I've been a Word user since 1991, and it has been my central work app since '99 or so. The ribbon has turned out to be a complete hassle, trashing many years of experience that used to mean something on my resume. Is there any chance that 2010 has made some effort to step back from the Office team's aggressive disinterest in the investments made by countless individual users and organizations who learned and use and customize Word in 'the old world?'

I'm enjoying the Office 2010 Beta as well. I use Outlook more than any of the other applications in the suite. It runs flawlessly on W7 64-bit. I like the improvements so far - especially "Quick Steps" and the new grouping options. I believe the final will be out before my TechNet subscription expires.

MS had better fix the patent infringement with i4i before January or no one is going to see Office on the shelves.

A school is not about to place non-industry standard software ,like Open Office, into a learning environment. Business expects employees to use Office. It would put students at a disadvantage.

We still use Office 2003 at work, it does its job very well and I can't see us upgrading anytime soon!

I like the innovation, and the interface is slick, if complicated (got a steep learning curve here). OneNote is a great innovation. When I compare Word to Open Office, Word 2010 wins hands down across the board.

One thing I'm going to be looking for is tutorials.

Thanks for the tip; that custom tab could be soothing for a bit of my work (I prefer to see the style & font info for wherever my cursor is resting), but it can't help me build the custom menus and toolbars that I still quite miss.

My problem with the ribbon hasn't been so much about being annoyed at having to re-find old things; it's that the Word keeps making wrong decisions about what I'm doing and taking away UI that I want to see. The keyboard support bites utterly, which slows a touch-typist like me down significantly. And I don't want to get started on the complete trainwreck that happened to named styles...

Keep in mind that these are random grumbles and not a methodical critique--

Top keyboard grudge in ribbon-land is that the UI no longer helps you learn keyboard paths. Until this change, you could tell any Office app to put underscores on menu commands so you know how to hit them with the keyboard. Some unknown but large chunk of my former speed was not that I remembered exactly how to get to some less-used feature or even how to do a complicated thing regularly without looking at the screen.

Right close behind that is the loss of customization. I don't have the volume of same-type documents pass through my hands that I did back when Office XP was in beta, but I still get piles of things with repetitive task requirements that I could push through more quickly if I could just build a little toolbar and give it the keyboard commands I wanted.

Being able to customize 'properly' would also be a big help for me in the general process of copy editing, which often includes cleaning up great piles of paste-dung left behind by folks who have no idea what the Paste Options button is for. Previously, I could use the Standard toolbar to keep an eye on the style and font info without having to mouse around for that ghostly minitoolbar. When I started stepping through tracks or comments, I could float the Reviewing toolbar and leave it where I wanted to have it, minimizing my need to move the pointer around.

Heh. Touch typing can get out of hand quickly. But you asked...

If you want to try Office 2010 beta yourself:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/download-office-professional-plus/default.aspx

It's useful feedback, so don't feel bad for writing walls of text Some things about your post:

- About the keyboard paths, I don't have Office 2007 right now, but in 2010 that exists too (you press Alt and you get all the keys for the shortcuts).

- And about the customization and toolbars, there are tools for that too: http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/Customization/CustomizeRibbon.htm

Hope it helps!

Re: Loss of customization with the ribbon:  You can customize the ribbon in Office 2010, just check the Options dialog

Unless I'm missing something, it sounds like you're confusing the Quick Access clutter on the title bar with the ribbon; it's a handy workaround for a few basic things (you can 9 or ten ALT+A_Number hotkeys that way), but not what I really need. And I guess I should admit I know about and have puttered with the Developer ribbon, but the problem is that the 'customization' options I can find are simply more of the same too-helpful ribbon worldview and not a way to properly take control of a specialized doc-work context.

First preview of Brad's new book.

That sounds encouraging in plain English. Can you float ribbons and dock them on the sides and bottom of windows in 2010.

Edit: After a much-needed-scrap-of-a-day being able to bill for time spend in Word, I might have learned how to decently describe the heart of my frustration over the radical ribbon revolution, and it might not be entirely about the ribbon after all. To me, it seems like the Word UI has basically given up on a text-centered approach to writing and editing (tragically illogical as that might sound). I understand that some chunks of text might be intended for final delivery via a PC-related rig that's far better than what I have to work with. But why the fuck did Normal view have to go away? I understand that most of the audience for the products my patrons commission are using really new rigs with nice big landscape/letterbox displays. But why eliminate Word's former ability to let production folks focus exclusively on content and structure at the raw text and outline level?