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Whoa, this gal hates MS Office 2010 -- 5 Reasons Why You Don't Need It

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Josh:
In Office 2010 you can customize the ribbon to your liking, a one time task unless you change the way you work quite often. Also, the office applications are smart enough to detect when you are working in a section that requires different functionality. If you are working on something that requires another feature, you would have had to click through another menu anyways to get it. The ribbon actually makes it EASIER using keyboard shortcuts, something I have taught my user and increased their productivity exponentially. Hitting the ALT key displays an associated shortcut key for the ribbon tab and then hitting one of those keys displays shortcut keys for the remaining functions on the tabs. Once you learn a few basic shortcut keys, you will learn how to quickly access functions.

I wish thunderbird had the ribbon, firefox too. I am sick of not being able to "ALT N-F" to attach a file or "ALT N-P" to insert an inline picture.

f0dder:
I was pretty skeptical about the ribbon before I gave it a decent try, and I have to admit I've come to like it. For the way I use Office, I find that the "focused" view it offers is much more convenient than always having a zillion icons on the toolbar, or having to go hunt endless cascaded layers of menus. And when I'm doing bulk writing, I can hide the ribbon to maximize screen real estate.

That said, it's silly when developers adopt the ribbon just for the sake of using the newest MS feature. It simply doesn't make sense in a regular text editor, and I find it to be overkill in MSPaint as well. But for Office, you can't use it as a general argument the suite, since a lot of people like it and it's really a personal preference kinda thing.

As for the rest of the summarized points (can't be bothered to RTFA), well... yeah, there's free alternatives, and they might work just fine if you only have simple needs. But if you have to do document exchange, you're SOL if you need to process anything but the simplest .doc or .docx documents. If you do VBA developing, the OOo offering sucka compared to the debugger and help integrated in MS-Office (which isn't even that hot compared to visual studio).

While I'm not that big a fan of SharePoint (the system implemented for our school was so poor that we had to dismiss it after a semester or two - probably not SP's fault but sucky developers developing a crap system around SP), suggesting that you can just copy/paste instead of doing a proper save is ridiculous... c/p a couple hundred of pages, great idea? I think not. Besides, what would that do to version tracking?

And dismissing simultaneous editing, heh. The author is describing a people management problem, not a problem with the feature. Yeah, great dismissing a program feature because you and your co-workers are disorganized, non-communicating clobbermonkeys :)

Tuxman:
I am sick of not being able to "ALT N-F" to attach a file or "ALT N-P" to insert an inline picture.
-Josh (July 26, 2010, 06:40 AM)
--- End quote ---
There's the keyconfig extension for Tb and Fx. Works exactly this way without scrambling your UI.  :up:

Josh:
I agree f0dder. It is quite silly to adopt the ribbon just for the sake of it. The ribbon becomes useful in applications where you have countless menus to sort through. It exposes functionality once hidden to the user interface. I forget where I read it, but I do believe Adobe is toying with the ribbon for it's suite of applications.

And tux, I use keyconfig, it is in no way a substitute for what I want to do.

Tuxman:
Of course it is, at least regarding your complaint about missing default hotkeys.

BTW:

It simply doesn't make sense in a regular text editor, and I find it to be overkill in MSPaint as well.
--- End quote ---

So why should it make more sense in a web browser then?

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