Microsoft Word Menu Tools Cut Ribbon Delays

There's a tenet in martial arts that speed and power (said by some to be the same thing) come from neither speed nor strength, but from technique—muscle contraction and torque and weight shifts coordinated to within nanoseconds for an impact that is a combination of all three.

The U.S. military has a similar rule of thumb: "Slow is smooth; smooth is fast."

In both cases the key is practice—doing something in a specific way over and over and over until every micro-movement is automatic and every gap and glitch between movements is eliminated, leaving only the perfection of apparently effortless movement.

Organizational efficiency experts discovered the same thing; eliminate unnecessary motions in manufacturing or other manual work and you eliminate a lot of the time it takes to complete a task.

That's one big reason techies and clerks and office workers who braved the steep learning curves of character-based interfaces for DOS or Unix apps hate to give them up; commands that are impenetrably arcane to newbies allow initiates to work so quickly that even complex commands barely interrupt the rhythm of their typing.

So when Office 2007 replaced the familiar menus with a tabbed ribbon and shifted frequently used commands to different categories, all those repetitions and the lightning fast, almost-unconscious movements were lost. Millions of Office users had to relearn which menus to click and what to customize to expose their favorite commands.

It was like having to go from 100 word-per-minute touch-typing to hunt-and-peck on a new keyboard. It was agonizing. For some it still is.

There's a rumor that Bill Gates tried to require that Office 2007 offer the ability to use older, classic command menus rather than the newfangled, nonintuitive ribbon. New versions of Windows let users choose "classic" menus; why not Office?

But someone talked him out of it, and Office 2007's failure to take over the office suite market has more to do with that screwup than any level of competition from Google Apps or OpenOffice or any other external competitor.

Hunt and Peck replaces—Wait a minute

In Word the ribbon tabs divide commands by function such as View, Insert, Review and so on. Each tab pulls up a row with icons for the most frequently used functions within that category. The problem is that, for longtime Word users, the categories aren't self-explanatory, so it's hard to figure out which tab would hold the command you need or if that command is easily exposed at all.

The only way to customize the ribbon is to move specific commands into the remedial QuickAccess Toolbar, which gets so crowded it's hard to identify which commands are up there. Other than minimizing it to make it go away, you can't do a lot about the ribbon itself.

This is why there's a consistent market for add-ons that take Office 2007 back in time by allowing users to see all the old familiar menus instead of the badly organized new ones.

They are not so much killer-app utilities as they are sources of enormous relief. Thank god someone killed the damn ribbon.

Well, not killed, exactly, but shoved aside a bit.