The ribbon interface removed customizability, and inflated the size of all the common commands (and also made it impossible to get them back without 3rd party extensions).

Pre-Ribbon I could have the menus, file operations, font and paragraph settings, and the reviewing tool bar at the top of my screen. I could have the object and image editing at the bottom.

Post-ribbon the exact same amount of space is does a third as much. Reviewing for some reason is now on a separate tab. The menus are less commonly used functions are non-existent, stuck somewhere under "File" which now takes over the whole screen when I open it.

It is not just "different" it's worse. It removes the basic ability to prioritize my interface to the types of tasks I'm doing, in favor of some vaguely defined every-user who is not actually a real user.

Just to be clear, the ability to customize existing tabs, and make new ones with whatever commands you want on them, is insufficient? Or is this only a complaint about the defaults?

For those who don’t know: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/customize-the-rib...:

“What you can customize: You can personalize your ribbon to arrange tabs and commands in the order you want them, hide or unhide your ribbon, and hide those commands you use less often. Also, you can export or import a customized ribbon.”

Thank you! I didn’t even know this was possible.

They've optimized it for the least common denominator, not for specialized use or for power users. Short term this is a positive approach as it's more approachable for people who are just learning or are very lightweight users. But for people who have a lot of experience or use it often, it's a serious regression.

I'm a "Power User" and I've memorized every single hotkey on the Excel ribbon interface to the point that I don't care where they are.

Wrap text? Alt H A W

Open settings? Alt T F T

Change to page break view? Alt W I. Go back to normal view with Alt W L

Take the border I currently have on the top edge of a cell and swap it to the bottom? Alt H B M Alt+T Alt+B

Paste values transposing? Alt H V S V E. Want to follow the old accelerator? Alt E S V E also works

Power users don't need to care what the ribbon / menu looks like. They learn hotkeys.

I'm an emacs user. You have made me feel warm inside.

Emacs is a lot like Excel in many ways: they both make you feel like wizards. I suck at excel, but I've seen some analysts who are crazy good at it. You watch them use it and numbers and shit just start appearing out of nowhere. It's pure magic!

On top of that, old shortcuts still work. For menus that disappeared more than a decade ago!!

power users have macros and hotkeys. I've met plenty of excel power users, and I haven't met many excel power users that click on anything in the ribbon all that often. Maybe it's different since they're bankers and the amount of time they're spending on spreadsheets is an order of magnitude more than other people that could still be called power users but maybe don't have their lives revolve around excel and powerpoint, but hotkeys and macros are where its at

Except this is where the intermediate user point becomes valuable: if you spend close to all your time in spreadsheets, then yeah, sure, you're probably in hot key land.

Of course that's discounting the idea that a power user would still want to customize their UI to get less frequently used but still common functions into view and keep them there.

Which is what I, an intermediate user, definitely want: at the time the ribbon happened I was in chemistry research. Excel and Word are important parts of that process! And having them work the way I want was valuable to me. Just not so valuable that I needed to learn a huge number of hotkeys. And yet somehow, the ribbon manages to still be in the way rather then letting me keep a productive, dense UI in view for when I am in those tools - which I'm definitely not in all the time since most of the actual job is being in the lab.

The Formatting/Reviewing split was one of the most irritating possible things as a result of the ribbon: I can't keep the formatting tools in view alongside the Reviewing tools? Like, what?

I believe it's because the ribbon is context-sensitive. What shows up depends on what has focus, and that makes it harder for retention, similar to how Office 2000 has automatically hidden menu items that ended up being confusing.

At least for this Bob here:

1. The ribbon interface has more levels of depth, which equals more clicks. If most of your commands are in the same toolbar, you can have a lot of commands that are only one click away, even if you don't customise. For example, to "insert symbol" in word to get an em dash or non-breaking space or similar, you have to select the insert tab, click the symbol dropdown and then "more symbols ...". Used to be one click on the "omega" button, or two via the menu (insert / symbol). The fact that I have to move the mouse from one end of the screen to the other and then half the way back again also doesn't help.

2. Maybe this is just me but Alt+N, U, M for "insert symbol" is a lot harder for me to memorise than "the button with an omega up there to the right". It feels less intuitive somehow - I really like working with visual muscle memory (if that's a thing) where I remember the place and shape of a button.

3. Customisability. Yes you can do this to some extent with the ribbon, but in Excel you can't just swap out "merge and center" with "merge across (but do not center)", you'd have to replace the whole "section" - I've tried.

4. Speaking of visual muscle memory - the number of times I've come in to work and found that my ribbon has changed in an update overnight. Some of these are work installing new plugins, but most of it is microsoft adding new "features". No thanks, I don't want my documents "integrated with LinkedIn" when I'm working to a deadline.

5. There have been several major changes to how the ribbon looks and works as Word has gone through new versions since it was introduced - in a lot less than 17 years. Of course that happened with toolbars too (I think around 2000 everything went "flat style", but you could at least turn it off), but I found it easier to adapt back then. Maybe I'm just getting old but each new version that comes out feels like learning half the things I need for work all over again.