Harlan

Agreed, I just feel that many of the features on old toolbars were not
discoverable, there's many I've not found/used surely. Now whether they're
more discoverable now is questionable?? For the average to power user, it's
probably a backward step and MS 'claim' to have used data collected from the
'User Experience' program, which most experienced people 'turn off'

I've actually turned mine back on so I can moan a little more next time ;-)

I think another issue is that so much of this is non-application specific,
for example the ribbon is now 'owned' by another group. The officeMenu
(RibbonX element) is owned by the UI team across apps and even the charting
(and shapes) is partly controlled by an OfficeArt team. This explains a
reasonable amount of the inconsistencies and I believe the application teams
need more input but that could also cause decisions 'by committee which is
often bad.

Do I like it more...yes, definitely. I can get customisations done quickly
and 'safely' using ribbonX and VBA and unload them simply. (Take the
dictator app from the other day...no issue in 2007) and being a *totally*
non-design guy, (you should see how I dress), I can get great looking
documents done quickly and looking great. I could get them done quickly
before, but....

Again... MVHO and £0.02

--
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
DTHIS
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog: www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

"Harlan Grove" wrote in message
oups.com...
"Nick Hodge" wrote...
IYHO

The lack of ability to park any toolbar-like sets of icons on left,
right or bottom sides of the application window is an objective and
verifiable fact. No opinion involved. It's possible to create modeless
user forms containing objects that look like toolbar icons of old, so
rough equivalents for floating toolbars could be hacked but without
drag & drop customization.

This constitutes reduction in choice as that word is usually defined.

Only things that are matters of opinion are whether this is good or
bad and whether the old grab bag of toolabrs constituted welcome
variety or confusing bloat.