I have Office 2007 on my newest computer at home, which I bought primarily to familiarise myself with the Ribbon interface and allow me to discuss it from a position other than ignorance. I use Word and Excel 2007 on that computer, and find the ease of use about the same as earlier releases. Some things are easier to find and use, some things are harder.

My 9 year old daughter recently asked if she could use PowerPoint at home, as she had started to use it at her new school for making little presentations and wanted to make her own at home for fun. I put a shortcut on her desktop and let her go for it, and she has produced some pretty impressive stuff with no help from me. Not only that, but my 7 year old daughter is now doing the same thing, having learnt just by looking over my eldest daughter’s shoulder. They don’t ask me for any help, they just get on with it.

A vindication of the Ribbon’s ease-of-use claims? Not exactly. You see, they are using PowerPoint on my old computer, which has the completely Ribbonless Office 2000.

I don’t hate the Ribbon. I just don’t see much benefit in it, even for novice users.

Thanks to Shaan Hurley for revealing to the wider world the existence of Ribbon Man Matt Stein’s blog. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for a blogging n00b like myself to welcome somebody with a blog four years older than his own, but I’m going to do it anyway. Welcome, Matt (no pun intended).

Some of Matt’s blog posts (particularly the early ones) make for, er, interesting reading, so don’t click if you’re easily offended. Please bear in mind that this is a personal blog, not an Autodesk one.

Matt and I generally get on fine, but we have had some frank exchanges of view and often agree to disagree. One subject where we are unlikely to share the same views is the Microsoft Vista marketing exercise The Mojave Experiment. This is something I planned to post about some weeks ago but then something more important came up and I didn’t bother. Here’s what Matt thinks, and here’s what I think:

While this is a cute marketing ploy and might convince the terminally naive, it pretty obviously qualifies as propaganda rather than any kind of meaningful study. Here’s how it’s done:

Find a selection of people with no experience of a product but with ignorance-based negative feelings about it. Make sure the hardware and software you’re going to show them all works well. Fix up the settings for minimal annoyance. Present an expensively prepared, well-choreographed demo that presents all the best features and none of the worst. Result: oh wow, what a surprise, it’s better than they thought.

A marketing company could reproduce the same results with practically anything if they set it up right. I bet I could do it with Linux, OS X, Windows Me, whatever. Give me Microsoft’s resources and open slather to present things as fairly or unfairly as I like and I will hand you whatever results you request.

For the record, I don’t hate Vista. I have Vista and XP available, dual boot, on hardware that can easily cope with the demands. In my tests on that hardware, Vista runs AutoCAD significantly faster than XP. Vista has been reliable and it looks nice, but I use XP about 95% of the time. Why? A few minor annoyances, but mostly it’s because Vista doesn’t support my mouse fully. Is that Microsoft’s fault or Logitech’s? Who cares? It’s something I have to put up with when I use Vista, therefore I generally avoid using Vista. As Matt rightly points out, Vista has a lot of minor “nice to have” touches, but all of them added together don’t make it worth putting up with a partially functional mouse. Neither do they make it worth buying a new mouse.

Back to the marketing campaign, it reminds me of a productivity “study” paid for by Autodesk an age ago to show how much more productive Release 13 was than Release 12. It was released, accompanied by a poorly worded and deceptive press release (unintentionally deceptive, supposedly), to hoots of derision from a cynical AutoCAD user community. It convinced almost nobody and angered many, and was, all in all, a spectacularly bad idea.

Autodesk marketing people, if by any chance you’re thinking of repeating that old mistake, or even “doing a Mojave” with AutoCAD 2009, please don’t. Just don’t.

I’ve closed the poll for those of you who are using 2009 with the Ribbon turned off to show us the reasons why. The top 10 choices were:

1. Tab concept means extra clicks (65%)
2. Uses up too much screen space (64%)
3. No advantage over existing methods (64%)
4. Dislike concept of hiding tools - want buttons to stay visible (60%)
5. Too hard to find things (51%)
6. Using it minimised requires an extra click/hover (47%)
7. Doesn’t make good use of my screen size/shape (45%)
8. Tab switching is too slow (45%)
9. Customising it is too difficult (44%)
10. Ribbon content doesn’t match my needs (44%)

I was hoping that the poll would help Autodesk in deciding how best to improve the Ribbon in future releases, but it’s pretty hard to do much about the top 7 choices here. Except number 2, perhaps; the Ribbon could be considerably tightened to remove waste space, in the same way as the excellent AutoCAD 2009 floating toolbars.

The new poll is slightly related to item 5 above. Autodesk combined the Ribbon with a change to the button images. Personally, I don’t think this was a good idea. If you move people’s stuff around, changing the appearance of that stuff is only going to make it harder to find things and reduce people’s acceptance of the changed interface. Enough of my opinion, what do you think?

I was interested to see Shaan Hurley reporting the Ribbon usage figures from the Customer Involvement Program (CIP). Shaan’s figures show Ribbon non-users at 46%, my poll results show it as 71%. Why the discrepancy? Is somebody telling fibs? I don’t think so.

First, blog nauseam poll respondents represent a biased sample, comprising people who are more interested in AutoCAD than average users. Dare I say more knowledgeable? More likely to be power users or CAD Managers, anyway. They are probably more likely than average users to make changes from the default AutoCAD settings. But Shaan’s CIP users are also a biased sample, comprising those AutoCAD users who have CIP turned on. Are users who go with the flow and have CIP on also more likely to go with the flow and leave the Ribbon on? Possibly, but I would have thought the CIP-on bias would be less significant than the blog-reader bias.

Second, Shaan’s sample size is likely to be very substantially larger than mine. I currently get about 5000 unique visitors to this site each month, with only up to about a hundred bothering to respond to a given poll. Shaan’s numbers are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, and thus much less prone to a few people skewing the results.

Finally, the method of measurement differs. My poll is totally open and transparent, but requires active participation by the respondent. This means that the more strongly you feel about something, the more likely you are to be measured.

Shaan’s measurement method avoids that pitfall. However, because the details of the CIP measurement mechanism aren’t public, its accuracy is open to conjecture. For example, if somebody spends 8 hours working in a Ribbonless session and then tries out the Ribbon in another session for a few minutes, does that count as a score of 1-1, or is the time used taken into account? If somebody works Ribbonless except when using the Block Editor (personally, I think the Ribbon works well there), is a flag raised that says the Ribbon was used during the session? Does that then count as one Ribbon Session and no Ribbonless sessions? (Shaan, you’re very welcome to put that speculation to rest with some details of how it works). In any case, the number of part-time Ribbon users is likely to be small enough not to make a huge difference.

In summary, I’m quite prepared to accept that Shaan’s CIP numbers are likely to be closer to reality than my poll results. I think “about half and half” is a decent compromise answer to the question posed by the title of this post.

The question is, is that a good result? Shaan says he was surprised by the results, but doesn’t state whether he thought the Ribbon would be more or less popular than that. Before I ran my poll, I would have said that a significant minority, say a third of users, were going Ribbonless, and that a good result for the new interface would have been if less than 20% of AutoCAD 2009 users were going out of their way to turn it off. Whichever numbers you choose, the Ribbon is doing a lot worse than that. Why? Please fill in the poll on the right and let us all know. Whatever the reasons, we should be grateful that unlike many software companies, Autodesk has at least given us the choice.

Following on from the earlier poll to find out what you were doing with the Ribbon (mostly turning it off, apparently), I’ve added a poll for those of you who are using AutoCAD 2009 Ribbonless. I hope I’ve covered all the bases with my 23 possible reasons! You can pick as many or as few as you like.

Judging from the results of the Ribbon usage poll (and the usual poll caveats apply), you are turning off AutoCAD 2009’s Ribbon in droves. I’m surprised. I thought there would be a significant minority of 2009 users who turned it off, but it looks I was wrong and it’s a large majority. The non-Ribbon numbers have hovered around the two-thirds mark right from the start and have now settled above the 70% mark. If nothing else, this validates Autodesk’s decision to make the Ribbon optional and keep all the old user interface elements.

Now I’m curious about the reasons. Why do so many of you dislike the Ribbon so much? Is it an unwillingness to change, a reaction against Microsoft’s influence, or are there more practical reasons? Is it screen space, extra picks, performance, customisation difficulties, difficulty in finding things, or something else? Did you turn it off straight away or did you give it a fair go first? Is the whole idea a write-off as far as you’re concerned, or is there something Autodesk could do that might convince you to use it?

Please comment and let me know. If I get enough responses, I’ll post a multiple-choice poll to get a better idea about how many of you have the various reasons for going Ribbonless.

One of the many unfinished aspects of the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon is the lack of Express Tools content. One enterprising user has put the effort into correcting this, and has posted an Express Tools CUI replacement in this Autodesk newsgroup thread. I have not tested this myself. As usual with CUI, be paranoid. Back up everything before you touch anything.

While I wouldn’t normally suggest you do any Ribbon custom work in 2009 in its current state, it shouldn’t hurt in this case as it should be easily redoable once Autodesk has fixed up the worst of the 2009 CUI problems. Anything else you do should be considered as disposable. The problems with 2009’s CUI are so fundamental that it is quite likely a restructure will be required to fix them, either in a service pack or in 2010. That means your 2009 CUI efforts may need to be redone, just like your AutoCAD 2008 Dashboard modifications.

It would appear from comments made on the Autodesk newsgroups that a lot of AutoCAD 2009 users have their Ribbons turned off. That’s actually one of eight possible states for the Ribbon to be in. Is it really the most popular configuration? Does it apply to 12.5% of you or is it more than that? I’ve added a poll to find out. Please vote only if you’re an active AutoCAD 2009 user, as I want to see what people use in production.