There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does no

There are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I find to be extremely interesting: For MS Office, the ribbon introduced better shortcuts. Since Office products are totally overloaded with functionality, the parts you don't use often were usually left behind in terms of useful shortcuts. With the Ribbon, these functionalities are usually accessible via a Spacemacs-Style mnemonic keypresses. If you use a specific functionality over and over, it's now much easier to remember a not-so-bad way to trigger it from the keyboard. On another note: I also find the "new" formatting context menu that pops up in MS Word whenever you select some text to be a very clever idea. It remembers me much of an old Xerox demo[1][2] that was done with a mouse and a trackball simultaneously (featuring a palette you could place around where you were currently making changes with the mouse). I'm convinced that to this day, there's a lot of ignored potential in that concept. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpTFcItyE9w [2]: https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html https://www.billbuxton.com/TGtaxonomy.html