Jan

29

More Ribbon Talk

January 29, 2007 |

Marc Orchant from ZDNet writes:

Because I’ve been working frantically to keep up with the evolution of the Ribbon for my forthcoming Wiley book about Outlook 2007 I’ve been living with the Ribbon for nearly a year full-time. In that time, I’ve seen an interesting conceptual leap in HCI (Human Computer Interface) design evolve into a very well-conceived and masterfully polished step forward in the way we interact with Office.

Couldn’t agree more. I started using Office 2007 full-time last October and immediately fell in love with the new interface. I am not Microsoft fanboy, but the Office 2007 interface is close to perfect. I have heard complaints about how it is not customizable. It isn’t and I have not cared. The only customization is in the shortcut menu that is not integrated in the title bar and I use it all the time.

Here is my use scenario: I am writing my dissertation. Of all the functions, the function I use 90% of the time is the footnote function (the one that not a single web text processor has yet implemented!). It sits right in the title bar and because of that, it immediately gets a shortcut ALT+1, 2, 3 etc.

When I need to do something, it pops right up at me. The other new function that has already saved me a lot of time is the menu that shows up when I highlight text. Now here I would like to see some more flexibility, because while I can change font, size etc, I can’t change line spacing here and that’s what I want to do 90% of the time when I highlight a chunk of text. But I can live with that, because I know the keyboard shortcut for that now.

Funnily, I never used shortcuts in the older versions, but this time, they are highlighted so well that I have grown accustomed to them very quickly.

End of rant…

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