Don't Like the MS Office Ribbon? Bring Back Proper Menus.

What it boils down to is CHOICE! You can argue till you're blue in the face folks, but those of you who can't accept that users want choice simply want to force their _own_ opinions and choices on people who _do_ want it! If someone wants an older interface, who are you to argue differently?!? And how dare you do so. Each of us works differently and we all just want what works best for each of us.

I've gone through many, many versions of Office as so many others have done here, I'm sure. Yet its the ribbon that I hate the most. It's completely ludicrous. Its slow and clunky and reduces my speed incredibly. I've lost ONE-BUTTON access to all the commands I use repeatedly. And my custom toolbars included things that MS had never bothered to add in its basic interfaces before that while are now included don't even do as fully as my macros did (still do at home, of course). Customizing the toolbar AND THE ICONS FOR IT was a breeze in older versions. All saved to a tiny file I've carried around for years and that fit on a single floppy a decade ago and that now take up a tiny, tiny space on my usb flash drive.

Of course, Office 2007+ shure is real perdy, and if that's all everyone wanted, it would wins hands down. But it's not about eye candy or what looks aesthetically more pleasing but what allows us to work in the manner we need - and for me that means speed and efficiency which is missing in the new Office versions even after cutsomizing the severely limited QATs. Heck, we've also lost the power of CommandBars as they get pinned to the ribbon in later versions and we've completely lost their power now that they don't float anymore! No, the ribbon is a complete joke. Yet I wouldn't care if I had a choice!

Thank god for Kierans simple addin for Excel and wish I had that type of complete ribbon suppression to the old menu with PowerPoint and the other Office apps. No, not ideal at all since I've still lost the one-button speed I had before, but at least everything is more logically put together instead of having to click all over the ribbon for things that used to be under same menu if you did have to go the menu route (i.e., COPY>PASTE in the ribbon anyone?! Ha!)

Being forced to move backwards in speed and efficiency is the type of thing we object to. MS expects us to accept change at any cost and that type of autocracy is unacceptable to me. It always forces its ways onto users no matter what. And MS is proving to get worse at that as it goes along, not better. So perhaps biggest lesson MS needs learn is to change for the better by starting to listen to what a broad base of customers want and need and to provide choices. That would be a change I would embrace unreservedly.

Hello, do you still hate the Ribbon? I do! Anything about it is awful, especially how much space it takes from 'wide' screens. And even in 2012 I am confronted with so many users (at a school, hundreds of them) who are not able to find what they need. Unto Office this situation was not possible: you simply told them where they can find the command. This was valuable for ALL of them. But now the 'dynamic' menu is DIFFERENT in it's arrangement on every screen. But most annoying is loosing so much space - and no, it is NOT comfortable to hide it so that every seconds I need it the hole thing is coming/hiding, this is so horrible, an ergonomic disaster, causing headache. - And soon we will face Windows 8 with still more hidden menus.

I use both the PC and a Mac and it's interesting that Office 2011 for Mac does give you an option to use the ribbon or the original style menus. Baffles me why they don't have that in Office 2010 as well. I find the ribbon cluttersome and in the way. Nothing wrong with offering choice.

The problem is that the new UI, while it may (or may not) be nice for the majority of people, tends to slow down the some of the MOST PRODUCTIVE users of the older version (i.e., those who memorized and used the KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS).

It's good that, for the most part, the Fluent UI recognizes the 'menu key sequences' (as Microsoft calls them) from Office 2003. But one of the most compelling user-friendly features of the old menus was the highlighting/underlining of the menu shortkeys in the menus themselves. In this way, I could EASILY learn the shortcuts to things that I haven't previously used or used infrequently before. Now, there is no helpful indicator on the Ribbon that tells me the command for "Format / Sheet / Rename" for example.

The most productive PC users are the ones who rarely touch the pointing device (mouse, touchpad) and who learn the key sequences instead. Microsoft has taken most of that away.

The ribbon is an absolute waste of space. I hate it. I will not use it. I will not upgrade to office 2007 or windows 7. I will stay with office 2000/2003 and windows XP on every computer of mine until such a time as those idiots at microsoft pull their heads out of their behinds and put things back to how they should be.

The issue about the ribbon for me is not that I can or cannot get used to it. I suppose we can get used to anything. The problem is productivity. The move to the ribbon hurt my productivity in 4 significant ways. 1) the Ribbon was completely new and I had a lot of down time trying to find all the important commands that I need for my work. This issue would become less important as I learned the new system. 2) Some very important commands are no longer found anywhere on the ribbon and I have to design my own custom quick access toolbar. I quickly ran out of toolbar space for all the complex macros that I wanted to have tools for. No real solution there. 3) Many of the commands I use regularly for layout tasks now require several more clicks to get to. There is no fix for this productivity hit with the ribbon. 4) The ribbon takes up real-estate, even though it can be hidden. Each time you use the ribbon your real-estate disappears again.
I have begun moving to Open Office in place of MS Office. The ribbon was the main motivating factor.

Microsoft also has some transition help - some quick reference guides in Excel format, and some interactive programs to run as live tutorials to hep find things

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/guides-to-the-ribbon-use-office-2003-menus-to-learn-the-office-2007-user-interface-HA010229584.aspx

Since my employer switched to Office 2007, I have had no choice. I have learnt where to find things now, and in fact I think it is quite OK. But of course I use the auto hide option - I want to see as much text / spreadsheet etc. as possible instead of the space consuming ribbon.

great find Gizmo. Thank you. I just installed this piece of software and I like it, although, I would be thrilled if I could save even more screen real estate. I do not need any of the written words, (two) menu bars, I do not want to see any empty space in the menu and below the menu- waste of precious space. Also, I would have liked to be able to customize my menu the way I used to do it before 2007. I used to know all Word and Excel menus by heart, now I am entangled in the ribbon every time I try to use it... I would upgrade to 2010 if they would bring back the old menus. (just needed to vent a little, sorry) Thank you again.

Unfortunately, the shortcut keys don't work with Ubit, so it doesn't work for me

This sounds great, but when I download and run UbitMenu, then run MS Word, nothing has changed. The "Menu" tab does not appear at all. Has anyone else had this problem?

Thank you very much! Great hot find!!!

In office 6 MS gave an option to use Word Perfect shortcut keys. For several years I used those (shortcut keys are faster than clicking on icons). Why couldn't they make a backwards compatible option to replace the ribbon with the old interface? I tried this Ubit menu once and it worked fine. I'm going to download it again

I hate the ribbon for its size;locating anything in it is secondary. I'm pretty much through with Office because of it. Problem is, other applications feel the need to follow MS's (bad) example so eventually - unless I can outlive it - I'll get stuck with the fat hog. So - what I really need is a program that can replace it in all applications, a universal ribbon destroyer. In the meantime, I avoid any software that uses the #%*?! thing.

The other popular alternative is Ribbon Customizer, which is actually free if you just want the old-fashioned office toolbar.
http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/starter.php

But really, there's some truth to the fact that the ribbon is here to stay and we all might as well get used to it. I might also suggest Search Commands, which is sort of useful as a transition tool.
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands/Pages/default.aspx

Been using this one for almost a year,.. it's perfect !
Enables you to get your work done quicker with the old style Word menu and yet at the click of a button on the toolbar, you can revert back to the infamous Word Ribbon if you feel tempted to master the learning curve.

With the trend to widescreen and notebooks, and pages being tall and thin the last thing we need is a huge menu bar across the top. Menus should be down the side. In fact, here's an idea, what about going back to Word up to 2003 when you could completely customise it? Up to 2003 you could have menus on the top, left, right and bottom. Now we need a fix to correct MS's "improvement" and a search will show users have been asking for this since Word 2007 was released!

But, FYI, if you right click on the top bar you can set the ribbon to auto hide. At least that gets rid of most of it but you do then have to click a tab to get it up.

I've been using the free menu add-ins from Shah Shailesh for Office 2007. He has one for Access 2007.

http://shahshaileshs.web.officelive.com/MenuAddins.aspx

MS should have made this as an option rather than making a new uniform sewn with ribbons with no other choices :>)