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Word’s Ribbon seems to be missing an important feature
By Jacob Cohen | February 29, 2008
Microsoft’s Office software has been redesigned with a new “Ribbon” instead of the old toolbar. The idea is that the ribbon can give better design based on information architecture to put the give greatest prominence to whatever the most relevant tools are for whatever it is you are doing.
And rather than using obscure menu names like “File” and “View” and “Edit”, the ribbon is categorized based on general categories that more accurately reflect the things you can do from that view of the ribbon, such as “insert” and “page layout”.
This all seems like a pretty neat concept. The operations I use most often are all within easy reach. Or are they? How do I print the document?
Let’s see.. maybe it’s on the Home ribbon:
Or on the Insert ribbon:
Or perhaps the Page Layout ribbon:
Hmm.. maybe the References ribbon:
Mailings doesn’t seem likely, but we’ll see:
Ah, Review sounds likely, maybe it is there:
Last ribbon, it must be here:
But wait, it wasn’t on any of the ribbons. If you want to print, you have to click on the “Office logo menu” or whatever this thing is supposed to be.
Why is this functionality buried in some obscure menu that doesn’t even look like a menu? Why isn’t it on the ribbon? Surely printing a document is a task of primary importance to the average user of this application.
Then I thought, perhaps the ribbon only represents things you can do to edit the document, and the operations you do with the document, such as saving, opening, printing, and so forth, are found elsewhere. But why can’t this be a category on the ribbon? Why should I have to remember what’s in that unlabeled dropdown menu when the rest of the operations are presented visually?
Topics: General |
March 19th, 2008 at 7:41 am
The menu is highlighted (really visible) the first time you start Office 2007! I even think it’s open on the first start.
March 29th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
hehe good work & nice screens,
in our class we have to work with access 2007 every once in a while and i see on all pc screens people doing the same thing : clicking , searching failing , clicking , searching , failing
m$ you just fail :
http://img.phraktured.net/funny/fail.jpg
April 19th, 2008 at 8:50 am
I work in an internet cafe that has the latest version of MS Office. Since we switched to Firefox from IE, probably about 90% of the reasons I have to get up and actually do some work is to show someone how to Open, Save or Print the document they’re working on. Whether this means it’s a good or bad thing, I don’t know, but the change certainly does seem to confuse a lot of people.
May 2nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Personally, I like the new design. The reason the menu is ‘hidden’ behind the ‘pearl’, is to complement the design of Vista’s Glass skin.
However, even being the advocate of the new ribbon interface that I am, I still think it would have been a kind thing to do to include a legacy interface. But this type of thing is bound to happen when people change stuff. It would be just the same if they had gone from using the ribbon for years to the file-edit-etc menu now. Everyone would feel like “Where is my bar? What is this ‘File menu’? Why do I have to click file to print instead of my pearl.
Change confuses people, upsets others — even if it is a (mostly) good change.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:15 am
People still use menus? Just hit control-p. Should work for most every application.
Well, at least until they change it in Word 2009…
May 30th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I really like the new Office from an aesthetic standpoint, but it seems that everywhere I go that Button is the Single largest hurdle in learning 2007/2008. Once you’re past that though it seems fairly simple.
I also agree that it should support some kind of ‘legacy’ interface. They do it with the Windows OS; why not office?
June 6th, 2008 at 1:09 am
The ribbon seems to be, for me, the worst interface “improvement” that I have experienced in 25 years of my PC working use.
I used to be able to find the commands I needed by looking thru the pull-down menus for most software. The ribbon obscures commands, and does not weigh relative importance to a command by it’s size or colour. Well used commands are small and hard to find, and others that I have never used seem bold and colourful. Confusing!
It seem amazing that I have to search thru help to “find” a command location within the ribbon that I know must exist somewhere.
Who on earth thought that adding important stuff, such as the print command, to a little “perl” icon? How on earth does that aid useability?
I regret having upgrading to Office 2007
June 11th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Image the developers sitting around and pondering how to get rid of the menu. So they come up with twenty different interfaces that could substitute. And lo and behold this ribbon wins out….
July 17th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Microsoft’s new Ribbon device is ridiculous. It attempts to move everything around so that the most useful options are easier to get to. The problem is, Microsoft developers have no idea what options are most useful for *me* in *my* work. And in the process of shuffling stuff around, they’ve removed all the consistency and the clarity that used to mean I could find an option merely by context. “I want to print this file”, so I go to File->Print. It’s pretty simple.
Now, as you have documented so well, you have to run around trying to guess where the option is; not by what you intend to do, but by guessing how important the option is to Microsoft.
The old system worked just fine.