Ribbon Interface
Posted on 03 January 2010
I’m a bit late to the game here, but after reformatting my computer to officially upgrade to Windows 7, and installing OpenOffice because I don’t want to deal with Office 2007 licensing, I realized how much I prefer the ribbon interface.
I looked around briefly to see if there was a “skin” or something similar for OO since it’s open source nature lends itself to that sort of thing. Alas, nothing to be found but rumors of Sun Microsystems working on a ribbon interface of their own.
Which was an enlightening discovery since reading the comments and reviews revealed almost universal rancor towards the ribbon interface – an attitude I fail to understand or agree with.
To me, the ribbon interface represents a logical solution to a big problem (especially with word-processors), namely feature-creep. There does not need to be a button for every function since there are so many. I don’t need four different visible buttons for left, center, right and justify. Of course I don’t believe the ribbon interface is necessarily appropriate for every suite and program available to the PC, but there is something to be said for a design standard.
So I guess for anyone reading this I’d like to hear your thoughts.
For me it’s a matter of two things, screen space and conventions. Ever since I started using computers so many years ago, programs have put functions into menus across the top of the app. Even going back to DOS days, it was that way (with the interface driven DOS apps like wordperfect, not command line stuff). I don’t use toolbars very much. In a default Word install, I always spend a few minutes removing all the crap from the toolbars, and stripping my interface down to one toolbar and the menu bar. With the ribbon, I can’t do that. It takes up about three toolbars worth of vertical screen space, and it doesn’t really show me more than I had before. Each tab of the ribbon only has a handful of options available by default, and you can’t really customize it very well (at least not to the level I’d be comfortable with). So to find the options I need, I still have to click around in the Ribbon (just like clicking around in drop down menus), so for me it’s not an enhancement. It’s just a different way to do the same thing, and it’s not an improved way.
I don’t hate the ribbon, I’ve gotten used to it. I just don’t see it as better than what we had before. Why fix what’s not broken?
I just found the ribbon more intuitive than the dropdowns were. I never had to wonder what menu it was under – it was just so logical I couldn’t possibly complain about it.
Sure, every program since the beginning of time has had the same top drop-down menu, and I often subscribe to the “don’t reinvent the wheel” mentality, but without rethinking some things, there’s no innovation.
I think what it comes down to is three decades of old-style menus engrained in peoples’ minds, and the overall resistance to change.
I, too would trim down the menu bar to streamline it, but I still find the ribbon to be cleaner and far less visually jarring than the old-school toolbars.
I agree, it’s good to innovate away from old conventions, when necessary. But is the ribbon bar an innovation? I think that’s debatable. You said you never have to wonder where things are, but I often can’t find options that I used to know where to find. Not simple things like text formatting, but things in Outlook like “Edit Message”, or freeze panes in Excel. Maybe it’s just me, but I had a hard time finding those and other infrequently used options. They don’t really fit well into the categories that Microsoft chose for the tabs, so they just had to stick them somewhere. Admittedly, the same problem exists for drop down menus, but at least with the old way I knew were things were.
I guess my biggest beef is that the ribbon is so freaking large, and that you can’t customize it as well as the old toolbars.
That’s fair I suppose.
There should be an option to revert to the old menu style at the very least. But for the average user (those who don’t use the advanced functions) I think the ribbon is probably great.
Would be nice to be able to customize the ribbon too – though I haven’t found it necessary due to the resolution of my monitors.
It’s the lack of customization that kills me. If I want to move a button from here to there, I cannot. If I want to hide a button I never use, I cannot. The most devastating thing is the inability to add my own tools. In Excel 2003, I hid the Standard and Formatting toolbars, and replaced them with two bars (one on top, and one on the left) with an entire suite of tools specifically designed buy our team to drive our spreadsheets with a bare minimum of clicks.
That’s gone now. It’s not that I can’t find how to do normal Excel stuff (but that is a LOT harder, and always has more clicks than before), and it’s not that I’m resistant to change (I don’t use menus all that much anyway). But cutting off my superuser tools for the convenience of some novice users – that’s what switched me back to Excel 2003. Sure, I can use the QAT, but that is limited in size. There is not enough room on there to do what we need.
I’ve always been a huge Microsoft fan – but they abandoned me now, and I can’t be supportive until they let me customize my interface again, like I have for so many years.