ElderKnight

I got a good deal on a package with MS Office 2010 from my employer.

As I noted elsewhere here, I have tried Office 2007, but gave up due to the lack of standard menus. O-2007 had "The Ribbon," wherein you have to (1) guess what its pictures mean and (2) guess where a needed item should go "intuitively."

I suspect this is okay when you just open, write, close and save. But I';m used to using it to edit program code, often converting text to a table, moving and merging columns, back to text, doing something el;se, then back again. Complicated, but better than typing in lots of stuff. I really can't guess where the esoteric commands should be. I went back to O-2003, which is okay.

So, I'd like to ask whether 2010 has at least an option for classic menus for people who don't mind reading words. Or is it even more "intuitive"?

Any comments will be appreciated.

surfR2911

A quick Google search turns up:
uBitMenu
AddinTools

TRSDOSBasic79

If it has classic menus, I may be inclined to buy a copy.

ElderKnight

Yeah, I found some of that too. It seems that you need a 3rd-party tool to get usable menus.

Does 2010 have any positive features (as compared to earlier versions) that would make this erffort worthwhile?

Colin Legg

I think Excel 2010 is very good. Much better than Excel 2007 and it calculates on a par with Excel 2003. The ribbon is improved too.

It has lots of features not available in 2003, such as PowerPivot.

ElderKnight

I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud about this, but I've been using those menus (often via the keyboard rather than clicking, whatever's faster and easier) for darn near 25 years now (not only in Word, but in every other Windows program), and all of a sudden I can't just do "Edit", "Find" any more. I'm supposed to know to click the spitball, or is it the eagle? Hey, I don't have another 25 years to spare.

Edit: Okay, I find that Word 2.0 was 1991, so it's only 20 years. Just seems longer.

geodekl

Most of the keyboard shortcuts still exist, with some new ones for navigating the ribbon.

You have to know them by memory to use them effectively, though. Or print out this list for quick reference until you learn your favorites.

http://office.microsoft.com/client/h...2Ddc26a652da30

ElderKnight

I'll give that a try. Thanks.

webbone

I'm with you ElderKnight - the menus were much faster, easier and you could actually find things!

Good to hear there are some 3rd party options to bring back the good old days... oh wait, that would mean Excel 3.0 on my Mac

Gruff

Funny that you use Word for massaging programming text.

Back in the MS-DOS stone age I used TechnoJocks third part text editor for Turbo Pascal Code.

It had the then unique feature of being able to copy columns or blocks of text across rows.
This was easier as back then you had fixed width text as the standard font.

If this is all you need you could write your own editor in VB with a Three inch high main menu.

On a serious note you can find a list of programmers editors (And their features) at this Link.

If you scroll down you will find a comparison table dedcated to editor features
At a glance it looks like about forty of them support rectangular block selection of text.

Downloaded NotePad2 from the list. Like its namesake it looks dead simple and supports rect cut, copy, and Paste. (Select with Alt and Left Mouse)

Link to Notepad2 4.2.25

SpecialDegree

Hi, i'm newbie in this programming languages and so on. But for what is worth i'm using Notepad++, i like because is very light.

ElderKnight

For awhile there, WordStar was the only editor I had that could actually mark and move columns, so I used to haul out WS version 7 for some exotic source code editing now and again. Lately, I di8scovered how to do it with MS Word through 2003.

But figuring out which menus to do this in Word 2007+ ... I don't know!


Just lately at work I'm updating and reworking an oft-edited 700+ page document that has too many layers of formatting, e.g., tables within tables. I usually convert every table to text, strip away the noise and make a new table. I'm lightning in Office 2003, but would come to a halt with a newer version.

Roger_Wgnr

This takes me back when I first started woking with computers it was with Wordstar Version 1 (ran in 16K of Ram) on a Cromemco Z-2.

The thing that amazed me when I was working with Wordstar 7 several years and 4 assignments later was that it still looked like version 1 except the borders were graphics instead of drawn with extended ASCII characters. The only really big feature that was added was the ability to add graphics. That was what I called a commitment to user compatability, Keeping menus, shortcuts, and options unchanged through all versions. Too bad Microsoft does not find this approach favorable.

Rockoon

Microsofts market has changed considerably over the years tho. Its hard to fault them for changing with it.

Back with the first Word for Windows, the target market was the business world, with a first-time-using-a-computer audience that received training. Today the market is only marginally businesses, and nearly everyone uses computers regularly so training for something like a word processor simply doesnt happen any more.

The Ribbon is the result of market testing. It simply isnt designed for the hotkey-through-menus gurus of the world, but instead is designed for the click-the-icon mass market. The ribbon is here to stay because you are an insignificant blip in the statistics.

Even the competitors to Office are planning or have already implemented Ribbon-like interfaces now. Microsoft was innovating on this one.

dilettante

The Office team has been notorious for breaking Windows UI guidelines with weird ad hoc design decisions. It's true their menus were getting terribly crowded in Word. They tried those goofy "hide-a-menus" too, which are pretty annoying in themselves.

Ribbon controls seem to be here to stay. It wasn't long after that a native Ribbon was added to Windows and we saw it appear in Paint and such on Win7.

If you hate the Ribbon you'll hate Win8 too from early reports.

I find the whole Ribbon concept flawed myself, but I know better than to try to move Microsoft on their false starts. We'll just have to wait it out and let it die like other things, if it does.

Looks like they are positioning to shoot themselves in the phone again too. Phone 7 to Phone 8 looks like another breaking change.

AtmaWeapon

If you take the time to hit the Alt key when a proper ribbon is on the screen, it shows you all of the keyboard shortcuts. I can't think of a ribbon button I use in Office that doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. Some of them are more awkward than the older shortcuts, but I am willing to re-learn shortcuts if it means I can use them for everything. My mouse is what hurts my wrist; every time I need it I do damage. I also like that it is fully customizable as the toolbars used to be: never use a tab? Zap it. Want some obscure feature easily available? Add it. Can you never seem to remember where a handful of buttons are? Make a new tab with just those buttons on it. I've done this in VS and I've probably saved an hour a week hunting for some of the menu items.

<aside rant>
The Windows 8 Explorer ribbon drives me bonkers, though. Office is a tool with hundreds of use cases and hundreds of knobs and dials for working with those features: it makes sense to present a ribbon bar crammed with buttons. Explorer is a tool for file management. There's maybe 8 things I do with files. The Windows 8 team found that some 60% of users use context menus and took that as a cue that the menu bars weren't prominent and emphasized enough. Less than half the buttons on the ribbon are used by more than 10% of the users; the rest were haphazardly arranged because the ribbon looked empty with only the common items on it (negative space can be good!) So our "no compromise" interface takes the pieces that no one liked and crams them in everyone's face. Excellent. Even worse, the "Share" tab. Your only options to share content are email and .zip files? With those as the only options, I'm surprised there's not a "fax" or "send via post" option as well. Where's the Facebook/Youtube button? (My guess is they'd get sued for including those buttons, so instead they have to create an extensibility framework so every has-been or also-ran social network can pretend it matters by writing a buggy extension that crashes Explorer. Hooray for consumers!)

Perhaps if everyone had migrated immediately from VB6, the VB team would have noticed that VB6 seemed underused and would have created the spiritual successor everyone seems to have wanted. Instead, VB6 users displayed a strong preference which forced MS to spend their resources making VB .NET bigger and flashier.

dilettante

I'm not sure anyone in the DevTools group pays much attention to VB6 at all, and probably haven't for a long time except to wring their hands over its persistent popularity.

The Windows team is C++-centric and always detested VB in any form. So no safe harbor there either despite their current push for more native development.

No, I think the group that spends the most brain cells on VB6 would be the Office team. That would be because they inherited most of the guts of the VB6 dev toolchain for supporting VBA. I think their interest pretty much ends there though.

I would be amazed to find any kind of champion for native VB anywhere within today's Microsoft. The glory days are long past, squandered just as Windows Mobile was.

AtmaWeapon

I suppose some context might expose the sarcasm in my statement. Pay close attention to which side of the 80/20 rule MS seems to place their focus.

dilettante

Oh yeah, the blog that spends a large fraction of its content on saying they want a conversation while chastising any feedback besides slavish praise. Anyone not gushing admiration has been relegated to "a small set of people that [sic] are not satisfied."

The funniest part might be their own usage figures that show how unpopular "immersive" take-over-the-screen applications (case in point: Media Center) are - while they take no heed of it.

These are the people who brought a lost decade to Windows, and they're even more entrenched for the coming decade. Hard to expect more of a culture that eschews engineering and aggrandizes process and marketing though.

Color me unimpressed. Do they own Apple stock or something?