After 18 months of using MS Office 2007 I can’t even begin to describe how much I loath and detest these Ribbons that Macrosquish has forced on everyone. Its not a matter of them being different but rather the fact that they are completely and utterly useless unless you have never been a poweruse of MS Office products pre-2007. They are not intuitive, they are more than a radical departure from what was previously in place, they take up way too much room on the screen, and more importantly the learning curve to go from 2003 to 2007 is steep because not only have they changed functionality to try to make the product “more accessible” to those with an IQ lower than a slug but in doing so they are forcing a dramatic retraining of every single user of MS Office products just to find out where the heck they moved everything and how to get to common functions. And this is the short-list.

How far does my dislike what they’ve done in Office 2007 go? Let’s just say that having the programmers that thought up this ass-backwards “productivity improvement” drawn, quartered, and used as fish bait is a good starting point. The dreaded GST introduced in Canada has nothing compared with the agony that businesses, governments, and others are going to experience in switching mindsets from 2003 to 2007.

Not withstanding, and since I’m not one to really surcome to those types of down right nasty thoughts (okay maybe this once). I FINALLY found something that came out of Redman that actually helps make sense of this all.

If you are a previous power user of MS Office 2003 or earlier and are now working with 2007 you absolutely have to bookmark these links:

• http://tinyurl.com/MSExcelRibbon2007
• http://tinyurl.com/AccessRibbon2007
• http://tinyurl.com/WordRibbon2007
• http://tinyurl.com/OutlookRibbon2007
• http://tinyurl.com/PPTRibbon2007

They are interactive guides that will show you exactly how messed up the relationship is between where you use to find things in MS Office 2003 products and where they simply threw darts at a dart board to figure out where they were going to move them all to in MS Office 2007.

Don’t get me wrong on this, if you are just starting out in MS Office and 2007 is your first cut at working with the product, the whole ribbon concept probably kicks-ass. But why they couldn’t have made this switch in stages rather than deliberately trying to throw every business and organization in the known MS Universe into chaos is beyond me. There was simply no reason to make this large a leap, this quickly.