my eyes, my eyes!

[julesjones]

So I've just fired up Word 2007. It appears to be infested with the ribbon. And when I go to microsoft.com, I find

There is no way to delete or replace the Ribbon with the toolbars and menus from the earlier versions of Microsoft Office.

.

Yes, Dragon has natural speech commands that can bypass the menus, but my current machine isn't powerful enough to run that part of Dragon. Time to go hunting for the accessibility stuff on ms.com. :-(

(this may go some way to explaining why the day job is still on 2003.)

Comments

[kalypso]

The ribbon (which is unfortunately present on Rory) is pretty awful. Even when I can remember where they've hidden something, it takes me a couple of minutes to get to it - and this for the simplest task that I used to be able to do in seconds. I'm hanging on to 2003 for as long as I can.

[hawkeye7]

It's terrible. You have to go hunting for everything you want to use. Some things are in very counter-intuitive places. I spend half my time with it struggling with the user interface.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Word 2007 is an abomination. I don't know anyone that likes it and on the odd occasion I've had to use it at the college for a class, the language I mutter under my breath would make the proverbial sailor blush if he could hear me. I have used versions of Office since Word 6 and right up to Word 2003, there is a good continuity from version to version -- and then Word 2007 throws everything out of the window and everything you used to know no longer applies. Why???? Who on earth thought it would be a good idea? No business wants to waste days with staff becoming unproductive because they can no longer use the tools they are familiar with.

[spacefall.livejournal.com]

I hate the ribbon more than I can express in words. Both my paid and voluntary roles involve frequent exposure.

[vaughan-steph.livejournal.com]

It was forced on us at the day job a couple of years ago and the learning curve was fierce. I remember how unintuitive it felt and how much longer it took to get anything done. I can use it pretty fluidly now, but it's been two years. Learning it was teh suck.