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Using the new ribbon version of office I found out that document properties could only be inspected by clicking on a golden orb and going into a menu called "Pu

Using the new ribbon version of office I found out that document properties could only be inspected by clicking on a golden orb and going into a menu called "Publish". Similarly most other less-often used features became impossible to find. I've refused to use office for any substantial document ever since. I can only assume that this research was targeted at new users and not existing users.

knolan 7y ago
Similarly for editing charts in excel which became a multi-click hell. Whereas in 2000/XP office you could quickly rearrange series in charts by dragging and enable chart elements at a click now it’s a tedious unintuitive affair. I haven’t used Excel for any serious work since.
dmitriid 7y ago
Microsoft destroyed their old blogs and with them a lot of knowledge they contained. Thankfully, Internet Archive preserved the "Why the new UI" series of posts: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... Relevant parts: by Office 2003 they had 250 top-level menu items and 50 toolbars (Part V), and this was becoming unmanageable. In Office 2003 they started collecting info on how people are using Office: About 1.3 billion sessions since shipping Office 2003, over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days (Part VI). I won't quote the rest because it's a very good series of articles.