Hacker News Reader

Comment by skymt | Hacker News Reader

The Office Ribbon is notable for being designed entirely for discoverability. What it lacks is familiarity.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.as...

> Office "12" consolidates all of the entry points into one place: the Ribbon. So if you're trying to find a feature and don't know where it is, the scope of your search is drastically reduced. Click on the leftmost tab, and click across the tabs until you reach the end. That it. It's either there or it's not--there are no other "rocks" to look under, no other places we've hidden functionality. We've found in early tests that people find it easier to discover how to do new things in the Ribbon, and they're more apt to explore the UI looking for better ways to get things done.

View on HN

My favorite path is that (MS Word):

1. Click the tiny icon in the bottom right corner of the styles widget. It will open essentially the same widget, but as a vertical list and with a few additional controls; this is what we're after.

2. At the bottom there are three nearly identical buttons without labels. Click the 2nd one from the left (the tooltip says "Style Inspector"). This will open another floating window. We don't need it per se, but, again, it has extra controls that we need.

3. At the bottom of the window there is another set of unlabeled buttons. We need the first one (tooltip "Reveal formatting"). (Note that the icon is also very similar to the three icons in the previous panel.) Click it and you'll get the "Reveal formatting" panel. This is our target

4. Now close the other two panels. You're ready.

I write code to create reports in MS Word XML and I need this panel to see if I'm getting the code right (i.e that all non-obvious flags like "keep with next" are in place). I know no other path to this widget. And since I don't write such code often, I keep forgetting how I get to this panel. E.g. yesterday I tried to find it, but failed. It's good I saw you reply and made another effort to retrace the steps :)

I totally think a classic Mac-like menu consisting solely of text would provide better discoverability here.

Microsoft Word makes it pretty easy to find commands. For your example, I did the following: Click on 'Help' menu, type 'reve', press down arrow to select 'reveal formatting' and the actual menu item (in the 'View' menu) is highlighted, press 'enter' to enable. This is in Office 2016 for OSX.

That's what I meant. It's not a MS Office but an OSX feature. AFAIK the windows version still doesn't let you search through its ribbons.

OK, fair point. So is there nothing like that available in Windows? I had thought Win 7 and 8 had similar features, but maybe only for the desktop, not applications?

Ther s a powertoy for the windows version that does this. Why it wasn't mad part of the core ribbon UI I'll never know.

Can't you script it in visual basic and pin a button to one of the ribbons?

I can put it directly to the ribbon (i.e. its available as a command in the customization options), but to do all this I need to know it exists (i.e. discover it), and the ribbon-style path is not very discoverable. I still wonder how I found it in the first place. As they say it here, it's probably God kissed me on the head :)

I mean, it's a nice theory but it isn't actually true. There's tons of functionality which exists in many ribbon-ified programs but not actually accessible from the ribbon.

If you right click on the ribbon in many applications and select 'customize' you'll find all sorts of useful functionality. The customize window (at least in Excel 2010, which I happen to be looking at at the moment) has organization to help you find the stuff you can customize the ribbon with, and it even has a 'commands not in the ribbon' section!

Maybe the ribbon contained all functionality when it was first introduced (though I doubt it very much) but that certainly hasn't been true for years.

It's even worse: look at the Paint in W7: there is a ribbon, but try to find something as simple as "print" there. No, the Print button is behind the button that drops down the menu. Then look at the Mail in W7 (Live, whatever). Once the big button called "Send and and receive" on the toolbar is also not on the ribbon, but a tiny tiny button on the title bar. If you already have the muscle and visual memory for the older interface, such "illogical" shifts can remain confusing for a long time. Especially to the older people.

Does something have to contain all possible functionality to be "discoverable"? I think you're both correct.

Related: The Story of the Ribbon

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

The other thing the ribbon is missing is simplicity.

I can navigate the entire menu system by clicking the menu and then moving my mouse around. Same thing with the keyboard - I can activate a menu and then browse the whole thing with just the arrow keys. You can't do either of those with the ribbon.

The ribbon is nice for touch interfaces, but they should have made it also act like the menu system (as noted above). I bet the only reason they didn't do that is because they wanted to patent the ribbon as something new - http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/6074/prior-art-re...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com