Ribbon? RIBBON! WHY?

[Obelix]

Annoying is having to help people save their important Word document who have "customised" the save button off their toolbar and managed to turn the menu bar off.

 

Or to try to explain why menu items move around depending on how regularly you use them.

 

The Office ribbon interface may not be great, but it's nowhere near as broken as the previous UI.

 

There are ways to stop that - but you are falling into the same trap as Denomis does and assumes that one size fits all when it doesn't.

[mickey finn]

Denomis will soon be along to tell us to get with the program and how wonderful the ribbon is... but if you ever used a "pre ribbon" version of Word etc you will soon know just how annoying it is... Those who have never used anything else probably won't know what the fuss is because they wont know what they are missing.

 

Maybe swarfendor43 will beat him to it and tell us that we are being spied on by the men in black and how our very existence depends on us all running a ridiculous Linux OS.

[Obelix]

Maybe swarfendor43 will beat him to it and tell us that we are being spied on by the men in black and how our very existence depends on us all running a ridiculous Linux OS.

 

Well with Windows 10 having a built in keyboard monitor he does perhaps have a point....

[TimmyR]

Perhaps you just need to get used to it...its not that bad! Could this just be a bit of microsoft bashing, a habit displayed by oh so many. I personally think in general microsoft produce pretty good software.

[Obelix]

I that had been all I ever used it would be easy. But since I was already used to a better solution, and couldnt carry on using that solution I just moved to a different product.

 

Not that it matters overly to me, most of my longer documents are written in LaTeX anyway....

[DaFoot]

Maybe swarfendor43 will beat him to it and tell us that we are being spied on by the men in black and how our very existence depends on us all running a ridiculous Linux OS.

 

Nothing ridiculous about an OS that works

 

I've never got to grips with the ribbon thing, I know some folks swear by it, but I still prefer my menus.

 

Possibly because I've not given it much of a chance, just hours of frustration trying to fight with it at the office!

[swarfendor437]

There is a 'simple' way around this - it's what I had to do to cope with Office 2007 - you need to customise your QAT (Quick Access Toolbar). If you still have a separate old copy of Office as a guide as to what you want in there, on the down arrow at the end of the QAT select Customise - it opens with 'Popular Commands' - you need to use the drop down arrow and change it to 'All Commands' and choose those that you used the most in previous incarnations of Office. Once you have customised your QAT how you want it you can keep your ribbon minimised. I also move the QAT below the Ribbon.

 

One other bit of advice - if you want to place text/box in front of any image be sure that you save all documents as 97/2003 - xml (.docx) just cannot cope with text over pictures - you just get the box where the text should appear.

 

Another issue you may come across is the appearance of 'page border' in the middle of a document - you can't get rid of it in the time honoured fashion of 'no borders' - you have to select 'Styles' highlight above and below the line and select 'Clear All' in styles.

 

If you can't get on with Office then there is Kingsoft Office 2013 - this defaults with the Ribbon but you can click on tht T-shirt to change to Classic view and restart the app.

Edited October 29, 2014 by swarfendor43

[tzijlstra]

Not to be funny but.... the ribbon? Were you still on Office 2003 up until recently? The thing has been in vogue for a long time now. Wait til you get Win8 and have to get used to the fact that your traditional desktop is no use for launching programs, instead switching over to the most dreadful interface each time you want to launch something obscure. You know, like Paint or anything else you don't manage to pin to your taskbar.

[DaFoot]

Not to be funny but.... the ribbon? Were you still on Office 2003 up until recently? The thing has been in vogue for a long time now. Wait til you get Win8 and have to get used to the fact that your traditional desktop is no use for launching programs, instead switching over to the most dreadful interface each time you want to launch something obscure. You know, like Paint or anything else you don't manage to pin to your taskbar.

 

I don't use Office much at work, and don't use MS OS/office at all at home.

[Fogey]

Not to be funny but.... the ribbon? Were you still on Office 2003 up until recently? The thing has been in vogue for a long time now. Wait til you get Win8 and have to get used to the fact that your traditional desktop is no use for launching programs, instead switching over to the most dreadful interface each time you want to launch something obscure. You know, like Paint or anything else you don't manage to pin to your taskbar.

 

Yep, only got Windows 7 beginning of this year, my employer is often way behind.