Windows 8: Pushing hated UI elements
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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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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. :)
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 the Ribbon. Really, I always used to make my toolbars extend horizontally off the screen anyway, and had multiple rows of them, so this is kind of a tabbed toolbar thing which actually works better for me. Yeah, I use keyboard shortcuts for some things, but not everything. In Office 2010, you get the return of a functional File menu except IMO it's better than the old menu was. Mini print preview right there. Then you can just collapse it by double-clicking the active tab, or using the chevron (Office 2010, not 2007), or I hear there's a shortcut like Alt+F1. I like collapsible panes of tools, like drawers in a toolbox. Sometimes I just wish I could alter the layout a little bit more than they allow. The comments on the related Slashdot article[^] are full-on, unadulterated flame wars. But if you want to see the different viewpoints and can weed out the people who just want to argue, go for it. Reminds me of why I like CodeProject!
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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 admit it...I like the ribbon. I was skeptical at first but then quickly learned it and now find it faster. Additonally it seems from this artical http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/29/improvements-in-windows-explorer.aspx[^] everything people use most is on the same tab and they worked it to have more space then Windows 7. I for one welcome the new explorer.
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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.
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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 is quite simply very cool. Finding things is in fact easier - once you get acquainted with the layout. As far as screen space is concerned, if it takes up to much room for your liking all you have to you is minimize it. I think the problem is that some people just don't like change, and even less so if Microsoft makes the change! Of course some applications are not suited to the ribbon UI, and I would agree that Explorer is one of them, but then as with all things we will get used to it. I for one never use any thing but the context menus in explorer, so if it annoys me enough it will simply be in permanent minimized mode. If the Office ribbon really gets to you then there are other alternatives. If you have to use it at work then it's your job to learn how it works and where things are now located. So my vote is: The ribbon is cool - I like it! :)
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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 Braunahmed zahmed wrote:
Is there another kind of paint?
I'm trying to think of a smart-a$$ed answer. Check back after the paint dries.
XAlan Burkhart
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vonb wrote:
I'm old fashioned and prefer the Menu / Tab Pages interface (Visual Studio like is not bad)
Me, too. I don't care for all this artsy-smartsy stuff they're doing nowadays. Why can't they just leave it alone?
XAlan Burkhart
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That's because you are an accountant. Self-drying paint is exciting for you. ;P
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