Last Updated on April 11, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
How can you make the dreaded Office 2007/2010 ribbon worse?
I’m suddenly feeling a lot worse about the prospects of Microsoft using my suggestions to add the ribbon interface to Calculator.
This seems to be some kind of a joke program, to teach you how to use the ribbon. Which pretty much explains why the ribbon is a bad idea. If you can read, you can use pull-down menus. You race Clippy to finish tasks. You know, the scourge of Office 97 and 2000, the stupid animated character that observed you were writing a letter, and advised you not to run with scissors.
Let’s make it worse and add Bob to it. Then Clippy and Bob can race to see who can accept all the changes in a Word document fastest.
At work, when we have those races, I usually win. Even though it takes me five minutes to remember where they buried all the track changes options.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.