Microsoft Office 2007 - “The Ribbon”
Taking a first look at the functional layout of Microsoft Office 2007
As Don Norman says; “the biggest problem in design is keeping features out”. Bloated “featuritis” is in full flower in Microsoft Office, to the extent that your friendly Office suite has many more controls than a Boeing 747 cockpit.
One way of coping with such complexity would be to reduce to essential features, but there is already free software that does that. So Microsoft is faced with the problem of finding a better menu system. The tabbed interface is a good approach to that problem, allowing larger interface components in an intuitive layout.
Office 2007 does have some “change for the sake of change” starting with the desktop icons. They’re less readable and intuitive, but they are pretty. The situation improves once you figure out which icon to click on and get the application started.
Notice the tabs beginning with Home, Insert, Page Layout, Mailings, Review, View, and Add-ins. Click on each tab and the whole ribbon switches to that function. It’s much more intuitive and easier on the eyes than the old menus.
One quibble: all the functions of the File menu are hidden behind the Office logo at upper-left, which keeps blinking all the time unless your document is saved. Also I wonder if conversations at Microsoft are just exchanges of concept icons instead of using words now. Because there’s no “Help” menu either, only a 
icon.
Repeat after me, Microsoft: “F-i-l-e” and “H-e-l-p”.
When you click on style and color swatches, a huge matrix drops down showing visual examples. It is a super-quick way to restyle the whole document. This is probably great for the beginning user but the more experienced user will also learn to open the “Change style” dialog next to it.
The whole get-up leaves LOTS of room for your content, which is well-differentiated from the ribbon menu. On the whole, I would say the “Ribbon” is a major advance in interface design. Good job, Microsoft.
Notes: if you click on the partial image above, you will get a full-length picture of the “Ribbon”. But if your browser tries to shrink-to-fit, it will be distorted and difficult to read. Either turn that odious feature off, or right-click the resulting image to select “view full size”.
Hmmm. Don’t know if I like it. But maybe that’s just the “No More Microsoft” streak in me.
Posted by WeeDram on 05/12/07 at 01:32 PMThat’s Microsoft for you; if they put, like, a billion dollars into an interface problem, they’ll probably come up with at least one good idea.
Posted by george.w on 05/12/07 at 10:20 PMI liked the time I saved by having icons for the features I used the most one mouse-click away, rather than on a drop down menu I had to sit on or pull down further to find what I wanted. The icon for superscript (typing equations) was cause for celebration!
Posted by Justice on 05/13/07 at 12:58 AMI found the interface very friendly….specially the feature which lets me minimize the menu which was eating up half of my screen space…
The best thing though is that I didnt see the annoying pin trying to tell me that I was probably writing a letter…..
Atleast not till now….
Donno how the non-technical users would recieve the totally new interface but I like it in word…Not sure about the access interface though…still trying to understand why my backend VB code would change and add references to the new classes even when I open it to view it…:(
Did you notice that the files are being saved in a new format by default…which is different from doc and is not compatible with lower versions of microsoft….
Surprise surprise…microsoft is not compatible with microsoft !!!!
Posted by Abhilasha Sharma on 05/14/07 at 10:32 AMWell, it was high time for Microsoft to move to an XML document format as the definition of a “document” changes and the usage moves to various hypertext applications. So what did Microsoft do? They used the exciting new ODF XML format being adopted around the world, right?
Ha-Ha! No of course not. They cobbled up their own XML format to compete with the new standard.
Posted by george.w on 05/14/07 at 10:38 AM
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