Re: Quite rightly
The trouble I have is that whilst I prefer the menu UI of 2003, the 2007 versions of Excel, Outlook, Visio and Project contain some notable functional improvements...
Tis true, they do. For my use case those improvements are outweighed (by a country mile) by the detrimental effects of The Fucking Ribbon™. Constantly flicking back and forth between tabs just takes time. I used to customise the toolbars so that all the commands I needed were visible all the time. I can't do that with the ribbon, the buttons are too big and there are commands that don't exist any more. EG the alignment options in Visio, I use them a lot so it is a PITA that they are in a nested turdbiscuit¹ requiring multiple clicks for one action. You cannot customise the ribbon to have the alignment tools as 1 click buttons, the commands don't exist. Nor can you get round that omission by making macros and tying them to ribbon buttons.
In Excel I don't use styles as they fall apart but I can't get rid of styles thingummy from the ribbon on the Home tab. It gives me visual indication of when Excel is creating styles (meaning the styles list is imploding and I need to clean it before my file is totally corrupt) so it has to stay. Nor can I make it smaller. Nor can I add buttons of a sensible size to the Ribbon.
Pivot tables are improving, conditional formatting² is much more powerful and so are other things I use but the every day inconveniences are simply dominant.
¹ Thing that's a button on the ribbon that expands out into a non intuitively arranged set of nested buttons in a menu like structure. But that's a mouthful so turdbiscuit is the name now.
² A constantly imploding disaster in 2007 but good from 2010 on.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
