Why no File Menus option in Office 2007?

[John H]

I realize Microsoft wants us to change our menu driven ways and adopt the
ribbon. With the ribbon and lack of file menus Microsoft has decided that the
new product interface is more important than continued productivity from
their legacy Office products. Although you can purchase an add in to
'restore' the file driven menus to the ribbon you can't remove the ribbon
itself. Why didn't they give the user an option to choose which interface to
use? (I'd bet its because most would continue using menus over icons)

 

[Bob Buckland ?:-\)]

Hi John,

The MS Office User Interface design team documented their reasoning in quite a bit of detail on their blog during the development
cycle of Office 2007 http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh It can be interesting reading whether you agree or disagree with their
conclusions.

================
I realize Microsoft wants us to change our menu driven ways and adopt the
ribbon. With the ribbon and lack of file menus Microsoft has decided that the
new product interface is more important than continued productivity from
their legacy Office products. Although you can purchase an add in to
'restore' the file driven menus to the ribbon you can't remove the ribbon
itself. Why didn't they give the user an option to choose which interface to
use? (I'd bet its because most would continue using menus over icons)>>
--

Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP

*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*

 

[Patrick Schmid [MVP]]

Read the Why the UI posts linked from
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/09/58

Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
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[John H]

Sorry Bob, I don't have the time to sift through a blog.
I need to spend my time trying to get some work done.
Back using Excel 2003 for now...

 

[gls858]

I realize Microsoft wants us to change our menu driven ways and adopt the
ribbon. With the ribbon and lack of file menus Microsoft has decided that the
new product interface is more important than continued productivity from
their legacy Office products. Although you can purchase an add in to
'restore' the file driven menus to the ribbon you can't remove the ribbon
itself. Why didn't they give the user an option to choose which interface to
use? (I'd bet its because most would continue using menus over icons)

I initially felt the same way, but now I think I can access more
commands, quicker than the old method. Add the Quick Access bar
to the mix and access is even better. It took me all of about
10 minutes to see that with a little practice the ribbon was going
to speed things up for me.

gls858

 

[Harlan Grove]

I initially felt the same way, but now I think I can access more
commands, quicker than the old method. Add the Quick Access bar
to the mix and access is even better. It took me all of about
10 minutes to see that with a little practice the ribbon was going
to speed things up for me.

Yes, but yours and the OP's are subjective assessments, and both could
be right (or wrong).

If there's enough complaining, there may be some hope that future
Office versions may allow users to hide the Ribbon entirely, and maybe
even provide toolbars again (tangent: another hack - modeless dialogs
with command buttons can mimick toolbars).

It'd also be nice to be able to eliminate the metastasized Office logo
button and the QAT. If there's any consistent logic to the ribbon vs
menus, why doesn't that logic apply to file operations and settings?
IOW, other than marketing for Microsoft's benefit, what purpose is
served by putting file and setting commands under the oversized Office
button? Changing settings may be rare, but file operations are rather
frequent, at least for those of us who save files.

For some of us the point is CHOICE. Microsoft seems not to have placed
much value on providing choice in Office 2007.

 

[Harlan Grove]

Read the Why the UI posts linked from
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/09/58

....

And most of these Why articles focus on Word. Maybe Word had a huge
increase in the complexity of its menu structure in each version from
1.0 for Wndows through 2003. Other Office programs haven't, especially
Excel and Access, which just happen to be the Office applications that
have aspects of application development platforms. IMO, the ribbon
gets in the way of developing specialized applications in Excel and
Access. It's been sad to see how much uniformity with Word, PowerPoint
and Outlook has hampered Excel and Access over the years.