Comment from Jon Peltier
Time: August 29, 2008, 4:36 am

Not only are formatting options not on the first tab, but they are spread among a ridiculous number of tabs. Office 2003’s Patterns Tab of the Format Series dialog in Excel 2007 is now spread out among SIX TABS: four for marker attributes and two for line attributes. I understand that there are many more attributes available to us now, great new trash like glows and shadows and bevels. In 2003, any special fill effects were consigned to child dialogs only when you wanted them (e.g., the Area Fill Effects subdialog that handles gradients, patterns, picture fills, and the like). Excel 2007 promotes such junky effects to the status of full-fledged tabs.

In addition, in a lot of cases, less effective controls have been used. For axis formatting, the familiar option buttons that provide choices for tick marks and tick labels, which show all options at once, have been replaced by dropdowns which show only the selected item until you expend a mouse click to expand the list.

The dialog interactivity is poorly implemented. In 2003 when you clicked on the checkbox next to an axis scale entry box, the entry box was activated and the contents were selected, so you could edit with an effective one or two clicks. Or you could click directly on the entry box even if the scale was set for automatic, and edit the scale parameter. In 2007 the box is disabled until you’ve checked the “Fixed” box, and after checking the box you must then click on the entry and select the value to enter a new value. I feel the mouse click odometer spinning like crazy.

I agree with Andreas’ impression that the dialogs were constructed at the last moment out of pipe cleaners and chewing gum. In addition to the excessive tabs and ineffective controls and interactivity, many of the layouts are unnatural, taking up excess space and placing objects in strange locations.

The decision to make the dialogs modeless must have seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, for someone who’s never used them in battle. As a final indignity to the users of this interface, the non-modal nature of the dialogs means that the trusty F4 Repeat Last Action shortcut key, which in Excel 2003 repeated all formatting activity since the dialog was opened, now at best repeats only the last single formatting action. The F4 key, which could save dozens of keystrokes with each click, has been hobbled, incapacitated by a poor sequence of design decisions.

As I keep saying, even if you know where the controls have been relocated to, it takes so much more time and effort to implement them.

Comment from Sam Benson
Time: October 1, 2008, 8:14 pm

I too am finding the UI interface in Excel 2007.

Being highly proficent in Excel 2003, the lack of the ‘old’ menu structure and keyboard interface makes navigation tiresome. I used to be able to go Alt-F,V for print preview (gone) and a few others.

Yes I know it retains the old keyboard shortcuts but you can see what you are doing (or remember what is was)

Further frustrating me is that the data import stuff has been overly complicated as I used to be able edit queries a great deal more easily then I can now (and when you don’t want to import 50000 rows just 100 ) this is a great irritant.

At the end of day, the additional power and size is probably welcome (though if I ever need more than about 1000 columns I have a problem). The loss of productive screen space (the Ribbon is huge), the change in where things are located and how to do things makes the learning curve steep and frustrating for long time users.