Hi All Ribbons are not good for several reasons;1) They steal too much vertical space that you would rather have documents/data displayed in. And as many have pointed out, with increasingly wider screens, there is a glut of unused space at the sides. 2) It's much more difficult scanning horizontally for an option than scanning vertically - I always drag my toolbars to the left. 3) Having clean head space makes a massive difference in usability - having ribbons on the top of your workarea is visually disruptive. Try working with and without ribbons at the top and you will also experience this. 4) It's a design mentality that says you need to have all this functionality on the screen when in reality you can make many menus contextual and only appear when needed (Design\WhiteBoards\InterfaceImprovement - 1].
MS has no idea about usability and I pretty much recommend that if you don't do what they do, then you are probably heading in the right direction.
Cheers Phil Jackson -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to design+help@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted