There are a lot of things wrong with the menus & toolbars UI for Office.
If you are interested in reading the background on the Ribbon UI, see
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/10/09/58. It's an index to the blog posts
of the PM in charge of the Ribbon UI. His blog gives a lot of the
background of the Ribbon and talks a lot about its design. It makes for
quite some interesting reading.
> No, the biggest problem is that it dumps YEARS of muscle memory and even
> when it could makes things compatible it just dumps the old stuff
> completely,
> as in Outtlook messages.
All the keyboard shortcuts from 2003 (including the menu shortcuts)
should work without a problem. They are not displayed, but they lead to
the same functionality.
> Without an option to restore the old menus I will NOT be installing or
> recommending
> this to anyone.
>
> > It took me a month during the beta (when the apps were quite unstable and
> > made working with them hard) to get used to the new UI in a way that
>
> A month? A week for no real improvement is too long.
Back in beta 1, the Office apps were crashing all the time. It's quite
hard to learn a new UI when you have a crash every few minutes then file
a bug for it, etc.
> > It's a big change and it takes time to get used to it. There are some
> > rough edges that you might encounter, but those can be addressed one by
> > one, but only after you are over the "the entire Ribbon UI sucks" thing.
>
> Then there should be an option to restore it.
Read the reasoning behind the Ribbon UI. In short, MS designed a new UI
because they didn't know anymore how to put all the new 2007 features in
a reasonable way into the old one.
BTW, you can create a resemblance of the old UI on the Ribbon. You'd
have to use RibbonX for it (the new customization model), it will take
quite a bit to do it and it won't look exactly like 2003, but it can be
done.
Patrick Schmid [OneNote MVP]
--------------
http://pschmid.net
***
Office 2007 RTM Issues:
http://pschmid.net/blog/2006/11/13/80
***
Customize Office 2007:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/customize
RibbonCustomizer Add-In:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer
OneNote 2007:
http://pschmid.net/office2007/onenote
***
Subscribe to my Office 2007 blog:
http://pschmid.net/blog/feed