I hate ribbons

Early in my career, I was tasked with turning the books and methodologies of James Martin into a CD ROM product. I think the final package that I used was called Movie Maker, and it provided a hypertext linked book before hypertext had been invented.

A step along the way in Movie Maker was to fit the many, many Word documents with special characters. This was 1990, so it had to be Word for Windows version 1.0. I wrote a slew of macros, and those macros were tedious keyboard control things (search for the end of the page, search backwards for a period, right arrow twice, type '#code#').

So anyway, Word and I go way back. I have come to believe that Word stopped improving in 98 and actively went in decline from its highpoint in Word 2003. I can sort of see why - what's left to do but change stuff around? I haven't had any new word processing use cases in 15 years.

So they took a fully-baked product and overbaked it with feature bloat, and then they moved everything around into the awful ribbon interface.

Egads, who could like such a thing? For starters, even though I am a Styles junkie, I know from other people's documents, as well as training them, that most people don't have a clue about Styles. It's so bad that I've had to show administrative assistants (who really should know this stuff) that they can have an automated table of contents created for them if they only use styles. But in document after document, I see headings being format  "Normal+bold+italic+14point".

So what does Microsoft do? Why they take up the same amount of space that the entire button toolbars used to take up for this gigantic styles display. And yet people still aren't using styles! Headers and Footers are on the Insert tab, and not Page Layout. Themes, which nobody uses but is at least a close cousin to Styles is also over on the Page Layout tab. You don't go to Insert, Table to insert a table of contents; no, you need to go to References. Over there on References, the TOC is about the only useful thing. I can't remember the last time I used a footnote or endnote, and I'll be damned if I know what a "Table of Authorities" is, although it sure sounds ominous. Cross Reference is over there too in the captions area, but there's another cross-reference on the Insert tab, links area. I ask you - when was the last time you put a cross-reference in your Word document? Do you even know what it is?

I'm sure part of my agita arises from being an expert in the old interface. AndvI know I'm not alone, because you can get some add-ins to help restore that old interface. But the ribbon is so ubiquitous now, embedded into Outlook, all of Office and even SharePoint, that there's little sense in fighting it.

The only thing that may bring me around to liking the Ribbon is as a tablet interface. That giant waste of space seems like it was custom-made for the stabbings of fat fingertips.