What good is the 2007 ribbon?

brucemc

New Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2003
Messages
33
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.
 

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The best part about the 2007 Ribbon is that you can "Cycle it ON/Off" by hitting Ctrl-F1.
Then you get the best of both worlds, space for your work and a fairly comprehensive menu.
 
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Welcome to the Board!

The Ribbon represents a unified front by Microsoft to create a new feel for all Office applications and believe me, it's not going away.

Here's a series of aticles by Microsoft's Jensen Harris' expalining the decision to adopt the new look/functionality:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/category/11720.aspx

Personally I can't stand the **** thing as I have never been a mouse oriented user, but I have heard many people comment that once you get used to it, it's pretty intuitive. Unfortunately I'm not there yet.
 
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Thank-you. It looks like a tremendous waste of space to me, intuitive or not, but perhaps I will use it, become good at it and then once I am good at it, then trash it.

I am looking forward to reading their rationale from your link now.

It's probably a great idea if you work for MS and have theater sized monitors, but then for the rest of us with regular sized screens... They at very least could come up with some form of collapsible bar to get it out of my face when I don't need to look at it.
 
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Having the menu bar out of sight is how I work in Excel 2003. The only toolbar I use is the default standard one & even that I drag out of the way into a corner so that the minimum section of it is visible. It is as close as I can get to working without any toolbars: mouse use is pretty minimal. Been using the keyboard for too long now. Excel 2007's ribbon puts me off changing (to Excel 2007) ...
 
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The Ribbon idea is definitely here to stay, and other software companies are using it too. SnagIt 9, for instance, has the Ribbon. And I understand that Windows 7 will use it extensively too.

I agree, it uses a lot of room but I like the contextual tabs that appear for charts, pivot tables etc. I still tend to use mouse commands most of the time so I'm sort of in limbo.

Once you get your head around modifying it you get much more predictable behaviour from custom menus in add-ins, for example. And you don't need to write reams of code to make the customisations disappear when you shut that workbook or add-in.

Some good, some bad, but it's going to be the main interface for a while to come.

Denis
 
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OK, so with Ctrl-F1 providing a kind of auto-hide mode, and after reading the history of menus, I see this as potentially viable. Now, have they done anything new to the VBA editor, or VBA in general, that will send me into a panic when I come across it late one night trying to hammer out a need-it-yesterday solution to something?
 
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The VBE is pretty well identical. There have been changes to the object model (there always are) but the most significant are:

1. You can no longer use Application.FileSearch to loop through files in a directory. The object has been "hidden". You best alternative is Dir.
2. Charts and pivot tables were completely rewritten so the code has changed.

Pretty well everything else I have come across is the same. There are some new worksheet functions that you can take advantage of but I haven't used them yet, because they won't work in earlier versions.

Denis
 
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You can no longer use Application.FileSearch to loop through files in a directory. The object has been "hidden".

Actually that was a mistake by the VBA team. They didn't think anyone used it anymore and removed it without checking. It will/should be back in Office 14.

And don't expect the VBE interface to change much, MS isn't going to dedicate any time to upgrading it, only continuing to support added/changed functionality in newer versions of Office.
 
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