Ribbon primarily designed to drive sales rather than improve usability?

[william.hooper]

I have just switched to Excel 2007 and was initially really impressed:
Trying a 45,000 row sheet with some calculations in the columns and a
SUBTOTAL formula on the filtered range I am getting no occasional long
spikes in calc time due to the calc tree rebuilding which occurred
regularly with Excel 2003. Saving the workbook in the new XML format
sucks, but the new binary format kicks butt. By comparison Open Office
falls apart with complex sheets like this with terribly slow file open/
save times and memory in usage exploding to ten times Excel's level.
The 65,000 row limit and has gone at last and there is a new XLL
interface and a server side. It's a huge and impressive upgrade.

Well that's the good stuff, but then after a few minutes I got stuck
looking for, can you believe it, edit, replace!!! I searched around,
then typed edit replace into the online help but got nothing, and
finally after 20mins found the info on the web. So it's under the home
menu, then over on the far right hand side you click on find, then
click on replace... Am I the only one to think this is a dreadful
place to put edit, replace? Why is the font name over at the left and
find at the far far right? Surely we all use replace more than we
change the font in Excel? Is it me or is this literally insanity?

I see there is a tool to customize the ribbon which cost $30 at think
link:

http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/starter.php

which I will have a play with as soon as I can it (getting an error in
install due to firewall).

Even then forget the days of running Excel side by side with other
apps. Squeeze the horizontal size and the Ribbon - which is the entire
UI - is utterly useless!

Anyway I am thinking Msft is going too far with these changes. We know
that a completely new looking Office could potentially drive upgrade
sales, to what extent is the Ribbon a function of this rather then
genuine usability? Here is an article about it:

http://www.willyhoops.com/Office2007Ribbon.htm

Scary....

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

I see there is a tool to customize the ribbon which cost $30 at think

link:

http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/starter.php

which I will have a play with as soon as I can it (getting an error in
install due to firewall).

If you keep having problems, send me an email (email is on the website).

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
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[jimmuh]

As with all things UI some people will love a drastic redesign, and some will
hate it. My take on this is that, in Office 2007 as in Vista, Microsoft seems
to be trying to herd people into the habit of thinking logically about their
actions in the application and OS. There's a school of UI design that says
put all of the commonly used stuff where it's easy to get to, and there's a
school that says let's get this thing organized logically. I kind of agree
with the latter school, and here's why. I think that when you first start
using a new app or OS (assuming it's not like any you've seen before) you may
very well benefit from the logical arrangement of components and UI elements.
You stop and think a moment about where you should find it, and, if the
designers did their job right, that's where you find it. And after you get
used to the new app, well, then you already know where everything is at --
just like you knew where it was at when the UI was designed the other way. Or
-- I could be full of it.

From what I've seen many of the more common functions in the new Office apps
can still be used via the key combinations that called them up in previous
versions. I'm a keyboard guy, so I hardly noticed the change in organization
of the menus until I'd already been using the suite a month or so.

Actually, I'm a CLI guy, too. Now THAT is a user interface I like! Even for
applications. I guess I'm a Luddite.

 

[Opinicus]

We know
that a completely new looking Office could potentially drive upgrade
sales

I for one don't "know that" at all. From many of the reactions I've seen and
heard, at lot of people (and companies) will be staying *away from* the
latest Office because of the ribbon interface and the retraining costs that
using it effectively entails.

 

[Val]

Jimmuh makes good points. Some of the angst over Office 2K7 and Vista is
the change - we all experience RTC (resistance to change) to varying
degrees. Whether the new UI will prove to be better than what we're used to
will take some time to find out. Does it matter? Will there be any going
back? Not likely. (sound of the Borg approaching - "resistance is futile,
you will be assimilated")

One of the gurus of interface design, Alan Cooper, set forth the idea there
should be three levels to a UI - the easy to learn, easy to use level, an
intermediate level, and the expert or power user level. We've enjoyed these
three levels for many years now, and the interface has become so
standardised than any program that reasonably followed the MSFT interface
guidelines (the old ones!) was really easy for a new user to start being
productive with. The three levels are the menus (we all know what to expect
to find in File, Format, Help....), the toolbars (handy visual tools,
easlily customized to suit your particular needs) and all the key
combinations ( ctrl-this, alt-that so you can keep your hands on the
keyboard instead of always reaching for the rodent.)

The new paradigm breaks that mold. I've not played with Vista or O2k7 much
yet, but fired them up this morning. I wanted to see the Help/About Windows
box - couldn't find it to save my life. The Explorer windows had nothing
that functioned in the way the old Help menu does. The Vista help was, as
usual, useless. Somehow I stumbled upon a tiny notation that you access the
menus of Explorer windows by pressing Alt. WTF!? Where'd that come from,
and why isn't it easier to find that out?

So we now have a UI that does not seem, at first blush, to support the new
user. How do you find the 1700+ commands in Word 2k7 without some organized
structure? With the ribbon always changing in a context sensitive way,
you'll go crazy trying to remember where you saw some option or command,
when you've not selected the proper object.

And as a closing remark, Word and Excel now have so many gooey eye-candy
features that these two program can now be said to have sunk to the level of
PowerPoint as big potential time wasters, where people will spend more time
finessing their glowing, rotated, 3D enchanced pictures when they should be
doing real work.

Val