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Show Office 2007 Who's the Boss
jcatcw writes "Microsoft knows how you like your Office Suite. You like Ribbons ... they're a given, right? Well, if not, Computerworld reviews some third-party packages that allow you to customize the software's interface. Classic Menu gives you an Office-2003-like set of menus. It'll help you navigate old menu structures to find favorite commands, but don't expect to use all the familiar keyboard shortcuts. ToolbarToggle lets you customize the menus. However, Classic Menu has two advantages over ToolbarToggle: It's available for PowerPoint today, and it includes Office 2007 commands on its menus, a modification you can't make to ToolbarToggle menus. RibbonCustomizer works within the Ribbon's own constraints to let you change the display of icons and commands on existing tabs or any new ones you create."
why do people fear change so much? The new Office design is much better
It's not that we fear change. It's that we're sick of relearning everything every couple years. Offer a new interface? Sure, just please don't take away the old one.
Have you read my journal today?
I'm pretty much cool with having the ribbons set as they are. There a a number of reasons:
Firstly, I seemed to spend ages pulling the whole lot apart and making it just the way I wanted it. Then I'd change it. Then I'd change it again. By the time I'd got it right, I'd made it so different from the standard menus that if I used another PC, I couldn't remember where the heck I'd put anything.
Secondly, this also goes for supporting users. How many times have you told people exactly where to find something in an OS, only to find they've moved it/deleted it/ lost it? Happens all the time with Office. People regularly seem to lose whole toolbars, or end up with a little grey stub.
Thirdly, it's contextual. In older versions, none of the command were contextual at all. The rest of the OS is - right click, drag, etc. but toolbars weren't. Those years of sorting out the new ribbon seem to have pretty much got the whole lot in just the right place. For instance, I absolutely hate PowerPoint, but in 2007 putting a new presentation together was a breeze. It looked pretty good too.
Just my twopenneth. I know a lot of people out there hate the idea of being told where their icons and menus are going, but to be honest, I just don't have a problem with it at all. It's all there, it all makes sense and it's progress as far as I'm concerned.
More and more people are not fearing change and are changing to things like Open Office and web-based word processing. I used to preach at people about the advantages of Linux and Open Source. Made very little headway, because people don't like change. Now they have a choice between changes forced on them by Microsoft, and an old interface (Open Office) that looks more like the old Office than the new Office does. Now I'm helping companies make the switch. Thank you Microsoft!
Funny, if some other company had vended something that looked exactly like Vista and the new Office, MS would have put out a study describing the very high costs of user retraining. You can only mislead your customers so much with this sort of nonsense before you achieve total loss of credibility, at that point even when you tell them the truth they are not inclined to believe you. I think Microsoft has finally achieved this goal, although why they would have wanted to I can't say, maybe just some inside joke among marketing people. Clearly the company is not run by techies.
No, it's not just "new features" but more importantly old features that they make work quite differently.
Go to Excel 2000 and put a column of numbers in columns A, B, and D. Hit CTRL-A to "select ALL" and do a sort.
Now do the same in Excel 2003.
You'll find that in Excel 2003, it tries to guess what you mean by "select ALL" and will only select and sort column A and B. If you sort your data, the data in column D is no longer associated with the data in A and B.
In this obvious example, you can see it didn't select all. But suppose you have an excel sheet that has many columns and you want to sort them like you always have... ctrl-A and sort. In excel 2003 you may end up breaking all of your data.
This exact thing happened to me and I lost almost a day of work because the file I was working on was ruined and I only figured it out after getting very strange results.
Why in the hell do they take something as long-standing and nearly universal as Ctrl-A and change what it does? Oh right, because if it's a standard, Microsoft will try to break it - even if it's their own standard.