Preview the Office 2007 Ribbon-Like UI Floated For OpenOffice.Org 617
recoiledsnake writes "OpenOffice.org has prototyped a new UI that radically changes the current OO.o interface into something very similar to the new ribbon style menus that Office 2007 introduced and which have been extensively used throughout Windows 7. The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype in Impress (the equivalent of PowerPoint), but this UI is proposed to be used across all OO.o applications. Some commenters on the Sun blog are not happy about OO.o blindly aping Office 2007, and feel that the ribbon UI may be out of place in non-Windows operating systems."
How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Ribbon is no good even in Windows. And isn't it patented? There's no reason Open Office needs to ape Microsoft's mistakes.
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What mistake? The ribbon is fine, it takes 5 mins to pick up unless you have a learning disability or a brain dead MS hater.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You press the pop-out button on the Styles pane. It creates a floating tool window rather than a sidebar.
These pop-out buttons are standard in the Ribbon UI.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's goal with the ribbon was to make an interface that better encompassed the large amount of bloat (*cough*) features that have been added to MS Office over the years. I've never used the ribbon, as I'm on Office 2003 at work and OOo at home, but I have to admit to admiring its appearance. It definitely looks like it was designed by someone who cares about user interfaces, rather than by someone from Microsoft.
Still, I really don't see the point of duplicating it in OOo. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in the wake of the ribbon, having a classic Office interface might be a feature of OOo, rather than a flaw. As in, OOo might pick up users specifically because it doesn't have the ribbon. And I haven't even brought up the fact that it gobbles up screen real estate that would be better used on your sci-fi novel. (Oh look, I mentioned it.) I hope this gets scuttled, and fast.
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I though the ribbon was much more about differentiating the M$ version from it's competitors and to create the impression that is was a new version and you were actually paying for something of value rather than throwing money away on a pointless upgrade. Added to that, I got the feeling 'IT'S A Trap' for any other company that copied it, patents and copyright etc.
So incorporate the features, for users who start out with M$ Office and want to swap but, please make it a plugin only. Big changes in UI real
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Then I came to work one morning, no coffee, databases were down, and I was on 2.5 hours of sleep. Opened Word to work on a requirements/solution document... and it made sense. Not just sense, but blinded-by-science-this-is-stupidly-simple kind of sense.
Once I got the fact that everything I was used to was still there, albeit not in the same format, but actually grouped
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Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Informative)
Umm traditional toolbars show or hide elements based on window size...
The ribbon just tries to do it intelligently by hiding stuff you might not use as often, while a toolbar just uses icon placement to determine which to hide.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any toolbar that needs a SEARCH to find SEARCH is broken.
That flippin' Find and Replace moves all over the place, from application to application. And if the Ribbon moves items based on usage (which it seems to), then it's a nightmare for support personnel:
"See the little icon next to Sort & Filter? You don't have Sort and Filter? OK what Icons do you have?"
Not to mention that Microsoft's categorization is just plain bad. Want to Insert a Powerpoint Slide? Don't press the Insert tab. Want to insert a row in Excel? Surely that's on the insert tab (nope).
Want to find out the Properties of a document in Word? Let's see, would Properties be under Home, Insert, Page Layout, Mailings, Review, View, or Add-Ins. I could make a case for several of those, but View seems to make the most sense... as in View Properties. But noooooooooooo .... it's under the "Click the unnamed icon with multi-colored squares on it, and press Prepare". WTF???
I've griped about this before... I'm sure the Ribbon has potential, IF IMPLEMENTED WELL, but it wasn't. Maybe Open Office will get it right.
Sigh. Someone else who complains without using it (Score:3, Insightful)
Any toolbar that needs a SEARCH to find SEARCH is broken.
That flippin' Find and Replace moves all over the place, from application to application.
Why was this marked Insightful?
Let's see... I fire up Word, I go to the Home tab ... there's Find/Replace/Select, on the far right. Open up Excel, open the Home tab of the Ribbon ... there it is again, Find&Select, on the far right. Let's try PowerPoint... open up the Home tab, lo and behold, it's on the far right, looking exactly like it did in Word. Even Access puts the Find/Select/etc. box on the far right of the Home tab of the Ribbon.
So which applications were you talking about that do it differen
Re:Sigh. Someone else who complains without using (Score:5, Insightful)
Word and Excel have SOME consistency (except that they sometimes call it Find, sometimes Find and Replace. Sometimes it's an icon, sometimes it's not.) Sometimes it's a big icon, sometimes it's small. Now, let's go to Outlook:
Let's try to follow your instructions, when creating a new message in Outlook. Home tab? there isn't one. Maybe you mean the Message Tab which is located where the Home tab is in Word: Far Right? That's Spelling. No, Find is under "Format Text". How intuitive.
Next try to find "Find" when you are reading someone's message to you. Where's Find?
Now let's say you want to find a message in your Inbox. Where's find? OK let's try to find a message in a file folder. Where's find.
OK, let's go to Internet Explorer. Where's Find?
See? So much for consistency.
And using Ctrl-F proves my point. OK, so we're supposed to tell our users what? "I know the Ribbon sucks - just memorize this control sequence."
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst thing you can possibly do in a UI is hide stuff inconsistently (ie, outside of user control) or move stuff around.
For example, hiding menu options based on use patterns. What purpose does this serve? To save screen space? The user remembers the option they want (if they donot use the hotkey) by placement (almost at the top, just below the middle, etc). Hiding options screws this up. These experts seem to believe users actually READ all the options (or look at icons or something). They don't. They just remember that the recycler was somewhere bottom right, the file menu with open option is top left, tools is somewhere on the right side next to help, etc..
The same thing goes for moving options around, it doesn't matter for what reason. Moving them around means that the option that was in the right corner last week is suddenly somewhere in the middle this week -- mega fail.
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No, those are multiple toolbars placed along multiple lines. Ordinary toolbars don't span many lines... they just hide their elements and offer a drop down menu to access the rest.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
Insightful??
Do you prefer a UI that hides the actual contentbased on window size? If a windows getting smaller, something's getting hidden, y'know..
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Ok, I'll bite. First, it doesn't take five minutes to learn, unless you really don't know woh to use Office advanced features, it takes a complete relearning of the interface. That usualy takes a few mounts of practice.
Second, name a single advantaje of the ribon. Even if it did take five minutes to learn, what return there is in spending those five minutes?
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn, you are old.
It wasn't that hard to get used to. More than five minutes, but now I can get to a ton of features a lot faster than I used to. The first week was a pain in the butt for sure. After that, I have a hard time going back to Office 03 menus.
Hates them, we does! Nasty Bloated Ribbonses! (Score:3, Interesting)
I just got a new laptop at work, and it has Office 2007, replacing the 2003 that was on the old one. The only thing that makes it at all tolerable is that my new screen is 900 pixels high instead of 768, so most of the space that the ribbon's burning up is new pixels, but it takes me longer to get to many of the features I use often, and I haven't yet dug around to find all the features I'd like to have, plus it'll take me a while to memorize where it's hiding everything that I considered to be reasonably
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The ribbon is supposed to show the average user immediate-to-advanced options for their software use and allow them to discover feature they would n
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If you're an "advanced user", shouldn't you know the (unchanged) hotkeys? I mean, I'm a pretty heavy Office user, and I was apprehensive about the changes at first, but all the hotkeys still work and the ribbon is easier to actually find things that I don't already know about.
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What mistake? The ribbon is fine, it takes 5 mins to pick up unless you have a learning disability or a brain dead MS hater.
Does that five minutes start before or after the half hour it takes to figure out how to open a stupid file?
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Ehh, double-click it like always...
Ok, done with my asshole moment. Took me about the same amount of time to realize the circle was a menu, not just a stupid logo/marketing thing.
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Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm... What about disliking unfair practices and monopolistic tendencies makes you "braindead" exactly.
You mean besides parroting a meme, operating from a simplistic generalization, and showing resistance to important details relating to the context?
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Good Lord, I agree wholeheartedly. The ribbon is nigh-incomprehensible to first time users. I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it.
Now, I don't know what it's like once you're used to it, but it didn't seem like a step forward in intuitiveness compared to the old Office menus. I don't think that I can chock that up just to me getting older and being used to the old ways.
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The ribbon is nigh-incomprehensible to first time users.
And yet, myself and other people where I work have had little to no issue picking up the ribbon when we had the opportunity to upgrade to Office 2007. Don't try to lump everyone in your claims just because you were too incompetent to learn it.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Informative)
"I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it."
That seems to imply that you're only a first time user /of that version of office/. And if that's true, then you had a hard time with it because you are probably used to the old interface, or the interfaces of similar programs. The ribbon is made to be easy to use for people who have *never used Office before*. And if you think no one is in that boat, take a look at your kids.
The fact is that the ribbon IS a much better interface than menus, and exposes options and settings that are easy to reach and understand. The ribbon is a GUI revelation, and anyone who says different is just afraid of change.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
*Actions* however are orders of magnitude more numerous. When you have to memorize an icon for every single action, it gets unwieldy. Icon graphics can only be so detailed before they are just blurs. *words* (little w) represent pretty specific ways to describe things and have done pretty well through the years me thinks.
Given Word's penchant for "everything including 5 kitchen sinks" in available functionality, it doesn't scale well to the icon/ribbon concept.
Most of this would be completely moot if MS has simply made the ribbon AN OPTION...but they force fed it to everybody. I don't want OO doing the same thing.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
with no obvious reading order
Absolutely bang on. You've hit the nail on the head with that.
The menu has a simple structure which can be understood instantly and extrapolates indefinitely. Go to the word that seems most relevant -> then to a more relevant word -> ... -> reach the exact word you were looking for. Once a user flips through a menu or two, finding any option - no matter how deep - only depends on whether the authors have made sensible organizational and linguistic choices.
The ribbon, as a wide rectangular region of varyingly sized/shaped/functional widgets - rather than a consistent tree of words - is a UI nightmare.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Informative)
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To most of the people i've shown the ribbon interface to, it wasn't even obvious that the office menu was even clickable... It just looked like a logo that was put there for decoration.
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Yes, that was me. I opened Excel, but couldn't figure out how to open a document. So, I double clicked the Excel document, and watched another instance of Excel open up, with that document in it. Read the thing, managed to diddle around with the document a little bit, then stared at the screen wondering "How the hell do I close this thing?" FINALLY, I just started clicking all over the place, and when I clicked the logo, I got a menu. I hadn't yet exhausted my supply of invective, fortunately. When I
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Because, y'know, a softly throbbing brand logo is far more likely to suggest that this is where I open and close files than, oh I don't konw, a maybe a funny little bar with text on it that says "File"! ;-)
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I'd really rather see something new and different, a genuinely innovative new interface, as different from the ribbon as the ribbon is from pull-down menus.
You might be interested in buying the new car I'm going to build. It actually has a steering wheel that works the other way around, when you turn it left you drive right and the other way around. That is SO innovative. Oh, and I switched the break and gas pedal, to get some more innovation.
Why do they have to completely change the user interface in big software products from version to version? Even before Office 2007 the "New Document..." templates first opened in an extra window, then in the sidebar, then
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, pull-down menus are pretty confusing to first-time users, too.
But they are not "in your face". People can work Word just fine without ever using the menu bar. Standard toolbars have everything for a common man. And those toolbars don't flicker on their own, so once you learn where the "Open File" button is, it's always there and the mouse movement is automatic. With ribbon you always need to look and comprehend why you see something else where another button was just a moment ago. That "feature" requires learning the whole palette of ribbons just to figure out where you are each time you need something.
Also, menus are structured far better. Everything insertable is generally under "Insert", everything about tables is in "Table" etc. In ribbons of MS Office some functions are duplicated, some are bound to the right-click event, and some are simply impossible to find. I remember looking for a footnote for 10 minutes; I did find it somewhere, but if I need to do that again I have no clue how that ribbon/button looks like.
Also, not everyone is image-oriented. There is a reason why most languages on Earth use limited character set, and why Chinese and Japanese and Korean scripts (CJK) [plus a couple more] are so hard to learn. Humans do better with fewer characters and longer words because our ability to distinguish shapes is not as good as our ability to form one complex object out of several simple ones.
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right where it logically and intuitively should be
I'm glad I'm not your analyst ;-)
Seriously though - navigation begins at the top of it to select the correct "tab" (?) then jumps to the bottom to find the right "group" (?) - assuming I picked the right tab anyway - then back up into the middle and across potentially the full width of the screen through an irregular morass of varyingly sized, shaped and colored controls some of which are buttons, some of which look like buttons but are menus, some are icons that look just decorative until you mouse over...
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Informative)
It's disallowed by MS specifically for Office-like applications. (nothing else)
I have always assumed that clause was added to gain a usability edge over OpenOffice.
So this could be interesting. *grabs popcorn*
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It's disallowed by MS specifically for Office-like applications. (nothing else)
The license is royalty-free.
It's a simple click-through agreement.
The program does not involve code or technical specifications and there are no protocols or file formats.
The license is platform-independent.
The license is available for {any application] except [those] that compete directly with the five MS Office applications that have the new UI.
Office UI Licensing Developer Center [microsoft.com]
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Informative)
Still, MS doesn't have any patents on the concepts of a ribbon.
Not yet, but that could change anytime [wikipedia.org].
Summary double-take (Score:2)
Anyone else read that line as
The blog shows a screenshot of the prototype it's a mess
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Ribbon is no good even in Windows. And isn't it patented? There's no reason Open Office needs to ape Microsoft's mistakes.
As a casual user with no time or interest to do a full OOo course (or even RTFM usually) I welcome the Ribbon UI. I understand that experienced and advanced users may not like it, but assuming that the original interface is not removed then the addition of the ribbon would certainly help weekend users like myself.
Another thing needs to be done (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Interesting)
I resisted my organization's upgrade to Office 2007 tooth and nail... I complained several times...
The IT department installed Office 2007 anyway.
And I hated the ribbon, with passion... for about two weeks, until I grudgingly admitted that, once you get used to it, it is quite easy to use and it puts the similar functions together in a intelligent way.
So yeah, I like it now
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Funny)
It's like the ending of 1984 (I kind of like ribbon, too).
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Ribbon is no good even in Windows. And isn't it patented? There's no reason Open Office needs to ape Microsoft's mistakes.
What mistakes?
Microsoft invested an incredible amount of time (and money) into usability research for the Ribbon, conducted with vast thousands of people (close to 10k, I believe) with various levels of computer literacy. The Ribbon is a result of that, and it's - objectively speaking - a massive improvement over standard Office menu hell.
Calling that a mistake is, well, a mistake.
If you have a problem with the Ribbon, it's YOUR problem, and it's statistically insignificant.
Re:How about some nice menus instead? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft probably did quite a bit of usability testing before launching Clippy...
Knew this was going to happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are absolutely correct.
Re:Knew this was going to happen. (Score:5, Informative)
It only sucks in office until OO.o can implement it.
Correct. After that, it sucks in both of them.
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1. Several global-use toolbars.
2. One specific-use adaptable toolbar.
3
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Right. After that, it sucks in BOTH Office and OO.o.
This looks like an excellent reason to pin OO to 3.0.
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How is that flamebait? It's the truth and only someone who was either blind or absolutely in denial wouldn't see that.
Yeah, Microsoft didn't come up with the ribbon interface and OpenOffice didn't copy it just now... This story is a big lie and none of this ever happened... Deny, deny, deny. Maybe it will come true.
Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:5, Insightful)
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice? When one of the big selling points of OpenOffice, among people I've talked to, is that it looks and feels more like the Office they're used to?
Please tell me they're only thinking of putting it in as an opt-in option, not as the default or only option...
Dan Aris
Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, you beat me to it.
Let's face it, most companies out there use MS Office. And most users of MS Office got used to the setup that hadn't changed in quite a while. When Office 2k7 came out, my CEO wanted it on his computer so he could test it out. As CEO, he reads/edits/writes a lot of documents.
Because of the god-awful changes, it took him quite a while to get up-to-speed. So much time, in fact, that he requested we A) not upgrade anyone else and B) remove it from his machine and put Office 2k3 back on it.
Now, he's not the most technically proficient person out there, but he's better than most (compared to average users I mean) and for him to say it was pretty eye-opening.
I can't comprehend why OOo did this. Not a good idea.
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and meetings, holy hell does he go to a metric shit-ton of meetings. Amazing fact, more than half are meetings he didn't actually set up. Weird, that. Only CEO I've ever worked for who goes to most meetings as a participant rather than the chair.
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Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the interface should be distinct from the core. They should just focus on writing a good word processing engine, and let others design user interfaces for it.
Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:4, Interesting)
They want to take what's probably the single most reviled "feature" of MS Office 2007 and put it into OpenOffice?
Do you have any evidence that the ribbon is actually reviled in mass among the majority of users or are you just wrongly extrapolating to all users based on what people on sites like Slashdot say? Plenty of people where I work absolutely love the new ribbon interface and mention how they don't want to have to go back to any previous version once they get really used to it.
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I'm extrapolating from what I hear on Slashdot, what I hear on other online sites, and what I see and hear in my own workplace and personal life.
I don't know of any scientific studies that have investigated the matter, but if you know of some proving that the ribbon is the best thing since sliced bread, please feel free to share them with us.
Dan Aris
Re:Sounds like a bad idea to me (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm extrapolating from what I hear on Slashdot, what I hear on other online sites, and what I see and hear in my own workplace and personal life.
So basically you have little to no basis to make such a sweeping claim.
I don't know of any scientific studies that have investigated the matter, but if you know of some proving that the ribbon is the best thing since sliced bread, please feel free to share them with us.
No one said that the ribbon is the best thing since sliced bread, but to claim make a claim that the ribbon is "the single most reviled "feature"" requires some actual evidence beyond what a few tech sites say. If one were to listen to what Slashdot users and other tech sites say, people were supposed to have dropped Microsoft and anything closed-source years ago and we're all supposed to be running Linux on our desktops.
May I be the first to say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Aww, *hell* no!
makes my eyeball fall out of my eyesocket (Score:5, Funny)
OO.o
out of place in non-windows OS'es? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office. It did require us to purchase all new manuals and devote a considerable amount of time to retraining our users. Perhaps that was the "goal"?
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The goal was to make the new version of Office seem "different" so that people would justify spending lots of cash on it.
Small, incremental, behind-the-scenes upgrades to a product, while truly valuable, just don't get the same "I got something for my money" reaction that a UI change does.
In short, the ribbon was a marketing ploy.
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Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office.
My theory is that it's another step in the bizarre UI design model that MS seems to have come up with, where the Windows UI is the same across every type of device (desktops, servers, tablets, handheld PCs, cellphones, etc.).
It began with them putting the Start menu on handhelds and cellphones, which IMO was a stupid idea. Som
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Okay, write the instructions for making your paper double spaced in office 2007.
Foot meet mouth.
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Open document, select text to be double-spaced, click on the lower right corner of the square named "paragraph", select "double spacing" in the third section of the menu that pops up.
There, it wasn't so hard, was it?
Underwhelming (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Underwhelming (Score:5, Informative)
I have a eeePC myself and I love the ribbon after I've minimized it, after that it works like a horizontal dropdown menu which is a plus because of the limited screen size. A minimized ribbon is actually smaller than menubars and toolbars. YMMV
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If OO.o allows me to revert to the classic UI.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is MS always aped and not OS X (Score:3, Insightful)
Optional or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
If the new UI is the only UI, I predict a lot of yelling and screaming. Changing an existing UI is never a pleasant thing.
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I remember that UI style (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'll say.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ya think? The Ribbon UI is out of place in Windows. With Outlook 2007 running on one of my screens, you couldn't come up to me and tell whether or not that window was in focus. It doesn't match anything else in windows, it doesn't look cool, and its a huge, huge step backward in usability. I finally gave up Office 97 for Open Office about a year ago, and now I just do my best to not have to use either because they're b
Re:I'll say.. (Score:4, Informative)
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He's not talking about the Ribbon interface though. He's talking about the custom window decorations that all apps (including Outlook) have in Office 2007. And he's right. None of them fit with windows XP at all and you can't easily tell which windows are active and focused because of the color.
Re:I'll say.. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, dear god! (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the Office 2007 ribbon now that I'm used to it, and the simplicity from tabbed toolbars over deep hierarchies in tall menus.
BUT... That "ribbon" in the article looks horrible! They've lost like ALL functionality but the buttons in them, and the design looks like a big step backwards. Note how Office 2007 ribbons add/remove rarely used commands as you resize the window, and crams in much more features in the space than OO.o there. I hope the end result will look nothing like in the preview. There are ribbons, and there are ribbons. :-(
What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Removing the ancient menu system altogether is more than a "shuffle" IMHO.
Oh, cool... (Score:5, Funny)
I like the ribbon, it's helped me convince people to use Open Office.
Wait, what? Ah, shit...
Keep this thing off my netbook (Score:2)
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Perhaps this is why netbooks keep increasing in size... Not enough room for "branding" the screen with useless ui components.
Re:Keep this thing off my netbook (Score:5, Informative)
If you minimize the Office 2007 ribbon, it takes the exact same amount of space as a menubar. Even when not minimized, the ribbon is smaller than the default Office 2003 toolbars. I don't know who keeps spreading this misconception, but please stop-- the ribbon uses no more pixels than the menu/toolbars it replaced.
In short, Microsoft *did* think of the small displays. You're just assuming they didn't because your head is full of misinformation from reading Slashdot.
As long as they make it optional I'm ok with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
When I started rolling out Office 2007 at a company I used to work for I was asked, often, if the ribbon could be disabled. I went to the office support site (which is something Microsoft actually has right) and started watching training videos to see which ones I should suggest to users. The first thing the video said when addressing the ribbon was you were stuck with it, can't turn it off.
I personally prefer OpenOffice.org. I have a copy of Office 2008 for my Mac that I was given, I don't even have it installed now that I don't have that job anymore, I prefer using Neo Office on my Mac, and OpenOffice.org on my Linux machines.
That being said - the interface is fine, as long as it's optional, I'm all about customization and user preference.
There's always Symphony (Score:2)
Which is better anyway.
Better behaved, better looking, and less '1995' than OO.o 3. Still uses much of the same code, still shows up as 'swriter', but smoothed out a little, so's it won't kill yo sef, but it sho will make yo ugly.
Here come the haters (Score:5, Interesting)
I know there will be a lot of "haters" regarding this. However, if the hopes of smoothly transitioning users from MS Office to OpenOffice it will need to give an option to have a similar look and feel.
To transition non-tech employees to Linux, I used an XP theme on Ubuntu. http://ubuntu.online02.com/node/14 [online02.com]
The transition was flawless.
Besides, I wonder how much money was spent by Microsoft on usability studies to come up with this interface. How much money has been spent on usability studies for OpenOffice? Might turn out to be a better way to work in the long run. Just because it is MS does not necessarily mean it is sh*t. That just seems to be the default.
Luckily... (Score:2)
... a number of other OSS word processors support Open Document, so it'll be easy to just move over to one of those. KWord would be a good choice, since it runs on Linux, Mac and Windows, and the KDE developers would never do anything so radical and alienate their core users.
Oh... wait...
It was a good idea, now find a better one ... (Score:2)
The ribbon is a good idea because it accomplishes the following:
(a) It makes features more visible. Features are easier to discover when they are visible and have multiple representations (such as text and icons).
(b) It cleans up the user interface. The ribbon cleans up the user interface by combining the menu and button bar representations into a unified representation.
(c) It encourages a workflow. Document are created in stages, since things early editing and early formatting can hinder productivity.
Looks Useful (Score:5, Interesting)
Blasphemy you say!! Well I'm an Office 2007 user so I know what the damn ribbon looks like. From what I can see is that they took the idea behind the ribbon of grouping commonly used features into clusters and unlike MS they went with large enough Icons with decent contrast to be easily visable on a high rez monitor (1280x1024+) like what I use.
So before everyone goes apeshit about this proposed change, take the damn time and actually compare the stinking ribbon with this and you'll see that the change doesn't resemble the ribbon. What I'd like to see is this being offered as an optional customization for those who appreciate its usefulness.
OSS Criticism (Score:4, Insightful)
If Windows 7 is going to implement the ribbon system-wide, it makes sense that OO.org would minimally make this an option, if not the default on the Windows release, even though I am amongst those who are not fans of the ribbon.
Good for PPT, Horrible for the rest (Score:5, Interesting)
When I finally upgraded my work computer to have Office 2007, I was having a hard time at first, but soon I came to like the new PowerPoint a lot. At this time I was doing a lot of work in PowerPoint, so it's where I got the most exposure. The main reasons I liked it were the improvements in functionality of the tools themselves and some of the new tools. Smart Art is convenient, positioning objects is much smoother, auto-formatting of slides is smarter. I can whip up a very nice looking presentation without a lot of thought about formatting. Things are pleasing to the eye without having to study color theory first, because MS did the color theory part for you with their pre-defined color schemes that have consistent values, densities and complimentary colors. Word and Excel improved on their "intelligence" too. For instance, bullets and numbering just happens instead of it being an explicit instruction. However, when it comes to ribbon, I am torn.
In PowerPoint, the ribbon works. The reason for this is that the tools you use are very task specific. If I am inserting a picture, there is a certain set of tools that I always will use with a picture, but will rarely ever use with any other task. That way, the tools I need are right in front of me, and the tools I don't are hidden. However, in Word and Excel, the tools are not as task specific and the definition of what task I'm working on is very unclear. Furthermore, the tools used are not always perfectly described by an icon, which means it becomes very hard to find what you're looking for. This is especially the case in Excel, where ther are just so many tools available to you that turning everything into an icon on a ribbon just makes it impossible to find what you're looking for.
But the more I think about it, every time I switch back to older versions of Office, I don't miss the ribbon, I miss the other improvements. I can find may way around just as fast, if not faster in the old style than with the ribbon, and I've gotten pretty used to the ribbon now. While the new UI is completely bad, it really does not improve things overall the way it claims. Like I said, PowerPoint seems to be a good fit, but even still, I get by just fine with the old style.
Stop, stop stop stop STOP! (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been developing and supporting hundreds of Open Source projects and packages for close to 20 years now... and I "get it". But can we please stop imitating, and get back to innovating? Nobody likes the "ribbon", and it just confuses users. Ask them. Ask Windows users what they prefer.
Stop imitating, start innovating. Again.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And that's exactly how much of his post you needed to read to get his message:
1. He uses OO because it doesn't have the ribbon like Office does
2. He doesn't like Office (hence the pejorative).
Seems to me that he communicated quite effectively.
Of course, you can decide that he isn't worth reading because he pokes fun of a product. If that's the case, I feel sorry for you. Plenty of insight is draped in sarcasm or stupid name-calling.
Re: (Score:2)
Open Office is to Microsoft Office as Microsoft Windows is to ...
Everything else?
Re:Nothing More Than Mac OS Floating Toolbars (Score:5, Informative)
What. The. Fuck.
They aren't even slightly alike. For one thing, it's attached to the window (floating toolbars *gasp* FLOAT). Floating toolbars generally didn't have multiple tabs of obtions in them-- I suppose there's no technical reason they couldn't have, but in my entire time using Classic Mac I never saw one. There's only one ribbon, where the typical Classic Mac app would have more than one floating toolbar. The ribbon has groups and a somewhat fluid grid layout, Classic Mac floating toolbars were just a simple grid.
Who modded this "Informative?" The ribbon is *nothing like* Classic Macintosh floating toolbars. The only similarity I can even think of it "they both have buttons."