Office 2007 ribbon gone, now let’s restore the keyboard shortcuts
On Microsoft’s wise decision to roll back the ribbon in Office 2007, Marc Orchant argues: “The fact is, it’s smaller than the menu and toolbar setup in Office 2003 by 5-8 pixels.”
Marc, that’s a goddamned lie and you know it. Here’s proof of a 47 pixel difference (even in the beta 2 version of Office 2007)
or this one:
where the ribbon clearly takes up a menu bar, two stretched out toolbars, and one category/label bar — that’s equivalent to the menu bar plus three toolbars in 2003, and that’s 47 extra pixels the Office 2007 ribbon needs over the Office 2003 toolbars! I’m just happy someone listened to me (and many others). But you cannot argue how much text/page space the ribbon eats up. It’s ridiculous. The ribbon had to be devised for non-typists, for monkeys who can’t use keyboard shortcuts but can pick out a picture. It’s ugly, fat, and unnecessary.
Now if we can just fix terrible shortcut keys in 2007 — they obscure the very item you’re trying to find, such as document names in the recent files menu! What the hell is this garbled mess? Why not use underlined letters? Oh that’s right — they’d make sense! They worked for fifteen years, but now they’re out of “style?” Look at this nasty crap.
Any way you slice it, that’s ugly. Fight keyboarders, fight for your keyboard shortcuts goddamnit!