The UI change was pretty brutal, I guess you could think of it as a "breaking change". Many people complain about it to this day, and it's been what, 5 years n

The UI change was pretty brutal, I guess you could think of it as a "breaking change". Many people complain about it to this day, and it's been what, 5 years now? Having said that, I've found the 2007 UI to be vastly superior to the older one, for most common tasks. On a reasonable screen (1900+ wide), the main ribbon contains a significant portion of the most used basic functions, reducing the amount of menu navigation and tab-switching. The rest of the tabs are pretty self explanatory (once you unlearn your Office 2003 lessons). E.g. most of the "page layout" functionality used to be hidden in some arb place in the depths of the file menu; it is now one click away. So yeah, while these types of conceptual breaking changes are irritating, as long as they really are for the better, I'm all for it.