Hi Pearl,
In part, it was to reduce future training costs and on looking at a lot of data on where people were clicking that led to the ribbon
and not including in the User Interface tools, an ability to customize it through the interface.
Part of the reasoning is that having the items in a predictable, consistent place will let folks use features that up to now they
haven't used, or didn't know they could use, because of the levels of menus to go through. (folks would, among other things, get
custom toolbars scattered across the screen apparently without knowing what to do with or about it or why they would 'pop up').
By having things in one place, the support/training costs didn't need to include scenarios such as ,
"okay if it's not on your screen turn it on by going through..."
Developers/advanced users, or folks who use a 3rd party utility, will be able to modify the ribbon, but for many folks, being able
to right click a command they use often, such as 'Paste special' and putting it on their Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) will be helpful.
For more on the Office 2007 dev teams history and design tradeoffs for the ribbon you may find their blog interesting
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh
One thing I've noticed is that folks do, once they know that the 2007 tools will be what they have to work with, is that they tend
to help each other learn with more confidence and have been using the tools (the live previews help overcome some of the 'fear' of
trying things out) that they were not using in older versions and they do 'get it' in classroom settings as well, where that is
needed.
A hope is that Admins also won't be as concerned with totally locking down the interface as they were in prior versions. It wasn't
uncommon to find that there was no ability to customize menus allowed in earlier versions for users, including limiting folks to the
incomplete menus views without the option to even seeing the full menus without clicking on each menus 'chevrons' to expand them.
=================
Ok....so how do I do that? Surely Microsoft didn't think that users would
want to be limited the choices available? This should be included in the
help instructions. The extra clicks will slow people down. Ex. If you
didn't use the keyboard shortcut for Paste Special in Excel, you'd have 3
clicks to find it through the home menu/ribbon, whereas if it was on your
pre-established toolbar it is just one. I'm finding everything to be more
clicks, and want to know how to get around it.
In all honesty, the impact of changing to the ribbon view would have been
lessened if, in the first release with it, the ribbons would have been based
on the original menu selections.
I have already calculated the training time needed to bring the 400
employees we have up to speed on the new office suite, and am finding it cost
prohibitive. It isn't the trainers time so much as all the time per employee
that will be lost learning how to use what is a drastically different product. >>
--
Bob Buckland ?
MS Office System Products MVP
*Courtesy is not expensive and can pay big dividends*
