I already mentioned the lack of file open icon, and previously I have talked about the ridiculous blob. And the initial flashing they had to incorporate to tell us its a button. But when you actually get closer it just gets sillier – I really wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

When you click and look, if you decide to cancel and move to the traditional cancel location (lower right) and click that button, does it close the file open dialog/ribbon? Or does it close Excel?

Everyone I have asked (and me) has accidentally closed Excel numerous times before eventually learning that this particular piece of the interface is not ‘normal’. In fact to cancel that thing you click anywhere else in Excel – and Excel ignores the click but closes the dialog! How ridiculous is that?

They have created a thing that is not as powerful or controllable as a dialog, but is too big and intrusive to be a menu or toolbar so they butchered an existing UI concept – the click away to cancel menu concept to work with this quasi dialog. But dialogs never worked like that before or in other applications. So now Office is the most friction-full application in the widows world (excluding perhaps Ulead products).

So, does the Office button bring up a (poor) dialog, or is it just a menu?

Sorry Simon but I have to disagree with you on this one (I seem to recall being told I was the voice of balance on smurfonspreadsheets by someone…).

Just because you think it’s a dialogue and call it a dialogue does not mean it is a dialog or should behave like one. Shredding a straw man / ribbon does not make a valid argument. To me it looks and behaves pretty much like I would expect a menu to behave:

• It appears from a button above it, and remains in that fixed position (unlike normal dialog which are windows which can be moved about).
• It has items which when hovered over reveal sub-menus of related items. The ones which do this are correctly indicated with a small arrow to the right.
• Since it is not a dialogue, it has no "X" close button in the window title bar because it does not have a title bar. (as an aside, I would wager this is just as popular a method of closing an unwanted dialogue as going for the Cancel button)

Why would I expect a Cancel button on a menu anyway?

Well, I wouldn’t. But even if I did, I would look for it specifically – the cancel button is not always in the bottom right of a dialog (nor always there at all). However, I do find that the Cancel button is usually the one labelled "Cancel" rather than the one labelled "Print" or "Exit Excel". This principle has stood me in good stead with most applications.

Anyone familiar with the old file menu and expecting things to be the same or similar in the new version would not be at all surprised to find that the option to exit the application was the last one in this list, I would have thought.

Fair enough, it’s not a regular, old style menu

A couple of ways this does not behave like a regular menu in the traditional standard interface design we have all come to love (or at least get very very used to):

• The “recent documents” list appears in the right hand half when the left hand menu does not require a submenu, rather than extending the menu to ridiculous lengths (especially if you crank up the setting to show the maximum of 50). Unusual? Non-(old)-standard? Sure, but you have to admit it’s useful, makes good sense and requires less mouse travel. And who does not love the ability to pin documents to the recent list by the way?
• yes, some of the menu items (such as Save As) have something like that weird dual-purpose behaviour where you can click the button and you get something very like it used to be, or you can hover and move to the right for the submenu. But these are better than the similar behaviour of split buttons on the ribbon in a big way – you only have to hover to immediately discover the submenu, unlike the buttons where you have to click one half or the other to see what is going on.
  The only menu item where this actually makes any difference is Save As. You click the left half and the SaveAs dialog is presented with the current saved workbook format selected (or .xlsx for a new unsaved workbook or some other default if you have a group policy in force to keep people in compatibility mode for some reason). A click in the right brings up the same box with the chosen format selected. Big deal. (The Print menu has print as an option on the right too, and no discernible difference to me which you choose to click on, so although it has the dual-control thing there is no downside to the user if they don’t understand it).

For me the only behaviour which is odd enough (in that it is unexpected for a normal menu) to warrant special mention on my Excel 2007 or Office 2007 update training courses is that the menu items can be added to the QAT with a right click, thus proving that they are buttons, this is therefore a dialog not a menu and Simon was right after all! Well, up to a point…

Should File actions be mixed with application Options?

As for “Excel Options” (or Word, PowerPoint etc. options) being out of place in here when everything else is “file” stuff, the same could be said for Options being on the Tools menu historically when everything else there was to do with content (of a spreadsheet or document or whatever) – like spelling checker, track changes or Goal Seek. It was never intuitive in the first place, we just got so used to it over time that anything seems weird (like non-Qwerty keyboards). Other application authors had options (or preferences) on the file menu years ago (Jasc Paint Shop Pro being one example I know of) or put it somewhere else such as the Edit menu. I don’t use Acrobat reader anymore, but I’m pretty sure Adobe put the preferences on the edit menu, which actually sounds right when you want to edit your preferences for the application, but never felt right because I was not editing anything in the usual sense.

I find that people quickly grasp the idea that anything to do with the whole document or whole application is on the Office button. It’s (sort of) a separation of content editing tools (on the Ribbon) and meta-tools (on the Office button).

What about other “whole document” options like Page Setup?

Arguably, Page Setup could have been left there for most people’s purposes (and Print Area in Excel), but they make good sense on the Page Layout ribbon, especially since they can differ from sheet to sheet in Excel or section to section in Word (thus failing my “whole document” test).

I actually prefer the visibility of the options on the Ribbon, especially Scale to Fit – how many times have you wasted a trip to the Page Setup dialog only to find the “fit to 1 page” option you wanted was already set. Now you see it before you go there. And having a true “Automatic” setting rather than a kludge of putting in more pages than you ever expected to need, (which worked until some twit turned on borders for a huge cell range or even the whole sheet). Now I just want the current margins to be obvious, and ideally adjustable from the Ribbon rather than another dialog – “Last custom setting” that I used is not the same as what is current for this document. Especially since Page Setup is one of the few dialogs which is still modal so I have to click OK, find out if everything now fits and wraps where I want it and try again.

To me it would also have made some sense to include other “whole file” operations such as Protect Workbook and Share Workbook on the Office button menu in Excel (maybe in the Prepare sub-menu) as well as on the Review tab of the Ribbon, in order to provide more discoverability? I think it makes as much sense as the Restrict Permission options being there, making it really easy for users to discover that they can’t use this feature without jumping through hoops or having a clued-up IT department to sort out certificate goodies for them.

What would you like to see on the Office button menu? Or on the Ribbon in general?

Styles in Excel are one of those things that sound good in theory, but are significantly worse than useless in reality. In an isolated world they may work but as soon as you start copying a pasting between workbooks…then you get a right royal style mess.

Cell styles as a concept seem pretty weak to me. The built-in ones are hopeless; I know hardly anyone (actually no-one that I could name right now) that uses them.

I have recently done some extensive work for a client on a set of templates, themes, etc for the whole Office suite. For the Excel templates I included some cell styles to make it quick to format things in “corporate” colours for headings and so on (as well as default table styles for the same reason). This provides user convenience and helps them create more consistent documents with more of a “branded” feel to them.

As to imposing a regime of “pink means bad” and “orange double underline means linked” (linked to what?), no chance.

Why styles don’t address the real need for good formatting

I teach students on my Excel training courses that formatting of spreadsheets should be used for three purposes:

• to highlight (data outliers; estimates as opposed to actuals)
• to group or associate data together (months in the same quarter or year having a light shaded background say, next group no background; using matching colour for axes and lines in a two-series chart with two different scales)
• to separate data by category or type (line above the first month of a new year; making the title row bold)

These principles of using formats to help interpret the data, rather than help it look pretty tend to get people focussed on the task rather than the appearance. The built-in cell styles only seem to address the concept of highlighting, rather than being useful for grouping or separating. The highlighting they provide seems arbitrary at best, and quite likely to cause headaches with some of the colours involved.

They also apply too aggressively for my liking. For example, if I apply a format to a cell to show that it is an estimate, and someone else wants to style it to say it should be checked (or updated or whatever), my original formatting is irrecoverably lost. Resetting the cell style to “normal” simply applies this instead. By using precise formatting I could control this better – for example my estimates might be indicated by use of italics and a different font colour. I could then highlight this cell to be checked by adding a border or background fill, which can be separately removed later once done, leaving my original font format in place. Or I can change the format to represent an actual rather than estimate figure, but still leave the border to make sure it gets checked.

Cell styles are all-or-nothing, and that does not work for me.

Surely styles help people apply formatting more quickly?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for people formatting everything by hand, one property at a time. Paragraph styles are a great way to format Word documents (the only sensible way for a consistent approach to layout and formatting). How a document is structured and how it looks are closely tied together, and providing users with an easy way to show heading hierarchies, properly legal-numbered lists and so on is really valuable, and saves a ton of time versus bold, italic, indent-a-bit, font size 24 etc. Re-using the hierarchical structure this gives for things like table of contents or an outline make good sense too. Marketing departments typically like templates as a convenient way to give end users some built-in branding and good design, making it easier for everyone to create documents which look similar, and meet the guidelines they have chosen for colours, layouts, even choice of bullet points. I just can’t see how this sort of model translates to Excel.

Colour schemes do make sense to help “brand” Excel documents with corporate colours for headings and the like, and to make sure that visual elements such as charts or diagrams have a sensible and consistent palette (not necessarily in corporate colours, which may be too saturated or distinctive in many cases).

Cell styles don’t seem to meet any actual need that is not just as well addressed for the majority of users by the format painter tool, and learning to use it properly – I have lost count of the people I see on intermediate or advanced courses who have never double clicked this to lock it on and apply a format to multiple targets, whether in Excel, Word or PowerPoint

Workbooks that have lived for a while in 2003 and been reformatted over time seem to generate loads of horrid pointless cell styles when converted to 2007 (equally PowerPoint files create large numbers of colour schemes so that existing slides can retain their colours while still pretending to be theme-aware). Copying sheets between workbooks seems to compound this (although because I hardly even look at the styles gallery it is hard to know exactly how bad this gets). The style gallery quickly becomes useless, and as Simon highlights, it is tedious beyond belief to sort out. Some kind of proper style manager interface might redeem this. I tend to crack open the zip file and reach for Notepad++ for some XML-hacking – not what I would expect most users to do, or even many power users.

Styles gallery is a waste of space – literally

My biggest gripe with cell styles is that for a feature which is very rarely used it gets given a lot of space. Right now my ribbon is maxed out on my 1920×1200 widescreen. The Home ribbon is 47cm wide, and the styles gallery is showing 10 items in 5 columns taking up 15 cm – nearly a third of the ribbon. The same space could show various groups which many people might find more useful, any of these pairs would fit in the same space or less:

• names and formula auditing
• page setup and scale to fit
• changes (protection) and workbook views

I know some things have been made more prominent on the ribbon to get people to consider features they did not even know were there – conditional formatting and defined names being two of the most underused in my opinion, and I’m very glad to see them given a useful amount of space. But getting people to use cell styles simply won’t set the world on fire, or make spreadsheets more efficient, or easier to maintain, or less prone to user errors. If anything, they distract from good practice and promote eye-candy – will “death by PowerPoint” spread to “death by spreadsheet”?