Office team corrects news about its new “ribbon”

August 26, 2006 By

One thing that’s good about corporate blogging is you can correct the record when other news sites get things wrong.

Here’s an example of this. Earlier this week a story broke across the blogs that Microsoft’s Office team was changing the way its new ribbon interface would work in the 2007 version of Office.

Turns out that wasn’t true, according to Darren Strange who is a 2007 Office Product Manager.

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  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/orchant Marc Orchant

    Actually Robert, they *are* changing it. What Darren tried to do was correct a misconnception about the how and why. Jensen Harris had announced a while back that an auto-hide function was being added to the ribbon for those who prefer that it not always be on-screen.

    A number of bloggers, myself included, assumed this was in response to complaints based on the perception that the ribbon takes up a significantly larger amount of screen real estate than the menua and toolbars in Office 2003. Darren’s post states that this was not the driver for the decision to put the function in.

    If usability data was the driver, as both Jensen and Darren imply, then the decision is a sound one. Personally I could care less either way. I’m completely at ease using the CTRL+F1 keyboard shortcut to display and hide the ribbon as needed and generally cannot stand auto-hide sliding toolbars, menus, and other screen objects in and out of the screen.

    And I think the ribbon rocks! I know serious power users hate the loss of customizability it imposes. But people who just use the core Office apps as part of their day-to-day work are generally delighted with it when I demo the new apps.

  • http://blogs.zdnet.com/orchant Marc Orchant

    Actually Robert, they *are* changing it. What Darren tried to do was correct a misconnception about the how and why. Jensen Harris had announced a while back that an auto-hide function was being added to the ribbon for those who prefer that it not always be on-screen.

    A number of bloggers, myself included, assumed this was in response to complaints based on the perception that the ribbon takes up a significantly larger amount of screen real estate than the menua and toolbars in Office 2003. Darren’s post states that this was not the driver for the decision to put the function in.

    If usability data was the driver, as both Jensen and Darren imply, then the decision is a sound one. Personally I could care less either way. I’m completely at ease using the CTRL+F1 keyboard shortcut to display and hide the ribbon as needed and generally cannot stand auto-hide sliding toolbars, menus, and other screen objects in and out of the screen.

    And I think the ribbon rocks! I know serious power users hate the loss of customizability it imposes. But people who just use the core Office apps as part of their day-to-day work are generally delighted with it when I demo the new apps.

  • http://www.duncanriley.com/ Duncan

    That’s actually a good thing, I couldn’t believe that they were thinking about changing it given it’s one of the best things in the new version of Office, sure it takes a day or two of getting use to, but it’s a time saver for sure and a definite selling point for upgrading to Office 2007.

  • http://www.duncanriley.com Duncan

    That’s actually a good thing, I couldn’t believe that they were thinking about changing it given it’s one of the best things in the new version of Office, sure it takes a day or two of getting use to, but it’s a time saver for sure and a definite selling point for upgrading to Office 2007.

  • Stephane Rodriguez

    I have read in some place that one will be able to double-click the ribbon to miminize it or something like that. I don’t know if that’s the truth, but let’s just assume it is.

    Has the Office team learned anything from the floating toolbars debacle? Apparently not, because if anybody can make significant changes to the UI without the intention to do so, my mom double-clicks everything for example instead of doing a simple click, then it will infuriate users and leave them with no clue of how to return to normal (since the Office team designed the double-click behavior such that if someone double-clicks intentionally to minimize the ribbon, he will THINK of doing it again to undo the change).

    Train wreck.

  • Stephane Rodriguez

    I have read in some place that one will be able to double-click the ribbon to miminize it or something like that. I don’t know if that’s the truth, but let’s just assume it is.

    Has the Office team learned anything from the floating toolbars debacle? Apparently not, because if anybody can make significant changes to the UI without the intention to do so, my mom double-clicks everything for example instead of doing a simple click, then it will infuriate users and leave them with no clue of how to return to normal (since the Office team designed the double-click behavior such that if someone double-clicks intentionally to minimize the ribbon, he will THINK of doing it again to undo the change).

    Train wreck.

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