Am I the only one that actually likes the ribbon? I can actually find the options I want to use in Office 10 instead of trying to dig through dozens of drop down menus.

I love it too; much easier to find features I don't use regularly.

Fair or not, I feel like people who complain about it today (years after it launched) are just announcing, "I'm bad at adapting."

"Am I the only one ..."

The answer to this is always "no."

Except this time.

Amusing, but untrue. I took a (long) while to like the ribbon, but I have to say that I find it a large improvement in usability, and it makes it vastly more likely that I will accept "other than the basic/defaults".

It actively encourages exploration. That's good for some use cases, and it's certainly good for Microsoft.

I love it, I used to be on the fence until I discovered the magical ALT key

> Office Ribbon UI, an unmitigated disaster

Are you kidding me?

the ribbon is the best thing MS has done in a long time. a ballsy move, but absolutely needed to have a UI that is able to guide users through the very complex functionalities of excel, etc.

use ms office daily, love the ribbon.

I use excel every week or so and I grumble at that stupid ribbon every time.

I _was_ a proficient excel user once upon a time but now I feel like I'm trying to cook in my kitchen after some "organization expert" came in and moved all my stuff.

IMO, life is too short to have to re-learn stuff you already know.

Same boat. I was a very proficient Excel user. The ribbon completely fucked my workflow. In addition, they broke just enough of the shortcut keys to break my flow.

What shortcut keys did they break?

I don't recall exactly. I'd been away from much use of Excel for a few years, then had occasion to use it helping someone else. Whereupon I suddenly went from an early 200x version (lastly 2003, I think?) to 2007.

The ribbon was annoying enough. But then I started manipulating using shortcut keys. And a subset didn't product the expected results.

I spent some years working heavily in Excel, including extensive on-the-fly worksheet structure modification (shoving data around, adding and deleting rows and columns, copying values or just the "text" portion of cells, etc., etc.). So those shortcuts were second-nature, or "muscle memory", as they say, if a bit stale.

It was a one-off, helping that person. I currently do a little budgeting in Excel, but without much such manipulation, so I haven't continued to trip across and so recall in detail what broke.

I do continue, in my more spiteful moments, to hope they reserve a special level of hell for the people who make such UI changes. For a subset of people, Excel is a heavy-duty industrial tool, and dicking with the UI is tantamount to dicking with their livelihood, not to mention peace of mind. At a minimum, implement and insist on backward compatibility (as an optional mode, at least), no matter how much your "rock star" designers piss and moan, or your Management pisses and moans about supporting multiple interfaces. You have a responsibility to the user base that has propelled your product to such success while integrating its functionality into their subconscious actions.

I think, given the diversity of opinions in the responses to your post, you might want to rethink some of this. I certainly said no such thing. Some redesigns are "good", and some redesigns are "bad". But that decision is personal and subjective. You can't change a UI without annoying someone somewhere. And any UI that lots of people use regularly (gmail, Office and desktops are all great example) is going to have a metric ton of loud complainers every time they change.

And that applies whether or not the change has merit. It's inherent in the process. So any analysis of a UI that starts with an "I HATE THE CHANGES!" blog post is flawed and (in the scientific sense) biased. Show some testing, write your own rant, or just sit tight.

The Ribbon UI is one of the best improvements to Office in years.

I think that the office ribbon redesign was rather brave for MS. As a non-expert user of Office, I found it easier to find commonly used features--I can imagine how for experts it would be annoying--but for new users, it really helped with discovery and I'm considering the idea for some of my own projects...

I actually like the ribbon, especially when working on tables, charts, and the like. My only complaint is that it takes up so much vertical screen real estate.