Re: Am I the only one who likes the Ribbon interface?
The point was that it threatened to transform an entire generation of power users into unskilled noobs overnight. In response, the vast majority stuck with what they knew and remained productive. They're not paid to "use Microsoft software". They are paid to get a job done
Thank you, couldn't have said it better myself. There is a process with power users: they mine for more features that make their life easier and become even faster and more proficient with the package. In other words, they are the happy few that derive more value from the software than the average user (for instance, they also use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse).
I have spent a good 20 years writing documentation, the last part more on repairing the stuff others cooked up (ironically, by using OpenOffice - Word has a *serious* problem when it comes to cut & paste if you accidentally drag formatting commands along). Astonishingly, I am NOT a touch typer, but I was *seriously* fast in repairing documents - until those idiots in Redmond came up with this ribbon rubbish.
I have effectively stopped using Word after that - I now mostly work in OpenOffice (didn't get on with LibreOffice for some reason - will test the v4 release shortly) and only load in a doc into Word for finishing. Otherwise I don't touch it, although I could really, really do with the "return to last cursor position Shift-F5" feature in Word, but the feature request is still sitting there untouched. As a matter of fact, the Navigator in OOo beats the living crap out of the Document Map in Word - it's FAR more flexible - so for larger documents it's simply easier, also because it doesn't crash so often. And it doesn't matter what I use as base platform, Windows, OSX or Linux, which helps too.
Oh, and Excel? I stopped using that years ago because I work a lot with languages, and when I stopped using it they were still stupid enough not to tokenise formulas. That means a cell containing the German "=SUMME(A2:A6)" would not work in my English version which was expeting "=SUM(A2:A6)". I'm not sure from what planet the fools were who dreamt that one up, but they should never be left near anything more complex than a blackboard and chalk ever again.
Of course, YMMV, but for me, MS lost the plot quite some time ago.