I recently upgraded my mother's PC to Office 2007. She's not exactly a savvy user but was somewhat familiar with the older MSO interface and was completely lost. I had to keep listening to her complain till I relented and rolled it back to Office 2003.

Funny thing is, after I did I actually found myself envying her! I'm not a regular Office user and I've found myself fumbling on several occasions trying to perform what would have been complete no-brainer tasks on older Office versions. I miss the old menu-toolbar interface that I spent years getting familiar with and I completely HATE the ribbon. It's like MS swept the carpet from under my feet.

The only reason I haven't gone back to Office 2003 is coz I'm assuming the ribbon is here to stay and since I have made the leap I may as well stick with it so I can get used to it. Is there any news regarding future versions of Office? Do people actually like this monstrosity? At the very least they could have given us a swappable interface so people who were not comfortable with the ribbon weren't forced to use it. This seems more like a carefully calculated decision made by the finance department at MS rather than the technical one. What do those of you who've tried the ribbon interface feel?

Tried out quite a few programs here and GreatNews seems to be head and shoulders above the rest. I've noticed a dramatic increase in speed over FeedDemon (I'm subbed to the same feeds in both) - & it optionally synchs with Bloglines (which I prefer to NewsGator).

One would expect a program that's so quick to be simplistic in its functionality, but it's not! It has just the right array of features, IMO. The only thing I miss is the Expando viewing style provided by FeedDemon and I've requested for the same on their official forum.

All in all a very well crafted software, I urge anyone with more than a handful of feeds to give it a try.

Thanks to everyone who replied.

I've been using FeedDemon and though I love the functionality it provides it's a complete resource hog. I'm subscribed to around 50 feeds.  FeedDemon, though almost perfect, does a lot more that I want it to.

I'm interested in trying out other standalone RSS readers (not web-based ones or Firefox plugins)

The only things that matters are:
 - It should have a well designed user interface (ie. not too much of a pain to navigate)
 - It should be relatively light on resources coz I have my feed reader running all the time.