Part of the reason put forward in the introduction of the Ribbon was to
expose commands to users. But there are far too many commands for them all
to be 'exposed' and depending on the users, different commands have a
different level of importance.
Supposedly, the commands 'exposed' on the Ribbon are those commands that the
test labs found that users used the most. If this is really true, it's a sad
testament. I would understand if these were just exposed in 'LEARNER' mode,
but anyone with more than a year or two's experience should be using the
context sensitive (right-click) menus and their own toolbars.
There are still so many useful commands hidden in depths of Word. I remember
once struggling to create a macro to add ParaPageBreakBefore, shortly after
I found that command was already listed deep in the bowels of 'All Commands'
in Word 2000. The last time I really looked at the commands list was in Word
2003, when I think I printed out 4 pages of 'All Commands', many of which I
still don't know their function! But how many users know about those really
useful little commands such as 'Go to TOC', the almost lost 'NEW' dialog,
CloseAll (which used to be a simple Shift+Close), TableUpdateAutoFormat
(that actually clears all formatting from a table) and the myriad of other
commands to make editing fast and easy before the need to resort to macros.
They are all still hidden away, sometimes labelled with incomprehensible
jargon
Terry Farrell
