coderanger.com blog

news about what I am developing and other random thoughts

Office Ribbon broken IMO

Having installed the latest Office on a new laptop for my wife I am absolutely dumbfounded at some of the design decisions with it.

As my wife said, “how do I open a document or even create a new document?” … hmmm you have to click the weird logo in the top left to get a menu of commands with the things you want. Don’t ask me why the clipboard operations have been given pride of place on the left side of the main ribbon tab, most people never use them as those that know about the clipboard (and a lot of people do not) would use the keyboard, either way there should be “New”, “Open” and “Save” with Save being a nice big priority button.

“How do I save the document to a different place” … sorry again you have to go the weird logo menu thing.

“Is there any way to turn off the smart quote things as they cause problems with our computer system” … oh this is a toughie, you have to customise the toolbar strip (at the top above the ribbon) and add the “AutoCorrect Options” command yourself; then you can click the new button and edit the options, after which you will probably want to remove it again.

Then Word still has the horrible image handling, I remember working on the great word processor for the Commodore Amiga called Wordworth by Digita and we had much better and more intuitive graphic handling within documents … Word is just horrible and so messy to use!

Rant over, but I pity anyone who has to show someone how to get to grips with Office now, eek!