On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:46:15 -0700, "Jim Cone"
wrote:

[snip]

I read some recent statistics that estimated 40% of Office users have made the switch to the Ribbon.
That still leaves 60% of us who haven't had to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road.
The commercial "Extras" add-in I offer, when installed on xl2007+, includes a classic menubar &
toolbars under the Add-ins tab.
It has made my life easier.

Yup, I tried those add-ons. Hah, what a joke. I had even _more_
buttons to cycle through to get to the classic menu and then to get to
the bits that were my own toolbars and nothing was in the right place.
Ugh! The power of my toolbars was completely lost.

What I'd love to see (hear this Micro$oft!!) is to have the ability to
switch the ribbon off COMPLETELY and get back the classic menu with
our own customizations EXACTLY as we had it before for those of us who
want to do that. Give people the option. That's the only way to
retian the power users such as myself.

The ribbon has very little advantage over the classic menu. Sure,
it's visually based rather than text based and all the new generations
won't know any different but you get no advantages in speed. You
still need to click in twenty million places. At least in the old
versions, you had the power to customize to the nth degree even
placing your own icons wherever the he11 you wanted them and then
attaching macros when the feature was not natively available. So the
older versions allow us to get the fastest interface possible. And is
it difficult to do? Not.

I don't doubt that with complex programming XML or whatever the QATs
are based on, people can come up with customizations, but the measly
little bit of room the QATs provide is nothing. I have 5 extra
toolbars on both my Word and Excel, with 1 or 2 parallell bars running
on either side in each. And the icons I've standardized in all
applications, including PowerPoint and WordPerfect so that all
functions that are identical carry the same icon across the board in
all the apps.

Ah well. Fortunately, one of my possible futures is to work at my own
business and I certainly then won't have these limitations. Since my
output work will be published in graphics form and PDF, I can work in
practically any app I want. I imagine WordPerfect and OpenOffice will
keep up with PDF technology so they should remain as options, too.
And anyway, may just decide to publish text/graphics in graphic format
such as gif or jpg anyway.

Anyway, time will tell how M$ recovers from this blunder. <g