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Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org
recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
The Ribbon is no good even in Windows. And isn't it patented? There's no reason Open Office needs to ape Microsoft's mistakes.
It only sucks in office until OO.o can implement it. Flame on.
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice? When one of the big selling points of OpenOffice, among people I've talked to, is that it looks and feels more like the Office they're used to?
Please tell me they're only thinking of putting it in as an opt-in option, not as the default or only option...
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Aww, *hell* no!
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office. It did require us to purchase all new manuals and devote a considerable amount of time to retraining our users. Perhaps that was the "goal"?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
One of the main reasons I use OO now is the ribbon on Orifice 2007.
I like OO file compatibility with MS Orifice, but please don't copy their ribbon user interface.
What about patents?
Do you think they've read the evil part of the ribbon T&Cs where it says they won't come and get you patent-style unless you *make something which competes directly with office*??
Surely MS have not given permission for this?
(Our company was about to use the ribbon for all our crap until we read that bit - some of our stuff could arguable compete with Publisher or whatever the hell they call it nowadays)
A
How did this inane idea that Microsoft 'invented' some new type of UI interface with this silly 'Ribbon' stuff.
It's nothing more than classic Mac OS era floating toolbars that are overlapped in a menu.
Its a nice idea, I guess, and I understand that if you keep it closer to that one big name competitor, then you can make it easier for people to transition, but I prefer to dedicate my limited real estate on my screen to what I'm actually trying to work on, not the tools that I can use to get the job done. I can't imagine this interface on my eeePc. I think the only thing I'll be trying out on this interface is the option to set it back to the old one.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
If OpenOffice allows me to revert to the classic UI, or even a hybrid mix of the classic UI and the "ribbon-ized", then I think it's a good idea. However, if not, at least Gnumeric and AbiWord still have a sane UI.
I use Linux, Windows, and OS X. I have always found OS X to be the easiest of the three to use GUI-wise. Why is there such a following to a windows like interface? Go for better! 3-D, or maybe a new scheme all together. MS interfaces are just the most horrible things - stuff hidden in illogical places, five or six mouse clicks to do things... I can go on but perhaps others following will. There are other ways.
If the new UI is a user-selectable option, I can't see anyone having an issue with it. It may even help the adoption rate of Open Office, since it would be an easier transition for people used to MS Office.
If the new UI is the only UI, I predict a lot of yelling and screaming. Changing an existing UI is never a pleasant thing.
Don't do it.
Keeping the current styles works just fine. The Office 2007 thingy is awful and a real PITA to use
Anyone else read that line as
The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype it's a mess
I think the program was called GeoWorks. It used a layout of icons very similar to what I saw in the screenshots. We've come full circle. The old is new again.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
"... and feel that the Ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
Ya think? The Ribbon UI is out of place in Windows. With Outlook 2007 running on one of my screens, you couldn't come up to me and tell whether or not that window was in focus. It doesn't match anything else in windows, it doesn't look cool, and its a huge, huge step backward in usability. I finally gave up Office 97 for Open Office about a year ago, and now I just do my best to not have to use either because they're both complete garbage.
Whale
I like the Office 2007 ribbon now that I'm used to it, and the simplicity from tabbed toolbars over deep hierarchies in tall menus.
BUT... That "ribbon" in the article looks horrible! They've lost like ALL functionality but the buttons in them, and the design looks like a big step backwards. Note how Office 2007 ribbons add/remove rarely used commands as you resize the window, and crams in much more features in the space than OO.o there. I hope the end result will look nothing like in the preview. There are ribbons, and there are ribbons. :-(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Is the Ribbon UI that groundbreaking? To me, this argues that we are just shuffling & renaming things and calling it a new version. Software word processors have been around for at least 30 years, are you really trying to tell me that this "innovation" will change everything and make me super productive? Honestly, development on this could have stopped right around when mail merge was added and I think we'd all have been fine with it.
I like the ribbon, it's helped me convince people to use Open Office.
Wait, what? Ah, shit...
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
OO.o
I could consider using it on my 1680x1050 notebook but not on my 1024x600 netbook: it's either the ribbon or the document, and I value the document more than the ribbon. I really hope there is the option to keep using the old menu system and that they think about small displays.
The problem with Office, aside from requiring a multitude of options/features to make it Everything for Everybody, is the menu navigation hell that was introduced back in '97.
The ribbon takes the concept presented with the (brain dead) AI that brought you the shortened menu with commonly used options (and made you think all your menu items were MIA), and laid them out with slightly larger, slightly more descriptive icons and sensible grouping.
May I be the first to say (and be damned for doing so) that a 'ribbon' interface for the GIMP would do wonders.
I personally like the ribbon-like interface. All it comes out to be is tabs for toolbars. If Micro$oft were the first to come out with tabs for IE, I think everyone would be giving Mozilla a stink about including tabs on Firefox. I usually don't support Micro$oft, but hey, they can produce some quality products every now and then. So quit your whining!
Open Office is to Microsoft Office as Microsoft Windows is to ...
When I started rolling out Office 2007 at a company I used to work for I was asked, often, if the ribbon could be disabled. I went to the office support site (which is something Microsoft actually has right) and started watching training videos to see which ones I should suggest to users. The first thing the video said when addressing the ribbon was you were stuck with it, can't turn it off.
I personally prefer OpenOffice.org. I have a copy of Office 2008 for my Mac that I was given, I don't even have it installed now that I don't have that job anymore, I prefer using Neo Office on my Mac, and OpenOffice.org on my Linux machines.
That being said - the interface is fine, as long as it's optional, I'm all about customization and user preference.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Someone mod this guy up! He's clarified all my OO.o "ribbon" thoughts in one simple post.
Let's go KOffice!
Which is better anyway.
Better behaved, better looking, and less '1995' than OO.o 3. Still uses much of the same code, still shows up as 'swriter', but smoothed out a little, so's it won't kill yo sef, but it sho will make yo ugly.
I know there will be a lot of "haters" regarding this. However, if the hopes of smoothly transitioning users from MS Office to OpenOffice it will need to give an option to have a similar look and feel.
To transition non-tech employees to Linux, I used an XP theme on Ubuntu. http://ubuntu.online02.com/node/14
The transition was flawless.
Besides, I wonder how much money was spent by Microsoft on usability studies to come up with this interface. How much money has been spent on usability studies for OpenOffice? Might turn out to be a better way to work in the long run. Just because it is MS does not necessarily mean it is sh*t. That just seems to be the default.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
... a number of other OSS word processors support Open Document, so it'll be easy to just move over to one of those. KWord would be a good choice, since it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows, and the KDE developers would never do anything so radical and alienate their core users.
Oh... wait...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
The ribbon is a good idea because it accomplishes the following:
(a) It makes features more visible. Features are easier to discover when they are visible and have multiple representations (such as text and icons).
(b) It cleans up the user interface. The ribbon cleans up the user interface by combining the menu and button bar representations into a unified representation.
(c) It encourages a workflow. Document are created in stages, since things early editing and early formatting can hinder productivity. By grouping tools by function then maintaining the visibility of those tools in a modal manner, a workflow is encouraged.
That being said, this interface is patented and could probably use some work. OpenOffice.org also has deeper user interface and feature implementation problems than it's top-level menus and toolbars. So maybe they should work on fixing existing problems and then exploring novel interfaces.
Really? That's some serious ADD you've got going there...
I use AbiWord because gedit/wordpad just don't quite cut it sometimes.
What? Some people need to type things to be printed out, occasionally but don't give a rat's ass about fucking presentations, spreadsheets or all that other bullshit nonsense business people desperately require for their organization.
The current model needs to be brutally eliminated and rebuilt from the ground up. Outlook is a demon with no master and email are its hatred, incarnate.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Blasphemy you say!! Well I'm an Office 2007 user so I know what the damn ribbon looks like. From what I can see is that they took the idea behind the ribbon of grouping commonly used features into clusters and unlike MS they went with large enough Icons with decent contrast to be easily visable on a high rez monitor (1280x1024+) like what I use.
So before everyone goes apeshit about this proposed change, take the damn time and actually compare the stinking ribbon with this and you'll see that the change doesn't resemble the ribbon. What I'd like to see is this being offered as an optional customization for those who appreciate its usefulness.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
One of the most frequent criticisms I often hear regarding FOSS is that the applications don't "look and feel" like the OS or other software in the ecosystem. They don't always use the system-default Save/Open dialogs, menu style and common controls and for a lot of users, like it or not, gives the perception of out-of-placeness or inferior. Firefox is a prime example where going out of the way to fit into the UI based on the OS has helped user-comfort and therefore adoption.
If Windows 7 is going to implement the ribbon system-wide, it makes sense that OO.org would minimally make this an option, if not the default on the Windows release, even though I am amongst those who are not fans of the ribbon.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The ribbon interface on Microsoft Office is merely obnoxious and overly complex, but having it in Open Office would bring obnoxious to a whole new level of horrid. Scrap the ribbon idea, put down the Crack pipe, and we'll all pretend like it never happened.
What's next, copying the security holes?
Not only are you off topic (you mean this topic: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/08/05/1926257/Comcast-the-Latest-ISP-To-Try-DNS-Hijacking ), but you're wrong on the name too. Its OpenDNS, not VPN.
And yeah, they do hijack DNS too, I hate the fact that the name implies they're "open" when they're not.
When I finally upgraded my work computer to have Office 2007, I was having a hard time at first, but soon I came to like the new PowerPoint a lot. At this time I was doing a lot of work in PowerPoint, so it's where I got the most exposure. The main reasons I liked it were the improvements in functionality of the tools themselves and some of the new tools. Smart Art is convenient, positioning objects is much smoother, auto-formatting of slides is smarter. I can whip up a very nice looking presentation without a lot of thought about formatting. Things are pleasing to the eye without having to study color theory first, because MS did the color theory part for you with their pre-defined color schemes that have consistent values, densities and complimentary colors. Word and Excel improved on their "intelligence" too. For instance, bullets and numbering just happens instead of it being an explicit instruction. However, when it comes to ribbon, I am torn.
In PowerPoint, the ribbon works. The reason for this is that the tools you use are very task specific. If I am inserting a picture, there is a certain set of tools that I always will use with a picture, but will rarely ever use with any other task. That way, the tools I need are right in front of me, and the tools I don't are hidden. However, in Word and Excel, the tools are not as task specific and the definition of what task I'm working on is very unclear. Furthermore, the tools used are not always perfectly described by an icon, which means it becomes very hard to find what you're looking for. This is especially the case in Excel, where ther are just so many tools available to you that turning everything into an icon on a ribbon just makes it impossible to find what you're looking for.
But the more I think about it, every time I switch back to older versions of Office, I don't miss the ribbon, I miss the other improvements. I can find may way around just as fast, if not faster in the old style than with the ribbon, and I've gotten pretty used to the ribbon now. While the new UI is completely bad, it really does not improve things overall the way it claims. Like I said, PowerPoint seems to be a good fit, but even still, I get by just fine with the old style.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
I hate that fucking ribbon, therefore it must die.
TIA.
Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old olde document
It's been a long time with me
Do you still want me?
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old olde document
I'll stay on the net
Forget about OO
Put the blame on MS
If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the olde document
Regards
Slashdotgirl
The more I know, the less I know
No, its out of place everywhere. Personally i think it was a poorly conceived design, as do many others.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For anyone that has an interest in understanding why the evil empire introduced the ribbon look at this video (and the next 8 segments..) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4 . As it turns out Microsoft did think about the problem of stuffing more and more options into menus and came to the conclusion that they could not continue any longer this way.
Personally I think that the OO menu's are a little bit better organized so there is no need to go to a ribbon style yet. Except to imitate MS and that is not a good enough reason.
While I applaud the use of the Ribbon, which I consider to be a major step forward in terms of usability in the user interface, I think OpenOffice is targetting the wrong demographic here.
Who loves the Ribbon? People that aren't expert Office users, but just need to get most of the simple things like fonts and tables, done. My wife needed extensive coaching on Office 2000. To the point I had to explain the same things over and over again, each time. I gave her Office 2007 and I started to explain things, and she said "but honey, it's right there! no need to tell me" - I haven't needed to explain any of the stuff **she uses** again.
Who hates the Ribbon? Expert users that use every advanced function the package offers. Some functions are just no longer there, others moved to very different spots.
Who's using OpenOffice? Not my wife. More the expert computer users who go and see what it has to offer. And get turned off by the new GUI.
That's why I think the ribbon is great in Office 2007 (and I love it, basically), but I think OpenOffice should make it an optional feature.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Way to innovate open source community.
Me? I like the MS ribbon, took about a week filled of cursing, but after that I'm able to navigate much faster. What's on the OO screen shots looks like crap, they should stick with what they currently have, unless that is just a very rough mockup.
Just echoing what others have said.
I'm the head of the IT Department for a small company. About a dozen of our users are on Office 2007, with the other 50 or-so on Office 2003. The majority on 2007 HATE it. Specifically- they HATE the user interface. It's just another example of Microsoft's complete disregard for usability for the sake of being "innovative". They came up with an innovative way to make it take twice as long to do anything in Office by mixing-up the menu and toolbar system everyone who has used a computer for the last fifteen years is used to. Office 2007 is also SLOW compared to 2003, on the exact same hardware, probably in-part because of the new user interface.
Of course, the saying goes: "Once you get used to it, it is hard to use anything else." But- that's part of the problem. It makes it more difficult to use anything that doesn't use the same interface. Now- everyone else needs to adopt a user interface that people didn't like in the first place, which is apparently what the Ooo folks are considering, just to try to continue to stay on-par with M$.
I can guarantee rendering and processing this new interface takes more CPU and GPU cycles, thereby making their aps run slower. Frankly- Ooo doesn't need any help in that department. I don't know who wins here- hardware manufacturers or Microsoft. The losers will be most computer users though- who will be forced to use yet another "innovative" user interface (cough, Vista, cough), while finding it necessary to upgrade their hardware just to maintain the same level of functionality they had before.
Yeah my bad about the name..
And I have no idea why my comment showed up in this story. I replied to the other story.
Oh well..
I just got a new laptop at work, and it has Office 2007, replacing the 2003 that was on the old one. The only thing that makes it at all tolerable is that my new screen is 900 pixels high instead of 768, so most of the space that the ribbon's burning up is new pixels, but it takes me longer to get to many of the features I use often, and I haven't yet dug around to find all the features I'd like to have, plus it'll take me a while to memorize where it's hiding everything that I considered to be reasonably obvious in 2003.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
First Microsoft added too many tools to manage with menus. OO then copied many of the tools. Microsoft came up with the ribbon to tame the menu. Why wouldn't OO want to do the same? Yes it took a while to understand what the ribbon was up to on Office, but I've come to like it. That and Impress forcing PowerPoint to get much better.
Some people hate the ribbon, and the fact OOo doesn't have it is seen as a plus...
Other people like the ribbon, and consider OOo to look dated because it lacks it.
When MS introduced the ribbon, they made it the mandatory interface for the versions it was introduced in, and this is what's bothering users...
So, why not make it optional in OOo?
Give the option of 2 (or more) interfaces, or even make the interface themeable? Users like making themes, just look at all the themes available for firefox.
Provide 2 themes by default - classic and ribbon, and prompt the users to choose either (or download more themes) with some good screenshots the first time they run the application.
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Why is that, as screens are getting bigger and we can see more of our documents at a glance, that they have to use up more on-screen real estate, thus giving us less view of the documents in question than we had on a 14" monitor.
I suppose these ribbons are options, so you can turn them off. But certainly with Office 2007, it's the default.
I, for one, like to maximise the amount of usable screen space - I even have my Windows* Start bar on Auto-hide to give me those extra few pixels!
T.
* Yep, I use Windows most of the time. Vista, at that! Sorry, folks. But I do duel boot to Ubuntu!
I'm grateful to OO for its ability to render Office documents, but I've always been repulsed by the UI. It would be nice if that were a separate component that I could just switch out. It would probably be easier on them too.
Office 2007 was the first implementation of the "Fluent" UI, but it is not necessarily the best. This is the doc that convinced me to use the ribbon for a UI redesign:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5ae8ea78-6ba9-4de4-aabd-2616d010caa7&displaylang=en
The goals of the Fluent UI design matched our needs almost perfectly. I think it works better for us than it does for Office. Many things seem rushed or forced in the Office 2007 implementation of the ribbon. Maybe Office 2010 will better deliver.
(It is interesting to note that this doc talks about the ribbon being custiomizable by the user, which is decidedly NOT the case in Office.)
FIXME: Add a sig here
One of the main reasons I use OO now is the ribbon on Orifice 2007.
This is where I get off.
There's no other reason for OO to "ape" MS Office, than some good old business reason: facilitating adoption. Having *exactly* the same UI, features as MS Office is the key to be able big organization to migrate from MS to OO.
I saw recently a big French administration migrate from MS to OO: you don't want to re-teach 10'000s of secretaries how to use the office suite. You want it to be as smooth as possible. Having the exact same UI and features makes is a little easier to migrate...
Tho i don't have any intention of promoting ms, the OO.o Impress ribbon for some reason made me think way back to circa 1992 or 1994 and some of the jumbo-ish Word Perfect icons. If they were resizable, and if one could nest a few together under larger, more used buttons/icons, they'd almost look ribbon-ish, less the boundary/shadow effects.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
Posted by Jamie on August 05, 2009 at 05:20 PM CEST #
This will be great for my netbook. Maybe the UI will use up ALL screen space so that I don't have to see, you know, the actual document I'm working on. That way I can spend all my time clicking various buttons and won't have to bother with how the document turns out.
is because of my hate of microsoft's changes to UI, I tried using it for weeks, if they offer the option to use either great, but open office is like office 2003 and I can use it. If they are going to waste time on this make sure you can use both styles, one interface is never perfect or fits all needs.
Just because people are "used to" a crappy system doesn't automagically make it not-crappy. It is still a crappy system - just a system that many people are used to.
Introduce a more practical and efficient, but significantly different, system and people become rabid that it's a bad, stupid, , system.
In this tech world it seems that what makes things crappy is not if they are actually crappy - but if they are different than what people are used to.
People turn their snouts up at significantly better things all the time in favor of what feels comfortable - even if what feels comfortable is inefficient, impractical, etc.
It seems from browsing these posts, just about all people bashing "the ribbon" UI are people that have not given it a balanced chance. Most, if not all, seem to be people that couldn't figure it out immediately and declared it to be a shitty system. UberTechSysAdmin-of-Doom sits down and needs to double-space the tech-note paper he/she is writing. Said person tries for all of about 5 minutes, can't figure it out (or does figure it out and becomes pissed that it took them that long to figure it out) and declares the UI utter garbage.
To dismiss a system based on "now I (and/or my people) have to learn something new" is a falacy. I understand cost and time are associated with any learning curve. So to have to learn anything new is "bad" in that sense - but it is not just relegated to a certain UI or OS or hardware platform - this principle applies everywhere.
Why not use reason and logic to mull over the viability and usability of a UI rather than emotion based on what you're used to?
To fairly acknowledge those who have done so, after giving the UI and honest trial, many people have changed their minds about it.
Many people think to change their mind is to somehow admit they were "wrong" - despite knowing that opinions are subjective and cannot be right or wrong.
It's okay to change your opinion's people - really it is. I promise.
ANY interface in an office suite that Sun/OO.o should be copying, they need to pull their heads out of the sand and clone Lotus WordPro. It handles multiple documents in a superior way. If you have multiple, various-orientation/various sheet sized docs to handle, as divisions and sections, then WordPro would be IT. I have begged until i got sick of even trying to suggest any more yet they just don't seem to care. It's as if NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome is preferable to actually FIXING the GUI. OO.o needs
-- non-modal interfaces,
-- snappier/tighter icons,
-- better (more Lotus Approach-like) database
-- better multi-doc handling (get RID of the "rule line" separating docs and use LWP's tabbed interface, larger/thicker border to differentiate the docs
They would rather beat their heads against the wall than ape Word Pro or work constructively with Lotus/IBM. Sigh
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The ribbon menu is the biggest reason i switched to OpenOffice in the first place, to get away from it.
It is also the most common complain against MS Office I have heard, by OO and MS O users.
The ribbon menu itself in my opinion caused MS Office to become half as usable as the previous version.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
First of all, to all the ranters out there: Menus are really *stupid*, because they usually contain items that open *dialogs*. Modal ones nonetheless! So stop wanting them just because you are used to them. You are wrong, and they are far from what is called a good idea!
Second, to the OOo developers: ARE YOU FREAKING STUPID? (Sorry, I had to let this out.)
Button bars are about the only thing that is worse than menus. Because they are a MOUSE-controlled UI element. They basically work strongly against the usage of the keyboard.
Also I got beaten much, for calling open source developers even worse imitators than Microsoft, because MS at least imitates the good ideas. And you promptly prove me right?? COME. ON! :(
I would be more happy to be proven wrong.
Again, this thing is not thought to the end. As usually. Because then someone would have thrown the mouse out completely, except for those things where graphical positioning is really needed.
Like tables in old-style web design, mouse usage for things that it is not meant for, leads to nothing but problems, inefficiency, and limitations.
If only someone would create a keyboard-only version of Lotus WordPro's InfoBox (a box of properties for the current node or selection in the document, with classes like in CSS).
The state in document editors is so desperate, that I nowadays use XHTML + CSS for my text and desktop publishing needs.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I don't care if you call it a toolbar or a ribbon or a wakalix, so long as you leave the goddam menu alone. The menu bar isn't perfect, god knows, I'd rather have it show up on a right click on the title bar or something instead of taking up space all the bloody time, but replacing it with something that takes up more space and is less discoverable and explorable is just effing goofy.
So long as the toolbar/ribbon/mugwump is optional, go ahead and ape Orifice's new thingobar instead of their old thingobar. Just don't pretend it's a replacement for the main window menus.
What does that have to do with Open Office? Posting on the wrong tab?
WTF is up with this?
__________________
|_____Clipboard_____|
|______Paste_______|
|__Cut___|___Copy__|
Do we need to burn that much screen for functions that pretty much everybody half competent uses the keyboard?
The UI need to be reorganized and simplified yes, so that advanced operations can be found and used easily, Look at that ribbon, so much space consumed for basic operations and no sign of a way to insert images or tables!
But... the future refused to change.
Is it April 1st already?
-- $G
For God's Sake, NO. Maybe it's time to fork.
At least MS Office's ribbon is pretty. OOo's ripoff is downright repulsive.
Microsoft changed Office to bring their still-locked-in users to a new non-OpenOffice interface. OpenOffice implement it. Microsoft, your move.
On a more serious note, Microsoft claims to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on changes to Office 2007 so it'll probably be better for users in the long run to have the ribbon in OpenOffice. I know it will become increasingly important if users are to be switched from $what_they_know.
In comparison, their traditional interface has more buttons taking up less screen real estate.
They're not taking up enough screen real estate! Please make them even huger and Herman Munsterish than they already are.
And why only that much blank unused space surrounding them? Why not have more!? Eventuakky the actual text entry window will be like a command line interface!
people .... please don't get sucked into M$Soft;s stupidly. you don't need it.. the current interface is functional, just work on bugs and speed issues ..
we use OO.o because we don't want to use M$Soft...
...in large, friendly letters...
The best interface for me is one that I custom-design for myself. It follows, for me anyway, that the best software is the software that gives me the most flexibility in designing my own custom interface.
I would like to see an interface that gives users the power to create a ribbon interface or to create, for example, an interface that provides context-driven menu items based on a database of my own prior use of the software, or to create one that does BOTH.
That kind of word-processing software would be dynamite!
Microsoft (wisely) decided that Mac users wouldn't tolerate the Ribbon. On the other hand, it wanted to keep the features of the Ribbon (Modeless editing, iconic/visual representation of functions, streamlining the maze of dialogs and submenus.) They came up with, among other things, a vastly expanded Formatting Palette.
The Formatting Palette is actually one tab of a palette called the Toolbox. It also uses accordion grouping for related functions, with however many sections of the accordion open as you want (or have room for.) The changes you make are applied in realtime to the document (no need to close the palette or click an Apply button.)
http://catchthis.ca/online-marketing-blog/post-images/electronic-letterhead.jpg
In some ways, it's part of the general trend in OS X applications to have an Inspector palette; OmniGraffle and Keynote/Pages are good examples.
Compared to the Ribbon
1. It's movable, resizable, and closable
2. The accordion lets you see more than one function group at a time
3. No matter how many documents you have open, there's only one of them taking up space on screen at a time
4. It makes better use of the widescreen monitors (very common on Macs) using horizontal space instead of vertical space.
5. It doesn't supplant the traditional menus and toolbars, so experienced users aren't punished.
6. It doesn't break established conventions or look out of place.
Once again the open sores community shows that it is only able to imitate, not innovate.
That is, unless OpenOffice improves upon the Ribbon UI, and it's shortcomings, of which there are many.
I hate those ribbon menus!!! IT installed Office 2007 on my PC at work and it's annoying as hell. Ribbon menus are designed for idiots, not intelligent computer users.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Have OO have an option to output LaTeX.
Basically it seems like they're going for a lowest-common-denominator approach that's not going to make anyone happy. UIs that are tailored to take advantage of a platform's strengths are much better, and exceptions (like crazy people who want to manage their servers from a tablet on a regular basis) can be dealt with as such instead of making everyone else pay the price.
I think you are correct in the statement about standardizing across platforms, but there is something you are overlooking. By standardizing things, it is setting up developers to be able to write something once, and deploy it to a whole slew of platforms just by changing a few compiler flags (check out the Windows Presentation Foundation stuff.). Then, it becomes easier to get apps for whatever platform you want to use, and everybody wins. Devs sell more software and customers have more choices.
Having an app with a slightly sub optimized UI is better than no app at all, right?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The MSO f'up with the ribbon is precisely why some moved over to OOo!
Mac version doesn't have Ribbon® (it has some half-hearted "me too" ribbon-like toolbar, but it's not used for anything serious).
It does have quite nice Toolbox palette, which IMHO makes much more sense than both Ribbon and classic toolbars. It has context-sensitivity of ribbon (that works well) and look'n'feel of toolbars from this planet.
And still got it wrong, the Story of Redmond.
Personally, I would rather have FrameMaker.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I like the ribbon in office but I think it's only really usefull in high resolution monitors, where all the buttons are visible and they dont take much area.
How about making it work with gnome-globalmenu like a REAL native gnome application before you go making its platform integration even worse (if possible)? Apple comes up with good ideas. Microsoft comes up with solutions to problems generated by their own ridiculous oversight. If you're going to copy one, copy Apple. Give us globalmenu compatibility.
I too was very critical of the Office ribbon when it was first introduced. People don't like drastic changes to the way they work. But I do think that after you work with it on a daily basis, it really starts to help after time and makes tedious jobs more efficient. Nobody likes sifting through menus and over crowded toolbars. As much as I hated it at first, I learned to like it and the reason for its existence is to increase productivity and actually make it *easier* for people that are new to the Office Suite to find things. It makes logical sense when you look at the categories to choose from. Most people despised it because it is unfamiliar. Maybe it was bad timing for them to do that considering it was near the same time as Vista's release. Regardless, to each his own. I just hope OpenOffice.org isn't doing this to be a copy cat, but rather to make it easier for the average Joe to be productive and navigate through the program.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Seriously, what about people (like me!) who work on laptops - who wants to give up that much screen real estate?
Yuck.
I wrote several books using OpenOffice.org, and I still very much appreciate having it (for free!), but I really prefer the use of Latex - you get to spend almost all of your time thinking about what you want to write, then doing the writing - and not waste time formatting with Word, OpenOffice.org, Pages, etc.
Anyway, the ribbon looks sort-of OK (perhaps) if you work on a huge display, but for hyper-modern nomadic knowledge workers (*) who use laptops, it seems like a really lame idea.
(*) In many years of posting to Slashdot, I don't think I have ever had a comment modded funny - this may be my big chance :-)
That is the freakin' ugliest thing I have ever seen! That looks like a Windows 95 interface at best. Get with this decade linux weenies!
OpenOffice is thinking in the same closed way MS does. Microsoft is rigid and dictatorial.
OpenOffice can be like Firefox with the GUI interface, not a simple theme skin, but a bit more advanced while being less coupled than a Firefox add-on.
I should be able to get a Word 5.1 interface (the only one of theirs I could tolerate) on OpenOffice and KEEP that plug-in for the next few decades without having to putz around to keep it as I upgrade OpenOffice. Most users HATE having stuff move around for many reasons and OpenOffice should let you have it your way and NOT mess around with you.
How does the average office user know to pick a different plug-in?
First, you don't have a million preference settings which take weeks of researching comparisons to make it act like something else-- there should be a list of grouped preferences with themes with widgets to choose from. Second, the install process asks the user to "vote" for what they want by showing many large screen shots coupled with a long list of interfaces properly named. Third, the help system's screen shots should be intelligent so they represent the interface and not just whatever somebody took and image of (clearly, gui related help items would have to be tied to a "theme".)
Office software is office software-- you should be able to make it look /act like any other office software you want (within reason) because its JOB is a generic one.
I know I'm proposing something big and complex; but hey, this is openoffice and firefox is doing both customization approaches already.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Sun shouldnt be doing a aping copycat of MsOffice Ribbon-UI, thera are too many issues to improve rather that making OOo look nicer
Any toolbar that needs a SEARCH to find SEARCH is broken.
That flippin' Find and Replace moves all over the place, from application to application.
Why was this marked Insightful?
Let's see... I fire up Word, I go to the Home tab ... there's Find/Replace/Select, on the far right. Open up Excel, open the Home tab of the Ribbon ... there it is again, Find&Select, on the far right. Let's try PowerPoint... open up the Home tab, lo and behold, it's on the far right, looking exactly like it did in Word. Even Access puts the Find/Select/etc. box on the far right of the Home tab of the Ribbon.
So which applications were you talking about that do it differently? The ones that don't use the Ribbon? Well I have great news for you: All of the Office apps will have the Ribbon in Office 2010, so everything will be just as consistent as it is in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access now. You might want to wait to upgrade until then.
P.S. Psssst... but between you and me, I use Ctrl-F.
Breakfast served all day!
Let me be the N-th to welcome the Ribbon interface in OOo. It's something I've never used (and never will if only Office has it) and I'm looking forward to try it.
Now, if someone would be so kind and code vi bindings into OOo (or direct me to some existing extension, you see, I've googled for it, but failed)...
Well I suppose any FOSS editor prizing screen real-estate and supporting ODF would do, perhaps Abiword?
I think that's a great idea. Normally I *hate* skinning, but deeply skinning OO shouldn't even be necessary, but retaining the old UIs through version after version of the software and even creating some alternatives like Word-5 like UI would be *awesome*.
Personally, I'd like a very keyboard-centric UI. I would *adore* a Wordperfect-like tags editor. In fact, I would be eternally grateful if there were a resizable character mode structured text UI with tags editor like the old Wordperfect 5.1 days but with OO's formats. A mouse-driven UI is a *flaw* in a wordprocessor.
it looks like the current Blender interface. Welcome to 1995!
Do it if you want to, but for fucks sake make it selectable. That's Office 2007's big failure -- some people just don't like the ribbon, and they give no option to return to a classic menu system. I found it VERY unintuitive (I prefer command line personally, but I REALLY prefer text menus over a bunch of icons. And icons that move around? *sigh*). And this HAS actually gotten some people I know to use OpenOffice -- they either needed to deal with docx files, or had Office 2007 and hated it that much (and couldn't find a copy of Office 2003) that they ditched Office entirely, just because of the ribbon.
On the one hand, I think the ribbon is stupid and pointless since I'm not a fan.. on the other hand, I guess some people do like it, and since OpenOffice is clearly meant to look like Office 2003 or so (which looked pretty similar back to Word 6 at least...) it does make sense to give it an Office 2007-like interface... just don't forget people have literally switched to avoid the ribbon, and give them a choice.
This is hideous. Why not work on better compatibility with ms office instead of imitating the look! I am a sysadmin at a company with many thousands of workstations. I cannot switch to open office for anything but basic users because it is not compatible enough with excel. Many things do not come across from excel to oo.
This ribbon knock off is terrible
By all means implement this. However you need to provide the ability to use 'classic' style menus.
I prefer the current style of menus in openoffice and think that Microsoft's ribbon menus are terrible.
However, for the sake of encouraging more people to convert to open office I think you should still include ribbon menus but still retain functionality for normal menus.
Simply pathetic. Like a dog that keeps licking one spot on its body until all the fur has come off, that keeps licking until soon enough the skin is blistering and sore, and you have to take the dog to a vet whereby it wraps its head in a giant paper cup--effectively preventing the dog from being such a fucking idiot.
And you just look at the stupid mutt, desperately trying to circumvent the stupid head-in-cup and get a couple more licks in, and you yell at it, "What in the hell!? Why are you so goddamned stupid!?"
That's what this is like.
I always thought more people would migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice to *avoid* the Ribbon and stick with a more familiar UI.
....
I say this as an OpenOffice user of many years, and as someone who has never used this fancy new Ribbon business in more recent versions of MS Office. The Ribbon in MS Office is one feature that helps keeps me in OpenOffice, and keeps me from upgrading the old version of MS Office that I have hanging around just in case I need it.
Ideally, both old and new interfaces would be available, and could be selected in the Options. In reality, this probably puts a lot more load on the developers to maintain two quite different interfaces
OpenOffice is thinking in the same closed way MS does. Microsoft is rigid and dictatorial.
Yet here we are debating over a PROTOTYPE UI screenshot released on a corporate sanctioned BLOG.
Makes you wonder who really missed the forest.
Frankly I hate both the ribbon and the standard menu + toolbars of old Word/OO etc. I've really taken to the OS X Inspector way of editing - in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Plot etc. Like photoshop I suppose. It's not perfect but it is so much more logical and compact without being limiting!! I've noticed in the latest Pages they've taken to having more of a toolbar which I think is pretty poor and uncharacteristics of Apple's usual firm stance on not copying other more familiar interfaces (eg tree-navigation in the finder).
I think the Inspector could be improved by having the option to lock it to the left or right of the screen (it does get in the way sometimes, though I like that it CAN be floated around) and also to let it absorb the extra windows like the font selection (CMD-t) and special character selection, etc. Or at least that they could easily be docked to the inspector. The OS X menu bar works well to support the inspector because it doesn't move.
Ideally why NOT make the OO interface "skinnable" so that each menu item is some sort of function that could be easily referenced by those who wish to write a ribbon OR menu OR inspector-type interface? I'm not really that knowledgeable with GUI programming but it could at least be an end goal.
I've been developing and supporting hundreds of Open Source projects and packages for close to 20 years now... and I "get it". But can we please stop imitating, and get back to innovating? Nobody likes the "ribbon", and it just confuses users. Ask them. Ask Windows users what they prefer.
Stop imitating, start innovating. Again.
As someone marginally capable of touch typing (and old enough to remember), WordStar had the best interface of a Word Processing Program. I find Word 2007's Ribbon bar absolutely perplexing. Wordstar had home row key-bindings. OpenOffice is a GPL project, so hopefully as a backlash some outraged developers will build a version that supports WordStar keybindings.
minds, get scrambled like eggs, abused and erased. Hard Hearted Alice is who you want to see.
I think the ribbon is actually a great idea and a great way of organizing buttons - provided that someone tell you that you are supposed to be moving your eyes across each block of button's name on the bottom, NOT LOOKING AT THE BUTTONS THEMSELVES! As - I believe - most people would find it counter-intuitive to look to the bottom of the ribbon (button-group name) first instead of the top (actual buttons), it was probably very unfortunate to position them that way.
Also, I use to think a ribbon should carry mostly buttons with icons, but looking at that Open Office ribbon with text-only buttons - hmm, it may work fine...
"Spoon!"
Well, "Fork". It's close enough. If you're that opposed to it, make your own office suite. With Blackjack. And Hookers.
I call dibs on the name "Openopenofficedotorg.com"
as possible.
Come on now. Isn't there a single person developing for linux with any taste or style?
I know I'll get modded down for this comment, but aesthetics do matter and linux looks like it was designed for engineers by engineers.
Openoffice and others put formatting commands under "format" which were under the "File" menu in Word.
A couple years later, we get the ribbon which is meant to group similar commands under one place.
Now, Openoffice is reacting to the ribbon.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I don't see any unintentional mimicry going on here at all, do you? It appears quite deliberate. That this mimicry is actually intended will make the consequences more painful, if the general reaction is a big bucket of FA1L as the responses so far suggest.
Ribbons are one of the few things that Microsoft has done right in Office. But what is it about open source that makes UI designers give everything those huge margins? It looks like Ubuntu, pure waste of screen space.
Someone called the ribbon the "most reviled feature" of Office 2007 and was challenged for it. I call BS on the challenge; There's no academically-sound research but evidence is all around you; Software tools for restoring some semblance of the standard Windows menuing system are wildly popular (half a dozen different highly-rated options at various software review sites, both freeware and commercial); Searching for "Office 2007 ribbon" turns up about 5 million hits, and among the first few hundred, about HALF are devoted to turning off the ribbon, recovering the "classic UI" or complaints about usability.
The feedback is clearly polar -- people either love the interface or hate it. There *IS* a large segment of the population that is well-served by the ribbon. It also means that a very large portion of the user base, possibly a majority, is quite unhappy with the PlaySkool-looking ribbon interface. In reviews and IT management testimonials, you can't swing a stick without hitting operations & management claims of lost productivity over many months or the past year+. Why would MS do something that so obviously and publicly has an inverted bell curve for user satisfaction?
I think the question about the interface is really a deeper question about the user base. Imagine if MS decided how best to arrange tools for working on a car. If you're a shop class student, having someone hand you the tool you need for the next scripted task might be very well received in usability tests. However, if you tried that in a professional's shop â" moving tools from where they absolutely always must be without fail â" you would be fired or provoke a physical fight in very short order. The ribbon, or any other adaptive interface driven by tasks/wizards/paths and not tools, is for novices (or those that have far-below-average learning skills). And I'll cite years of research at MIT's Media Lab to back up that assertion, along with acres of evidence from Edward Tufte at Yale (widely-recognized eminent expert in UI design) for starters.
By choosing the adaptive UI model (and abandoning the consistent UI model), MS clearly chose to serve the novice audience. That's OK! But to REMOVE the existing, proven, consistent UI interface as an unabashed fuck-you to professional office workers and anyone with more than a few years of computer experience. The latter are stuck with the PlaySkool interface. Some get used to it and even grow to like it. Many, many do not, find it a huge waste of time, a loss of important screen real estate or at best a visual distraction, and unnecessary change for the sake of novelty. It's ironic bordering on doublespeak that the official name for the ribbon is the "Fluent User Interface" given that "fluent" users are the ones most screwed by it.
Why? When has MS ever made a decision not based on monetary demands? I'll posit this: Microsoft is unconcerned with the productivity, perception or reaction of office workers, because they don't select or buy their own software. What MS wants is for novice, young, and timid users - but those who have individual purchasing power - to buy retail versions of MS Office. The ribbon interface suits them best, and MS wants their business so badly there's no option to turn it off. Screw the addicts, they'll take what they're given. Everything's packaged in dime bags now.
It would be a wonderful thing for OOo to adapt the experience with Office 2007 and ADD a simplified novice user interface. But to remove the experienced user UI would be truly tragic mistake. The beauty of being open source is the ability to absorb the best ideas: follow and adapt what works, innovate where wanted or necessary, but avoid following in the footsteps of people who have wandered into quicksand.
-J
I think not...(*poof*)
Office 2007 is the first version I actually felt compelling enough to pay money for (once the menu's are set to NOT change). Not a power user but have used many applications over the years. Have many old documents in odd formats now, and started relying heavily on plain .txt documents for stuff that doesn't need heavy formatting. Open office is getting usable for most people, and recommend it when feel it is appropriate.
"Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007...."
Huh? Have I passed into the Twilight Zone?
I suppose this will get modded down because it's just a pointless scream in digital form but I just had to get it out.
Does this
I remember being a beta tester for Office 2007, and really liked the new ribbon, I still do. The only downside to it, is that it wastes valuable screen space. OpenOffice SHOULD NOT COPY IT, and rather do a cross between MS ribbon/IBM Lotus Symphony/KOffice, and make use of the wasted space on the side of the documents. The problem is most people don't like change, even if it is better but requires some learning.
Note how Office 2007 ribbons add/remove rarely used commands as you resize the window
Then what if I need to use one of those rarely used commands, and my laptop's screen is only 1024px wide?
All the people who cant find the undo button (cause its not there) are just stupid morons.
All the people who trained on office for 10 years and then cant do what they want with it anymore are boobs.
The crammed full classes for people desperately trying to transition is just full of clueless newbies.
but its not the fault of interface design...the users are just incompetent
Yeah whatever...
Yeah, the Ribbon is much more efficient. The key was recognizing that context-sensitive menus reduce user workload in finding what he needs. There are two approaches to displaying functions in an application to a user:
#1, the static interface, is traditional. #2, the dynamic interface, is the Ribbon, but also the Mac OS top task menu, and the toolbox in the Gimp. We're less used to context-sensitive menus in word processors, but when we realize that these have become fullblown page layout and formatting packages, it makes more sense. People aren't just typing letters in word processors, but also formatting newsletters, compiling engineering reports and writing technical PhD theses (with equations, charts, tables of contents, special characters out the wazoo...). These have blossomed into powerful apps for combining and organizing text, mathematical, graphics and tabular information, far more than the typewriters they originally replaced. With that current usage, a dumb interface with forests of menus or tabs doesn't make sense and totally slows down the project. The application should, and can, take care of the user's needs a bit more, and with the Ribbon in Office 2007 it's worked splendidly.
It's sad that silly decisions are limiting your new cool machine.
In the old days, they built giant programs to make processors feel slow (probably hasn't changed but processors have just gotten so darn fast, people don't have the same burning need to upgrade anymore). Now that we are getting good screen resolutions, they're figuring out how to keep our content limited to the same postage stamp sized area we've always hated.
I use openoffice all the time, and I'll be really bummed if I have to give up 100 vertical pixels just so I can have giant cut, copy, and paste buttons (check out the screenshot linked in TFA: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/thumb/f/f2/Prototype.jpg/778px-Prototype.jpg ). I'd much rather see as much of my document as possible than have pixels burned up for no good reason, particularly when ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v are so thoroughly ingrained I can't remember ever using a button or menu option to accomplish that task. I just don't get it -- waste is bad.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
As a Microsoft Office trainer, I loathed the ribbon at first. After 20 years of menus, it felt wrong. But it seemed that it was only the older users complaining about it. Really, there was something of a learning curve in getting used to it, but after a fairly reasonably short time, people were getting used to it, and they stopped complaining. A couple of years on, and many people comment that they prefer it to the old menus.
Besides, if you understand the reasoning why the ribbon came about and the menus scrapped (they considered the structure of the menus overbloated with commands with no logical grouping, and something like 70% of requests for new features in the programs being features already there), you can see that it wasn't simply a case of them doing it for sh*ts and giggles. In programs that have so many features, the ribbon works far more intuitively, if somewhat differently to what people might be familiar with.
Users who have learned Microsoft Office for the first time since the ribbon have said it's easy, and when confronted with a menu find it difficult. This OO implementation does look klunky, and they should be looking to make their spreadsheet more robust. I was desperate to get away from Office, but OO doesn't offer anywhere near the same level of stability for those of us who think a 300 page document, or a spreadsheet with thousands of links, and macros are the norm.
The average Slashdot commenter dislikes the 'recent' UI changes in Windows and Office. Maybe it's just a way to express a dislike of Microsoft. Still, the prototypical Slashdotter loves (or pretends to love) ancient technology like vi, emacs and latex. For these people WYSIWYG seems to be a dirty word. Do Slashdotter long for the pre-Microsoft area when IBM ruled the world and IT people wore lab coats?
Word and Excel have SOME consistency (except that they sometimes call it Find, sometimes Find and Replace. Sometimes it's an icon, sometimes it's not.) Sometimes it's a big icon, sometimes it's small. Now, let's go to Outlook:
Let's try to follow your instructions, when creating a new message in Outlook. Home tab? there isn't one. Maybe you mean the Message Tab which is located where the Home tab is in Word: Far Right? That's Spelling. No, Find is under "Format Text". How intuitive.
Next try to find "Find" when you are reading someone's message to you. Where's Find?
Now let's say you want to find a message in your Inbox. Where's find? OK let's try to find a message in a file folder. Where's find.
OK, let's go to Internet Explorer. Where's Find?
See? So much for consistency.
And using Ctrl-F proves my point. OK, so we're supposed to tell our users what? "I know the Ribbon sucks - just memorize this control sequence."
Anything is better than the actual ooo interface
I moved to OpenOffice specifically because Office 2007 can't be operated from the keyboard. With the ribbon you can't bring down a menu with an Alt keypress and see the options on it. There's still Google apps I suppose.
After listening to users complaints and vetting a new interface extensively with, you know, actual users, they actually try to improve to innovate their product. I remember Microsoft actively soliciting feedback from business users regarding what we would like to see to make the Office suite more usable. And then Microsoft listened to our concerns and some of our recommendations showed up in the product.
The same people who complain that Microsoft doesn't innovate complain when they do. Seems a little pathological doesn't it?
Ctrl-F will give me bold text, if I'm running a danish version of Office. Some moron translated the f*cking shortcut keys (on a positive note, at least they didn't touch ctrl-ZXCV), and since we can't always get an english version, ctrl-F will sometimes be find, and sometimes bold.
Even better, they just swapped the keys, so find is now on ctrl-B, even though find is spelled "find" in danish (note the word does not have a single B, neither does "sÃg" the danish word for search). That is, if you're using Word. In Outlook, it's F4.
The one huge mistake that is causing large numbers of everyday users to switch to your product, and you go copy it. DUH!
First, it is a better use of space. Why have vertical menus drop down and obscure your work space? The ribbon keeps 'stuff' out of your way and doesn't drop into the work space.
You're kidding me, right?
Let's see: The menu bar is approximately 1 cm of space at the top of my window, which can expand, on demand, to a menu with an arbitrary number of different options of varying obscurity, which then disappears when I'm through with it, leaving me with only that 1 cm of precious vertical space taken up again.
The ribbon is about an inch and a half of vertical space at the top of my window, and it's always there.
Vertical space is the most precious resource on modern widescreen displays, especially laptop displays (and I do use laptops nearly exclusively). Setting aside completely issues of usability, retraining, etc, the ribbon is a terrible interface for its use of vertical screen space.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
- When you want to change ribbon menus or tabs or whatever you call them, you have to click on them - you can't just click on one and then point your mouse like you could with the old menus.
- Again you have to click, you can't just point, to open sub-menus. Every time.
- The ribbons waste a lot of screen space compared to menus - and you can't expand them when you run out of room, you have to maximize the window. I wonder what happens if your monitor isn't big enough? (trying Word 2007@800x600...crashed when I changed resolution but it's starting again)...oh the ribbon takes up an even greater amount (about 1/5) of your vertical screen space, compared to the thin strip of a menu. You'd have to stack on a lot of toolbars to waste that much space.
- Even if you discount the time wasted with extra clicks, ribbons are pretty slow compared to menus, possibly due to the space-wasting flashy graphics - there's a very noticeable difference on my office PC.
- Everyone from power users to barely-computer-literate office workers (who now call the power users in the IT department because they can't find things anymore) has learned to use a pretty standard and effective menu system in their office suite, there was no reason to change it. It hasn't been improved. It could only make sense if your aim is to make your product work differently from the competition to make switching more difficult.
I really hope OO.org doesn't go to a ribbon system, or at least makes it optional. MS Office handed OO.org an advantage when they went to the ribbon system, why not use that advantage?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
o.O;;
-- Boycott Shell
I know Office 2K7 inside and out now, but I still hate it. It's bloody slow compared to the old menus and requires FAR more clicking.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Or, radical idea, you make the ribbon disappear when you don't need it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I just got a new laptop at work, and it has Office 2007, replacing the 2003 that was on the old one. The only thing that makes it at all tolerable is that my new screen is 900 pixels high instead of 768, so most of the space that the ribbon's burning up is new pixels
So double-click on the damn ribbon. Voila, the ribbon autohides. Suddenly Word, et al, take up even *less* space than before (thanks to the absence of toolbars).
I was a firm believer that the MS Office ribbon was the stupidest, clunkiest UI to come along in ages, until I tried it for the first time about a month ago when work updated their software finally. Took me a few days to get used to it, but I have to admit I was wrong. It is intuitive and easy to use and learn, and I actually do prefer it to the old menu/toolbar setup. I'm not sure that OO.o necessarily needs (or even should) mimic MS, but I think that if there are good ideas, or new ideas, out there about how to approach to UI in a program, it's worth investigating at least. Maybe we won't end up with something like MS Office. Maybe we'll get something even better!
Well, apparently I either have a stalker, or someone *really* doesn't want people to know that the ribbon can be collapsed, thus making it far less craptacular...
In this case, imitation is the sincerest form of failure.
OO.org is second only to Office itself in terms of annoying.
Pressing the delete key pops up a modal "what do you want to delete" dialog? Are you fucking serious?
Question everything
Ctrl-F stands for "Forward" in Outlook. you have to hit Ctrl-E to find.
Outlook and IE don't use the ribbon. Hardly evidence that the Ribbon is inconsistent.
NOOOOOOOOOO. DONT DO IT! Or at least make it optional or do some UI design research FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Seriously, I don't want to have to learn tex to print my stuff :( :( :(.
As long as they reduce the damned compile time I wont complain too much.
It won't be long before Microsoft changes the Word UI to using a main toolbox and multiple customizable, tear-able, collapsible palettes similar to the Adobe Photoshop or GIMP interfaces. After all, when so much functionality is packed into an application, there are only so many functions you can show on the screen at once. Ever try turning on all the toolbars in Word 2003 or older? Was similar to the ribbon UI, but took up far more vertical screen real estate. The ribbon is bound to grow, too, or will just turn into a nicely skinned, context sensitive, menu bar, which is what it appears to be in Office 2010.
Outlook and IE don't use the ribbon. Hardly evidence that the Ribbon is inconsistent.
I wonder why Microsoft would have a page on their site titled "Customizing the Ribbon in Outlook 2007", then. (dated June 2006 - this is NOT news!)
Sorry, Outlook DOES use the ribbon, and mail is likely the office application that is used by more users than any other application, including probably Word, definitely Excel, and definitely Powerpoint. Then trying to use those "learnings" from Outlook on Word or Excel is pointless.
But LaTeX uses human-readable markup for this very reason! You can easily enter formatting information as you are working on the text without it getting in the way / becoming opaque and difficult to edit like in a wysiwyg.
Though I don't know LaTeX, I'm quite sure I could learn it if I had cause. But I'm a geek, and most people aren't. If I wanted to, I could just write in HTML all the time, and that would produce formatted output, but that's a) not what normal people would be willing or able to do, and b) not what I want to do.
No; no kind of markup is acceptable for this kind of thing. For non-geeks, a WYSIWYG editor is absolutely essential...and even geeks might like one some of the time.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
How long has IE been part of the Office Suite?!
Its not a mistake, its a horrifically misguided design decision.
They went through a reasonable design process based on data collected by the user experience program, the problem is anyone with a 3 digit IQ unchecked the box to send all their usage data to microsoft when they installed office. If you work in a company that installed it for you, the geeks with triple digit IQs disabled it for you. Who does that leave?
Stupid people mostly, along wIth a few lazy people that couldn't be bothered to uncheck the box.
They designed the interface for stupid people.
To make matters worse, Jensen Harris realized that if they gave users the option, they would instantly disable his masterpiece. Even some of the stupid people would have disabled it, so they removed that choice. No alternatives, no customizations.
And using Ctrl-F proves my point. OK, so we're supposed to tell our users what? "I know the Ribbon sucks - just memorize this control sequence."
I wish. let me offer up a few examples from the Norwegian Outlook 2007:
find in a mailfolder: F3
find while reading an email: F4
new mail from inbox: Alt-n
forward mail from inbox: Alt-n (yes!)
close and send email: Alt-s
close and save appointment: Ctrl-s
it's a complete fucking mess!
I mean, if they're busy destroying everything that makes it more usable than MS Office they MUST introduce something like it. Maybe use an animated Gnu, that'll keep Stallman quiet.
NOT without a "old UI" option. PLEASE do not make the same c*ckup as MS did - Office 2007 lost them a lot of clients.
Make OOo lighter, more portable - that's a win. Not the UI.
All IMHO, of course.
Insert
Maybe you can tell me, but i cannot for the LIFE of me see how my above comment is flamebait. I think someone is going around back-modding me every time i wine about being screwed with. Somebody comes to my aid, reads my comment, points out a few things, or another comes along and neutralizes my score back to where it was before some jerk came along and slam-dunked it to hell. Then, ticked they see i'm monitoring my comments for feedback or scoring changes, the fraking childish ones go and screw with another comment. I wish slashdot had a monitoring system that looks out for these abuses and bans the ip or the user for a week, or longer.
Anyway...
I don't see anything in my commentary (and, it is my personal experience, and i don't see how anyone here is slashdot could refute or lambaste or critically pan my experience without accessing the email servers of openoffice.org from around 2000-2002...) that is flamebait.
I have in the past and even now will admit that Lotus and IBM are dropping the ball, but there have been and still are features in SmartSuite that beat the shocks off of oo.o. Unfortunately for S/S, the same is true. oo.o has a newer set of cleaned up code, less patent bullshit risks, and fresher eyes able to inspect the code to some greater degree than SmartSuite does. Also, i have in the past and concede now, too, that if Sun and IBM/Lotus put away their gauntlets/mauls/maces and merged the best features of their suites, they could then see what they and Google might do to pry msofts domineering, anti-competitive hands off the personal and office document suite software industry.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"