Ribbon Bar - Office 2007 and up - Total Crap!
Recently, I had the unfortunate experience of helping someone with a Word document. Unfortunate, because the person had Office 2007 on their machine. All she wanted to do was PRINT. That's right...here's what the screen sort of looked like:
So...how do you print? If you were a first time user and you opened a document and this is what the interface looked like, what would you do?
Thrash around for a few minutes getting more and more frustrated until you want to grab Bill Gates by the ears and smash his head through your monitor? No? Maybe that's just me.
How about searching vainly, avoiding Help because, frankly, it should be FUCKING OBVIOUS!
Do you think it's in the View bar? Page Layout? Nope, and nope.
See that colourful little ball in the top left of the screen. Yup. You click THAT and this opens:
Then you select Print, then click one of the Print options. Wow...how intuitive.
For fun, go to google and search for "how do you print in word 2007" (try it without the quotes, otherwise you are looking for an exact string). Now, when people have to ask how to PRINT in a Word Processing application, time to go back to the drawing board.
Oh, the wanks and apologists will tell us that we just need to "leeearrrnnnn" it and all will be well. Take a course to learn how to PRINT. Brilliant.
You voluntarily bought this piece of shit...you're an idiot.
So...how do you print? If you were a first time user and you opened a document and this is what the interface looked like, what would you do?
Thrash around for a few minutes getting more and more frustrated until you want to grab Bill Gates by the ears and smash his head through your monitor? No? Maybe that's just me.
How about searching vainly, avoiding Help because, frankly, it should be FUCKING OBVIOUS!
Do you think it's in the View bar? Page Layout? Nope, and nope.
See that colourful little ball in the top left of the screen. Yup. You click THAT and this opens:
Then you select Print, then click one of the Print options. Wow...how intuitive.
For fun, go to google and search for "how do you print in word 2007" (try it without the quotes, otherwise you are looking for an exact string). Now, when people have to ask how to PRINT in a Word Processing application, time to go back to the drawing board.
Oh, the wanks and apologists will tell us that we just need to "leeearrrnnnn" it and all will be well. Take a course to learn how to PRINT. Brilliant.
You voluntarily bought this piece of shit...you're an idiot.
Comments
Btw, one of the first tricks I teach my students is to right click on "Quick Print" and "Add to Quick Access Toolbar" so that it shows up right next to the Save icon.
Oh and to MS defense, I persnally think that Access 2007 is actually a slight improvement over the old interface. Everything else sucks though.
I was just looking online to see if MS had provided a way to turn the menus back on and had a good laugh when I found other companies SELLING software to activate the standard menu structure.
I voted with my feet on both Office 2007 and Vista. In much less time than it would take me to find a couple of features in the Microsoft "Ribbon", I've migrated to Open Office. I deinstalled Vista and have been slowing moving over to Linux so I am no longer subject to the whims of an arrogant, insular company like Microsoft.