Want to know how easy to use the new ribbon menus are in Microsoft Office 2007? Microsoft's Office Labs group created a command search plug-in feature for Office 2007 so you can search for the command you can't visually locate on the ribbon menus. Excuse me, but what's wrong with this picture? That's like handing a lit match to a man holding a can of gasoline in a dark room who's asking for a light because it's too dark in there to see. Doh!
I'm sure the command search Office plug-in is a handy tidbit that modestly improves a severely flawed UI design, but... Wrong solution to a problem that can't be fixed with just a patch job. Ribbon menus need to go in the round file, and the Microsoft UI menu designers head back to the drawing board.
Here's a better idea. If ribbon menus are such a badly designed UI element they require a search feature to find menu selections, how about just drop the menus and icons all together. Just gives us a command line and we'll enter what we want to have done there. That would at least save one click for every click-search-click menu command.
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Mitchell Ashley is CEO and Chief Strategist of Converging Network, LLC, providing product and technology strategies to emerging technology companies. A serial entrepreneur, Mitchell has created many successful products and services in the networking, security, convergence, Internet and IT industries. In addition to blogging for NetworkWorld, Mitchell regularly blogs at TheConvergingNetwork and co-hosts the widely popular Still Crazy After All These Years podcast.
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