I disagree - the ribbon was a massive improvement for feature discoverability and usability. 1. Lots of options visible up front. Instead of reading tons of te

I disagree - the ribbon was a massive improvement for feature discoverability and usability. 1. Lots of options visible up front. Instead of reading tons of text, or guessing at hieroglyphics, you could find the tool to accomplish your desired task visually - if you want to change text color, look for the color picker. 1. Big improvement to mouse navigation. Navigating nested menus is a bit like playing Operation - you position your cursor on the item you want, then slide it horizontally to the next menu that expanded. But if you drift too far vertically, which was easy to do of you had a disability or a crappy trackpad, you have to start again. With the ribbon, there was no destructive effect to moving the mouse around without clicking. You could always take the shortest path to whatever you wanted to click on. 1. Big improvement to keyboard navigation. Tap the alt key, and every affordance in the ribbon displays its keyboard shortcut. This allowed the same exploratory navigation as the mouse, but in a way that built muscle memory and avoided RSI. Of course it was a large change, but the ribbon was an amazing improvement.