What people often miss in Ribbon UIs is that they are in fact very much for the power user. Here are a couple of reasons why: Every button or command on the Ri

What people often miss in Ribbon UIs is that they are in fact very much for the power user. Here are a couple of reasons why: Every button or command on the Ribbon can be accessed via polymorphic hotkeys. Every command can be accessed as a chain of key presses. There is zero need for mouse usage -- even in PowerPoint. This is huge. This was not doable in previous versions of Office! There were some commands you could not access via anything else than the menu, and to those of us that are vim users, you know how bad that can be! I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations and besides designing arrows or shapes I have no need for a mouse. And PowerPoint is a WYSIWYG editor! The other reason is that you can hide the Ribbon. See the screenshots? That chevron symbol (^) means that you can essentially auto-hide the Ribbon and bring it back, while still retaining its usability via hotkeys. I'm by no means an all-guns-blazing MSFT fanboy, but I need Office at work, and instead of jumping on the silly bandwagon of bashing all that is Ribbon, I found my inner vim user and learnt to god damn power use the hell out of it. To those that actually need Office daily, I recommend opening it and pressing Alt. Let the funny stuff unfold.