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I downloaded Office 2010 and have been fiddling with Excel and found the UI to be excellent. However, unless I'm missing it, menus are nowhere to be found. Are they done?

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What is the connection to WPF? – Michael Petrotta Dec 13 '09 at 19:46
I understood that it was developed in WPF but having said that... I don't know! <g> – Brad Dec 13 '09 at 19:49
It may have been, I couldn't say, but whatever the fate of menus in Office, they're definitely available in WPF. – Michael Petrotta Dec 13 '09 at 19:51
Badly formed question, I guess. Is it proper UI design to include menus? may have been better. – Brad Dec 13 '09 at 19:53
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 13 '09 at 19:53

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

In summary:

  1. Office doesn't use WPF or Winforms, it uses Win32 (unmanaged C++).
  2. The ribbon was added and menus gone in 2007.
  3. Menus still exist in WPF.
  4. Menus were replaced in office because the ribbon does a better job at exposing features and making common tasks easy by reducing the need to dig through menu hierarchies. Most people like the ribbon better after adjusting to it.
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I've found that the ribbon can be annoying at times ... like when it magically switches to a different tab as I'm navigating data... (MS Excel was the last place I recall seeing it in office 2007) Other than that I love it. Single click to do most actions... except those I switched the ribbon tab to before navigating the data... d'oh! – Jason D Dec 15 '09 at 1:37
Don't you mean "the ribbon was added" (and therefore menus were removed) in Office 2007? – Billy ONeal Mar 7 '11 at 2:30
Yes, I did mean that. Thanks. – RandomEngy Mar 26 '11 at 15:50
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up vote 1 down vote

Office doesn't use WPF for UI. menus were removed in office 2007! replaced with the ribbon

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Don't know where I got that... Thanks! – Brad Dec 13 '09 at 19:51
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up vote 0 down vote

Office has menus. It's just it uses the ribbion interface. This means everything is avaialble in the same vertical and hoizontal space.

If anything, Office is taking the route that they way we use menus is changing. Not the fact menus are dead.

Another example is Firefox. They are lookng for new ways of handling many tabs in one screen. Whatever method hey choose, it's still menus and tabs.

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