Hi Tony,

> That's what customizing toolbars was for. Didn't need a new
> fatter, less configurable thingy <...>

They actually gathered the numbers on this - out of all Office sessions that they recorded, only fewer than 2% had any customization in the toolbars.

Then of those 2%, 85% of those only had customization of four or fewer commands. (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx).

So the vast vast majority of their user base did not use toolbar customization like that at all.


I was still very surprised that they had the guts to switch to a much less customizable system though, because even that small percentage is a pretty large number of people since the overall user base for Office is so large.


> taking up more screen space.

Apparently not for most people. A good overview here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx


Anyway, it is a mixed bag, if you are in that percentage of people who liked to do heavy customziation then the new Office probably yanks away a lot of stuff that you relied on and therefore probably sucks for you. But it wasn't really feasible for them to hold the whole system "hostage" for only the needs of a small percentage. They consistently were finding that the top requested features were things that were already in there but that users could not find with the menu/toolbar system. That system was not originally designed to expand out to such a large number of things.


- Michael