Before, you had a toolbar for frequently used commands and you could customise that to your liking. You also had the menu bar which featured every option in the program. You got to know where the options were that you liked and you added the menu items you wanted to use often to your toolbar. That was a perfect system.

Now the ribbon bar comes and I don’t know where anything is. The ribbon keeps changing all the time, I can’t keep track of where I am or what I’m doing, I keep getting confused. I don’t like the fact that it puts tabs in the window title bar. I don’t like the fact that the ribbon seems to be a set of toolbars with tabs. I don’t want a set of toolbars. I want one toolbar with menus.

I’ve always been a Microsoft fan and supported their Windows OS enormously. But since Windows 7, they seem to be intent on changing things just for the sake of it. There’s a team at Microsoft that thinks something needs changing, this is a change so we must do it. But it’s making their software worse! They don’t even seem to step back and look at what they’ve done.

The Windows 7 Superbar, I spent ages trying to get used to it as best I could but I never liked it as much as the old taskbar. I’ve tried to put the taskbar back in Windows 7 and it mostly works, but you can’t turn the window previews off, it’s very frustrating.

IE8 is another example. It’s always been feature rich with its page progress bar, proper status bar and easy downloading. Then modern Microsoft came along and ruined it with iE9. The page progress bar is scrapped, the status bar is useless and the automatic downloader tries to do everything for you, screwing it all up as it does.

Then on top of all that we get the ribbon bar. Yet another useless change that has made the software unusable for me. I don’t like Microsoft anymore, they used to set themselves apart from the competition by offering quality and ease of use over anything else. Then this “modern Microsoft” came along and now nothing seems to matter other than making your program look new and flashy, to the horror of traditional Microsoft fans worldwide.

Simple key commands from Office 2003 are gone, so one is forced to search through the ribbon to do something one didn’t even need the mouse for before.

Second, if you didn’t know the key command in 2003, you could have every possible function available to you with one-click via the toolbars, which were much more visually compact than this ribbon. It takes at least two and sometimes more clicks to do most anything in the ribbon.

It is a productivity killer.

Download this free plugin to restore the classic menus. It isn’t perfect, but it helps:
http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/

If the ribbon were that great then why are they afraid of adding a classic menu option? Everybody would be happy: Those who like to train their click finger and eye muscles could use the ribbon and those who like to have some work quickly done could use normal menu’s.

Now thag go search for menu app like Louiellen.

In other words, ribbon sucks….

Change happens. Get over it. I remember when people were complaining about the menu system when it was coming out.