Windows 8: Pushing hated UI elements
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
I loathe the ribbon. What I loathe even more is Microsoft eliminating "classic" mode in apps using the ribbon. I'd upgrade to the latest Office tommorrow if they simply had a "use Office 2003 interface button." (To put this in perspective, my Word 2003 toolbar has about two dozen buttons on it that cover 90% of the most important commands for me. The ribbon scatters all these buttons throughout making me hunt through obscure buttons to find useful ones, which aren't always logically placed.) Incidentally, this is what pisses me off with IE9--the inability to customize it.
-
It looks like they believe in an anti-read website as well. That hover scroll thing is awful.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
Yes. The ribbon sold the copies of office 2007 I have. When both were menu/toolbars open office didn't suck enough worse to spend money on. Once 2k7 was out I needed office on the netbook too.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
-
You and your wife are suffering from familiaritis. You get used to the way things are and when something different, even better, comes along you get pissed because you have to relearn.
David Kentley wrote:
takes up too much room
A fair argument. The ribbon can be turned off.
David Kentley wrote:
making things harder to find
I've had the opposite experience.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering” - Wernher von Braunahmed zahmed wrote:
You and your wife are suffering from familiaritis. You get used to the way things are and when something different, even better, comes along you get pissed because you have to relearn.
First that supposes that it is in fact "better". Second it completely ignores the possibility that the user of the application uses the application in a fixed way. Thus "familiarity" is in fact easier because they would need to relearn exactly the same limited set of features to use the new application. This is further compounded when the application is used in a frequent manner in the same way for years. And because the feature set is limited there can be no significant impact on the work that needs to be done because the feature use itself is insignificant in terms of the overall work.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
David Kentley wrote:
Does anyone like the ribbon interface?
I've been waiting with bated breath for it to return, since I last used WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS). That was such a great step forward that an utterly ridiculous interface became 100% unusable, instead of merely incredibly difficult, and the threshold was crossed from low productivity to zero. Happiest day in my career!
Will Rogers never met me.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
Took some days to get used to.. but now I love it. If you put your "new-things-hatred" aside, you'll see that it's perfectly logical and actually quite beautiful UI wise in Office 2010 and Win7s WordPad, Paint etc. (not so beautiful in Office 2007 though). I've compared the height here: http://zipdot.net/shared/ribbon_vs_toolbar.png[^] 2010 doesn't come out too bad in height compared with the OSS alternatives.. only a few pixels higher. Office 2003 on the other hand is like 2/3 of the height og 2010 (just bing/google image search it). But really.. height isn't an issue here, because you can hide it in Win8 - people seem to forget that.. or do they just ignore it for the sake of arguing? It's not hated by _that_ many people... it's just that the people that really do hate it screams the loudest - just like (F)OSS-people do on forums.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
I like keyboard shortcuts the best
-
I didn't have carpal tunnel syndrome when I was using a dumb terminus or a terminus emulator. It started when I started using Visual Studio and Office.
For me it started with Ctrl-Alt-Delete, or in other words when I gave up on my trusty AMIGA 2000 and with a heavy heart decided to purchase a Windoze box.
-
This is the first reaction of most people. Unfortunately, software companies feel that they have to switch to a ribbon interface in order to "stay current". It's useless to complain to Microsoft - as long as that idiot Ballmer is in charge - but you will have better luck complaining to other software companies. TechSmith, for example, redid their ribbon interface after they were hit with a ton of complaints about the ribbon.
Best wishes, Hans
Our company doesn't suffer from this malady. On the last set of rolled out new PCs we were happy to find - against hope - the new W7 operating system. Apparently our argument that we couldn't easily investigate software errors that our clients working on W7 report to us finally took hold. (not to mention we had to ask our clients just to find out whether or not our application actually runs on W7 :doh: ) We were somewhat surprised however to find that the new workstations still came with the old Office 2003 suite installed! :wtf: Looks like nobody considered it neccessary to upgrade... I've yet to see the ribbon in action, I only read about it and at home I'm not using MS Office at all...
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
Sincerely dislike it - and I believe I've given it a chance. I've been using Office 2007 for about 2 years. It is great for first time users who want to create very basic documents, but not for power users who want to use the app to its fullest. 1. The main features are well clustered and easy to find, but the finer and more powerful elements are often hidden in arbitrary places. I find myself going to Help (a rant for a different time :mad:) way more often than I used to just to locate a fairly basic feature. (Did you know that "Convert text to Table" is located under the Insert ribbon while "Convert to Text" is located under Layout? Shouldn't related functionality be close together?) 2. The resizing of the elements bugs me. When I work in a smaller window, the look and location of the target I'm reaching for changes from when I'm full screen. I now have to look closely for an item that I "know" the location of. 3. They are not customizable. Any additional functionality (macros, etc) need to be squashed into the tiny title bar at the top and cannot be made context sensitive (I don't think). OK, I'm done.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
-
peterchen wrote:
Self-drying paint
Is there another kind of paint?
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering” - Wernher von BraunI had to embezzle it a bit, because Dave isn't dumb.
FILETIME to time_t
| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
I'm a long-time Windows user, but I'm not fanatical about a particular platform. My wife recently got a Macbook for her job and I was interested to try it out. She needed help with editing a document using Word for Mac 2008. I found that I really missed the ribbon interface and the Mac was not at all intuitive to me. I often collapse the ribbon in the Office apps to get back that extra screen real estate. You get the best of both worlds that way.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
The ribbon made me dread using Word. My productivity in Word (primarily using styles) went down the drain. Like I said in another post: µsoft, don't be schmucks and give us the alternative to switch back to menus. Who likes it can keep the ribbon. Now they plan to add it to Windows Explorer :wtf: . Anyway in Explorer it won't be such a tragedy as it doesn't have so many commands as Word for example. They'll just steal a lot of real-estate. Sometimes, I wonder why, why are the innocent dead and the guilty alive? Where is justice? Where is punishment?
giuchici
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
I love the ribbon. It took a while to get used to it in Excel where I had memorized menu layouts, but now I can't go back. Using Excel 2003 is just painful. On any app I had not used menus in previously, the ribbon just feels natural and perfect. So few clicks to get where I want and do what I want. Plus, with ribbon customization in Office 2010, it meets my needs exactly. I'm a HUGE fan of the ribbon interface. Plus, it's touch-friendly, so it's forward thinking for the Windows-8-on-a-tablet strategy.
-
Being accustomed to menus for over a decade, I found ribbons too difficult to cope up with initially. But as I got used to it, I found that it is really a useful alternative for menus and toolbars. Almost all commands that are applicable to the current context are available right in front of you without the need to keep clicking and searching for items in a menu. You get the added advantage of less mouse clicks.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the ribbon were a little more flexible - drag and drop customizing of items in toolbars is essential, especially in software like AutoCAD, where there are about 10 times as many toolbars as any given person wants to see. In a couple cases I've seen, the ribbon seems to sequester custom commands (say add-ins, macros or vb) in a corner of one tab, so far out of context that they compel you to set up keyboard shortcuts. Apart from that, though, the ribbon seems to be like the dvorak keyboard layout. It's apparently much quicker, but only if you never learned qwerty first. Look at the top left of your keyboard and tell me which won. :)
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
This is the only thing that really annoys me about the way microsoft operates. There is one little feature from microsoft labs that can solve this delemma http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspxwhich I found when I first started using office 2007 and had trouble finding a few buttons. All I did was a quick search on google and found the plugin but for some reason people don't seem to be interesting in doing a bit of research to see if this problem has been solved. When searching for a command it will list the top 10 results where the user can click it straight away to fire the action or hover over the result to find it normally. Another plugin I like is the save as PDF/XPF which is also free but not intergrated with the office suite for some reason. Personally I love the ribbon and in terms of customising it's second to none. I've developed a few small plugins and being able to extend the microsoft default ribbon tabs or adding your own personal ribbon tab is excellent. One client wanted to insert their electronic signatures so I literally extended the insert tab to add an extra section which had one button called add signature. From a training point of view telling a user to click insert and then click add signature is logical and easy. If we still had those stupid tool bars then you have to make sure the user has the toolbar activated, then find where the toolbar has been moved to (incase it's being hidden behind another toolbar, etc) then click the button just to get one image showing (it would probably be easier to do keyboard shortcuts to open the insert picture command).
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
From my (and my wife's!) viewpoint, the problem is not so much the ribbon, though we both prefer the old cascading menus approach. A bigger problem is that each new version of Word (and, to a lesser extent, the other Office applications) seems to change the interface just enough to be confusing. Another, is that it seems to be the functionalities that we use most often that are most frequently moved between versions.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
You know, you can Minimize the Ribbon, in which case it takes up about as much space as a old-school menu bar.
-
Does anyone like the ribbon interface? My wife, decidedly non geek, curses Office 2010 every day she has to use it because of the ribbon. I can't stand it myself. It takes up too much room with the added benefit of making things harder to find. I'm glad I bought my first Mac.[^] Yeah, I said it.
-
Our company doesn't suffer from this malady. On the last set of rolled out new PCs we were happy to find - against hope - the new W7 operating system. Apparently our argument that we couldn't easily investigate software errors that our clients working on W7 report to us finally took hold. (not to mention we had to ask our clients just to find out whether or not our application actually runs on W7 :doh: ) We were somewhat surprised however to find that the new workstations still came with the old Office 2003 suite installed! :wtf: Looks like nobody considered it neccessary to upgrade... I've yet to see the ribbon in action, I only read about it and at home I'm not using MS Office at all...
Well, if you want to experience it on plain vanilla W7, just open up Paint or WordPad.
