sounds like this Office is less customizable, not more, than the old one. The keyboard commands that heavy users rely on for common operations apparently are unchanged, so that’s nice. But when you need to find that odd command you only use once a year, good luck rummaging through trays of icons.
POSTSCRIPT: Harvey Motulsky writes to tell me that most of the Ribbon toolbars (though not the very first one, apparently) do have text labels on them. He points me to Jensen Harris’s blog at Microsoft which records the process of the redesign — I’ll look forward to reading that later. And, in comments, Walt Mossberg suggests I’m just showing my stripes as an “old-fashioned reporter” — no doubt guilty as charged.
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January 5th, 2007 at 12:39 am
I have to say I was sceptical at first too but the ribbon has somewhat grown on me. I don’t think it was really needed for Word, but in Excel it actually lets me do a lot more than before. Frustrations kick in when you’re looking for a small feature you know is somewhere in the GUI but at times I simply can’t find what I’m looking for.
Funnily enough, I just wrote about the fact that Microsoft considers the Ribbon concept their intellectual property that has to be licensed if used by other vendors – unless it’s to be used for a competing product, in which case you’re out of luck.
January 5th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Scott, you’re just an old-fashioned reporter who isn’t very concerned with formatting, which is why you aren’t a fan of ribbons or icons. I am less old-school about it, and use icons and toolbars all the time. The Ribbon is pretty good, actually. But, as I said in my review, the cost of re-learning everything won’t be worth it for folks who mainly do plain Word docs, like me, and I suspect, you. Of course, I’ve already had to learn it, for my job.
Walt
January 5th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Hey, Walt — as to my old-fashioned-reporterness, guilty as charged, I’m sure! The only response I’d make is that, actually, there are two reasons I pay so little attention to formatting: the first is that most of my writing is destined for the Web, where Word-style formatting just gets in the way of the HTML. So maybe that’s, I dunno, a very new school sort of old-schoolness. The second is that, somewhere early in my career, probably around the time I was mainlining “The Elements of Style” into my cortex, I got the notion that too much elaborate formatting of a document signals that you might have been spending too much energy on the font size and too little on the actual writing. Maybe that’s a quaint, antiquated prejudice today, but I’m stuck with it.
Anyway: thanks for subjecting yourself to the Ribbon for the rest of us…
January 5th, 2007 at 7:59 am
Scott, I’m sure I’ve heard the guys at twit.tv say there’s an option to turn off the Ribbon and bring back the menus, but a quick Googling didn’t turn anything up, except folks saying they wished they could do it or that it wasn’t as easy as it should be…
Maybe you can get some guru-to-guru tips from Paul Thurrott.
January 5th, 2007 at 10:39 am
there is no way to turn the ribbon “off” as such but if you hit ctrl-F1 this puts it in a kind of autohide mode to give you more screen back. I’m seeing a lot of people load up Office, get a shock, get past the shock, use it a few weeks and now love it. It is a change but one well worth going through.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Scott, I get the first reason — that Word formatting isn’t needed for the web. This is really the same as the old reason — that other people, or software, or machines, have always done the formatting and layout for journalists, even in old media. But I never heard, and don’t agree with, the second notion — that there’s an inverse relationship between good design and good writing. Sure, the former can be used to cover up bad writing, but it’s not always so.
On the Ribbon, as another commenter said, it can’t be banished, and the old UI can’t be summoned back. But it can be collapsed. However, it reappears when you use a command that resides in it. And I got quite used to it, and like it. My problem is that some commands mainly used for composing, like adding words to Auto-Correct, have become harder to find, because Microsoft’s very detailed usage data showed they weren’t used much. They aren’t on tne Ribbon, and, without menus, are very hard to locate. Once I found them, I merely added them to the one customizable part of the UI, the Quick Access Toolbar.
I would note that the forthcoming Mac version of Office, due later this year, won’t have the totally new, shocking, UI that the new Windows version does. So this may be reason #117 to switch to a Mac.
January 28th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
[...] [via Scott Rosenberg] [...]
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:25 am
MS needs to have a classic view button. I don’t have a week to discover how to do everything all over again. My screen is not that big and to have it all cluttered up with ribbons and big buttons. For the rest of us who work for a living they need the bring back the classic button. Then as I have time I can try out the new feel.
November 14th, 2007 at 3:33 am
Ribbon is horrible, what a waste of processing power and space. There is a reason every other windows (small ‘w’) app has evolved into a common interface, MS is just trying to throw a spanner in the works by hijacking new users in to their way of working then licensing their way to other software houses.
Fat blubberly jelly mold buttons, ugh, I’m off to Open Office for good.