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Mitchell Ashley

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Duct Tape for Office Ribbon Menus Failures

By Mitchell Ashley on Thu, 05/15/08 - 1:50am.

. What's this?

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.

Like this? Here are some of Mitchell's recent posts. Why 1984 won't be like 1984 for HP/EDS Blackberry Bold Staves Off Business iPhone Migration Vista Crashes Big, And Why I Wish It Was Five Years From Now Is Cisco Unloading To Pump Up The Numbers? Sun Hydrazine - Rocket Fuel vs. Live Mesh
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About Converging on Microsoft

Mitchell Ashley has a diverse background in software development, network engineering, information security, mobility, collaborative technologies, and IT management and operations. An early adopter of social media in business, he began blogging about security and information technologies in 2006 at theconvergingnetwork.com. Mitchell is VP of Information Technology at CableLabs in Louisville, CO, and previously held positions as CIO, CTO and VP Engineering at prior companies.