4 ms·

I take much longer navigating the ribbon interfaces in any recent MS Office than I do the traditional drop-down menu and toolbar UI. Scanning a list of words i

I take much longer navigating the ribbon interfaces in any recent MS Office than I do the traditional drop-down menu and toolbar UI. Scanning a list of words is much faster than tabs of differently sized icons. Having a choice of dockable and customisable toolbars made better sense, they achieved basically the same goal and could be tailored for the current task. I hope no one at MS takes that idea seriously.

gcr 3y ago
Coding is a lot more modal than document composition, so I think the paradigm fits better. Sometimes you're in "understanding the codebase and tracing execution paths through tons of libraries you don't know" mode, sometimes you're in "debugging a specific problem with a specific function" mode, sometimes you're in "designing UI" mode, sometimes you're in "figuring out event propogation" mode, sometimes you're in "writing unit tests" mode, etc ... ...
WastingMyTime89 3y ago
I quite like the ribbons. It exposes a lot more control that the menu and toolbars, the contextual split makes sense and keyboard navigation works great. It's an interface you have to get used to but once you do it's actually more efficient.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I've been putting up with them for years and they still slow me down to a crawl. If you have to do anything except for the most common actions, it takes forever to hunt through the ribbon to find what you want. I curse them regularly.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    I don’t know I think they are sorted fairly well and I use all the actions somewhat regularly. That’s for Excel and PowerPoint at least, no idea about Word but Word is just a poor piece of software ribbon or no ribbon.
deafpolygon 3y ago
FWIW, I hated the ribbons at first. I love them now. They are far faster than the old toolbar UI that they had prior to the ribbon due to the more recognizable items, and they've made a lot of tweaks to it over the years. You can now remove and pin your favorite things on the ribbons in MS Office, as well as make your own completely new ribbon with the buttons you want. It's a really good interface now. I like OneNote's new Simplified Ribbon as well, that you can toggle.

gcr 3y ago

Coding is a lot more modal than document composition, so I think the paradigm fits better. Sometimes you're in "understanding the codebase and tracing execution paths through tons of libraries you don't know" mode, sometimes you're in "debugging a specific problem with a specific function" mode, sometimes you're in "designing UI" mode, sometimes you're in "figuring out event propogation" mode, sometimes you're in "writing unit tests" mode, etc ... ...

WastingMyTime89 3y ago

I quite like the ribbons. It exposes a lot more control that the menu and toolbars, the contextual split makes sense and keyboard navigation works great. It's an interface you have to get used to but once you do it's actually more efficient.

JohnFen 3y ago
I've been putting up with them for years and they still slow me down to a crawl. If you have to do anything except for the most common actions, it takes forever to hunt through the ribbon to find what you want. I curse them regularly.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  I don’t know I think they are sorted fairly well and I use all the actions somewhat regularly. That’s for Excel and PowerPoint at least, no idea about Word but Word is just a poor piece of software ribbon or no ribbon.

deafpolygon 3y ago

FWIW, I hated the ribbons at first. I love them now. They are far faster than the old toolbar UI that they had prior to the ribbon due to the more recognizable items, and they've made a lot of tweaks to it over the years. You can now remove and pin your favorite things on the ribbons in MS Office, as well as make your own completely new ribbon with the buttons you want. It's a really good interface now. I like OneNote's new Simplified Ribbon as well, that you can toggle.