What good is the 2007 ribbon?

[brucemc]

Honest question.

I finally think the guts of 2007 are as good as can be, relatively speaking, so I am making the transition, but so far the ribbon looks like a big waste of space without any redeeming qualities, other than for people who do not know where to find commands having them all laid out in front of them where data could be. Is the ribbon just a gimmick to make more commands obvious to new users? I am VERY interested in knowing what qualities warrant the loss of real-estate. I see plug-ins to bring back the previous style, but if this "ribbon" actually has redeeming aspects I am ignorant of, I want to know before eliminating it and possibly later regretting the choice.

If it has no redeeming qualities - there are several alternatives, including those offered by our hosts here, spanning many other items in the MS Office suite - recommendations would then be appreciated.

 

[bob733733]

Hi,
I realize this is somewhat of an older thread, but today (August 11, 2009), I was looking to Protect my Workbook.

So, I look on the Ribbon to try to figure out where Protection is. And I kept looking, and looking.

So, I did a search up here on "hate the ribbon" to see how may other people hate it.

What would be nice (in conjunction with the ribbon), is a little search bar where I could have typed in "protection" and excel switches the ribbon to that portion on the ribbon pertaining to Protection. Or possibly a Macro that would accomplish this function.

It that feasible? Possible? Worth it? And, has anyone possibly written an Addon (or macro) that could do this?

If so, how can I get it?

At least from reading this thread, I found out Ctrl F1 toggles the ribbon on/off. How could I create a little macro that would send the Ctrl F1 keys to Excel. I would put a big ole button on every worksheet that would run the RibbonToggle macro

Thanks in advance

Bob

 

[RoryA]

You might find this page useful. There's also a link to a workbook about half way down that you can search to find the locations of menu commands.

 

[SydneyGeek]

This is also good; select the 'classic' command, and an animation shows the 2007 equivalent.

Denis

 

[bob733733]

Thanks,

I downloaded both of the suggestions and will use them. I especially like the Interactive one.

Now, if they only had something like this for Functions and VB commands. I know I am using a couple of URLs for the functions (besides the Help in Excel), but am always looking for something automated (like the Interactive one is).

For example, I wanted to send a stupid little Sendkey command (sending CTRL F1 to toggle the ribbon) in a macro, and eventhough I have found several URLs describing the Sendkey, do you think I could just follow the examples? NOPE! Every try receives error messages.

It would be really great if there was an interactive capibility that I could type Sendkey and a well documented (with great examples) page came up.

Oh well....nothing is easy in this business, so I keep coming to this great forum and get answers/advice from all you great people.

Bob

 

[RoryA]

I would have said that that sounds a lot like the Object Browser and f1 to me, but 2007's VB Help files are awful IMO...