Continued:

One myth that has been circulating everywhere is that the menus are irritatingly ‘smart’ and keep adjusting themselves to user needs, which is mostly wrong. The tabs, panes and commands stay fixed in their place unless you decide to move them around. Any bar, button or menu will come out only when you command it to and not by itself.

In the ribbon, you have various groups under which similar commands are grouped. For example, in the image above, clipboard is a group (currently called a ‘chunk’) with commands such as paste, copy among others inside it. Within these commands, the ones that are more important are highlighted. For instance, in the clipboard command above, paste has been highlighted as compared to the other commands.

The tabs are also resizable, and as you make them smaller or bigger, the icons change their layout and get grouped into a drop down menu if you make the chunk too small. In the clipboard chunk above, you have a drop down menu with other commands such as paste special. The commands you want on top are configurable, and you can edit what you want to see in the chunk flexibly.

The file menu is the only toolbar (as we know them from previous versions) that will remain in Office 12. It’s a quick access task menu and can be configured to put your widely used commands.

Contextual Tabs: Taking off from the philosophy of ‘enabling design’, Microsoft developers perhaps realised that right click is one of the most used mouse functions. What do we do when we want to edit an item? We right click it. If we don’t understand an icon and there is no explanatory pop-up after hovering over it, we right click it. Therefore, Microsoft decided to make the user interface very contextual dependant. If you are making a chart, you will get an additional menu, although very minuscule in size, with commands specifically listed for editing/modifying or making charts.

For instance, in the menu above, when you click on the chart, you get a new contextual menu called Chart Tools that was otherwise hidden.

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