Yakoob on 30/12/2010 at 07:31

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Yea, lost soul, if you were a REAL pro you wouldn't use notepad to create .cfg files, you'd write directly to your HDD with a magnetic needle and a steady hand. What a wannabe :rolleyes:

d0om on 31/12/2010 at 01:06

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Ah, that's an improvement at least. Now we just need to persuade Microsoft to change!

Renzatic on 1/1/2011 at 20:32

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Why do people hate the ribbon so much? It took me a bit to get into it when I first fired it up in Office 2010, but I actually find it a little easier to use now that I'm used to it.

A little easier being the key phrase here. It's not so much better, or so much easier to use, that it justifies the learning curve all these office people apparently had to climb when it first came out.

Nameless Voice on 1/1/2011 at 21:36

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Complete change of interface. It takes up more screen space unless minimised, changes around lots of things for no real reason, and is not really very friendly for keyboard shortcuts (though many of the old ones still work, but it isn't obvious, so you'll need to remember them from older versions of office).

It's basically the extreme example of "don't change your keyboard shortcuts / interface between versions for no real reason" problem.

Another random thing I noticed is the Sort By window in Excel. In Office 2007, they improved it by allowing you to have more than three sorts, but seriously broke the interface by not giving the appropriate box focus anymore. In the old versions of Excel, you could just open the sort window (Alt+D, S), type the first few letters of the column you want to sort by (because the first sort box automatically gets focus), and hit return - really fast and efficient. In Excel 2007, you need to grab the mouse and click on the input box, or possibly tab to it (not sure if that works or not). It's just an overall trend of making stuff look fancier, maybe giving more options, but making it harder to perform your favourite actions quickly via keyboard shortcuts.

I'll add that I don't actually use Excel 2007, and have fortunately and intentionally had fairly little exposure to it. It's not as if later versions of Office actually do anything useful that Office XP from 2002 didn't do. I think part of the reason for the Ribbon interface was to come up with something to change in the new version, since they couldn't think of any actually useful features to add.


Obviously enough, I'm a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts for everything. I also like the way menus work, and am mildly annoyed by the recent trend for programs to hide them away unless you press alt, as even for people who are more mouse-centric, I think they are a compact and efficient way of accessing a program's functions.

Another thing which annoys me is the recent trend to have one giant menu-thing, with a large button in the upper-left corner instead of having a normal taskbar icon.
Opera started doing this (fortunately it can be turned off), and it makes most of the menus much more awkward to use because you can no longer access them with their alt shortcut keys (though you can instead hit alt, then press the hotkey after the single menu has appeared). Considering that my primary way of accessing my bookmarks is via the Bookmarks menu (alt+b), this would make Opera really awkward to use from my point of view.
Recent versions of 3D Studio Max also followed suite, though in that case the problem is more the fact that the giant "file" menu with fancy graphics takes forever to open, as opposed to any other menu which all open instantly.
I have nothing against making interface features fancy or shiny (hey, I'm using Windows 7 and Aero here), but it can't be at the cost of a huge decrease in usability, efficiency, or speed.