Visio Guy

Seems to be coming.  You've seen the ribbon interface in other MS Office products.  Impressed?  Find it confusing?  Here's your chance to vote.

Having helped a disabled user to get up to speed on Word over 12 or more years, now the whole interface changes. Thanks Microsoft.  :-X

I've seen the presentation on "Why Ribbon?" and it is compelling. MS noticed that their apps' menu counts were growing geometrically--too fast to keep doing the same thing, so they tried to get smart about it.

In the new Office you can get like 90% of your stuff done just by right-clicking, instead of going up-top.

But in Visio, I constantly use keyboard shortcuts. And that isn't working in 2010 very well, especially in the ShapeSheet. I think that most of my "Alt + Something, Another-thing" shortcuts will end up becoming three-step instead of two-step.

I can't explain it fully (without firing up my Virtual PC), but it's kind of like this: when you hit Alt, it takes you out to the "root", then you have to drill back in to the context where you already were, then do some your shortcuts.It's kind of like having to type the whole path just to get to a sub-directory.

It may be that a real "developer mode" (ie: something more sophisticated) for Visio 2010 would have been a good idea.

Well, I've never really developed the discipline to using short cuts.  Part of it is I find looking at the keyboard more distracting than moving the mouse to the menu bar.  Another part, is developing a consistent, rememberable set of short-cut keys.  Don't get me wrong, I do use them, but, only for the more common tasks.

What I don't like about the ribbon is it's organization.  Things don't appear where it seems they ought to.  For me, the ribbons seem cluttered, and if you don't know where things are, I spend more time scrolling thru the ribbon than I would like.  Just doesn't seem intuitive.   Perhaps if I could fully customize the ribbon, then that might be more enticing!

One more presentation that kinda explains the motivation for introducing the ribbon.

"The story of the ribbon"
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon.aspx)

I only hate the extra mouse click.
Everything should be self-expanding when you hover over it.

Thanks Nikolay, very fascinating video. 

Office Open XML should be supported, then we can customize Ribbon with VSTO.

Home/Paragraph group is excellent!
All tools are in a group, indents and list, too.

ribbon is excellent and one of the best things to come out of Microsoft in recent years, I have 2007 on my personal machine and 2003 at the office and I can't stand using word 2003 etc.

Hi,

I've heard there are some ways to customize Ribbon in Office 2007.
I've learned only two ways for Visio 2010 Technical Preview.

One is to edit the exported custom UI file that is exported with menu in the option diagram.
Another is Com Addin.

It seems each ribbon is isolated from each other.
The exported custom UI file does not include the ribbon made by Com Addin.
Are there any documents about this isolation?
Or am I wrong?

I hated the ribbon concept at first, but after a few weeks I just placed the commands I use more frequently (about 2 dozen) onto the quick access toolbar; there you have them all on one line!

The ribbon is a complete disaster.  They should have an option to use the 2007 menu style.

It takes me 20 minutes to find things.