Hi Igor, I'm glad that having the UI open to alteration is working well for you!


> As for the article on the ribbon - most comments followed
> were negative as a matter of fact..

I wouldn't assume too much by that - it tends to be the nature of online comments that people with negative comments are the ones who will tend to go out of their way to post the most...

When things are going well, people often don't go out of their way to make special note that things are going smoothly. That's just kind of the nature of things.

But certainly the Ribbon is not right for everybody - any kind of a change at all can easily have the possibility of being disruptive, sometimes it doesn't matter if the new thing is actually better or not, just that it has changed can cause problems and force some time to be spent learning new habits. That's why I was very surprised that they had the guts to make that substantial change to Office.

But their previous system was not really working out to continue to append more and more and more toolbars, it had pretty much grown to a critical mass overload. They had to do some kind of reset if they wanted to make the overall feature set of Office more presentable.

Otherwise if they just continued to just add more and more stuff to the old system the problem of non-expert users not being able to find the functionality they needed would continue to get worse and worse, and that was already at a very bad level in Office 2003.

- Michael