The ribbon is beautiful because you can hide it. I disagree strongly with the whole "too many buttons/clutter" sentiment. This provides an awesome learning cur

The ribbon is beautiful because you can hide it. I disagree strongly with the whole "too many buttons/clutter" sentiment. This provides an awesome learning curve for users. The tooltips for the ribbon expose keyboard shortcuts. A first-time user will click the button, then eventually try the keyboard shortcut, learn it, learn all the shortcuts they need from the ribbon, then learn to hide the ribbon. This opposed to the crappy menu or context menu system which is much less conducive to exploratory UI learning.