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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