According to our survey of users about Excel's Ribbon, intermediate and advanced users have strong opinions about Excel 2007's new Ribbon interface. They don't like it. The respondents said that Excel's Ribbon has reduced their productivity by an average of 19%. Users with a negative opinion of the Ribbon estimate that it's reduced their productivity by 34%. You can read comments about the Ribbon, both good and bad, in the columns at the right. Because I received many more negative comments than positive ones, I included most positive comments a much lower percentage of negative ones. The Ribbon replaced menus that were used in prior versions of Excel. The Ribbon consists of several tabs that reveal collections of labels and icons. Depending on the width of a user's Excel window, there are at least 19 versions of Excel's Ribbon. This figures shows a view of the Home tab in one of those versions:
About 70% of the respondents had a negative opinion of the Ribbon and about 25% had a positive opinion. The remaining respondents had no opinion. As the following figure illustrates, advanced users were somewhat more negative about the Ribbon than were intermediate users. (Not enough beginning users responded to be relevant.)
These results exclude dozens of surveys that showed losses in productivity of more than 100%. Although these scores reflect an intensity of feeling about the ribbon, they can't be used in our summary statistics. Those who hate or merely
The statistical accuracy of this survey could be challenged because online surveys don't produce a random sample of responses. Even so, this chart shows that that the results have been relatively consistent month by month. It appears safe to say that the majority of experienced Excel users dislike the Ribbon. Excel developers have seen an opportunity in this response to the Ribbon. Search Google for the words add-in Excel 2003 2007 Ribbon menu and you'll find a selection of Excel add-ins designed to bring Excel 2003-style menus to Excel 2007. Unfortunately for businesses, those 3rd-party menu add-ins could make Excel's Ribbon/menu problem even worse. This is because widespread use of the competing menu solutions would create many unique versions of Excel 2007...a Menu of Babel. The Ribbon may hurt productivity, but having no standard menu-like interface -- that is, no standard version of Excel -- could hurt business productivity even more. Why Does the Ribbon Hurt Productivity?The most frequent complaint about the Ribbon is that it requires more clicks and mouse movement than the menu does. But the problem goes deeper than that. 1. The Ribbon eliminates built-in and custom toolbars, and also tear-off menus, features that provide one-click access to commands in a context that Classic Excel users could define for themselves. To illustrate, if we were working with external data, both the data commands and the formatting commands could be available immediately. Instead, the Ribbon
enforces context generally defined by the active
object, which could have little relationship with the task we want to
perform. This forces a greater number of visual searches and
a greater number of clicks.
More searching and clicking means less productivity. 4. The Ribbon changes significantly with the width of Excel's
window. This means that there isn't just one Ribbon; there are at least 19 of them.
Therefore, users never truly will know the Ribbon, because there are
too many Ribbons to learn. Instead, users always are forced to
search the current version of the Ribbon for the commands they need. More
searching means less productivity. The advantage to the Classic Excel approach is that we can choose some other cell or chart or whatever, then press Ctrl+Y to apply all the changes that we made in the dialog. But in New Excel, pressing Ctrl+Y applies only the one last change. To illustrate the power of the earlier approach, in Excel 2003 I recently modified 30 charts in 30 quick clicks of Ctrl+Y. Each Ctrl+Y click applied about ten changes with one command. But in Excel 2007 it took several hours and many hundreds of clicks to change the equivalent charts in that program. Why Did Microsoft Create the Ribbon?When they introduced the Ribbon, Microsoft introduced a change that many experienced Excel users have said they don't like. Microsoft appears to have made a particularly strange decision when we consider that experienced users -- who include many company presidents and most Chief Financial Officers -- have a significant influence on the version of Excel that their company uses. Why would Microsoft make a decision that's so unpopular with its most influential users? A speculative answer is that Microsoft didn't realize how unpopular the Ribbon would be. A better answer is that Microsoft had at least three reasons for introducing the Ribbon. First, the Excel team added many new features to Excel 2007. They added so many features that the Excel 2003 menu was going to have to be changed in any case. Using the Ribbon made it easier for the programmers to provide access to Excel 2007's new features. Second, Microsoft apparently introduce the Ribbon to Office 2007 as a branding device. More new features were added to Office 2007 than ever had been added before. To emphasize these improvements, Microsoft wanted the product to look and feel different from previous versions. Third, and most significantly, Excel users have been requesting features for years, features that already existed in Excel. This created significant frustration on Microsoft's Excel team. They had worked very hard to create useful features that many users never had discovered. Therefore, the overriding idea that guided the creation of Excel's Ribbon was discoverability. Microsoft wanted an interface that would make it easy for users to discover Excel's hidden features. Merely by allowing users to discover those features, Microsoft expected to enhance the value of Excel significantly. However, Microsoft apparently failed to consider that by improving discoverability in the way they did could hurt user productivity. They also failed to consider that most Excel users -- and their employers -- care passionately about productivity and care nothing about discoverability. When Will Excel Menus Return?Microsoft has said that the Ribbon is here to stay. Not only does this mean that the Ribbon won't go away, it means that Microsoft does not intend to offer a Classic Excel alternative to the Ribbon.
In short, discoverability will continue to trump productivity. One day, perhaps, far in the future, a senior Microsoft manager will have a Brilliant Idea. She'll decide that Microsoft should deliver a feature that its users care passionately about. She'll decide to concentrate on Excel users' productivity. When she does, Excel users will stampede to the stores to buy that enhanced version of Excel. But until that version arrives, be sure to keep Classic Excel installed if you do decide to buy New Excel.
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