[Lo Zeno]

Originally Posted by zerospinboson

I do hate to disagree with people, but in pre-Office2007, every function was hidden in a random place. Now only some of the functions are, and they are generally in a more logical place. Why is it bad that it's in a different place when the new place is at least more logical?

What seems logical for you, doesn't seem logical for others, probably. I'm not an Office power user, but many colleagues of mine are, and their greatest complaint is that while the older arrangement in menus and submenus did follow a logical grouping of functions (and menu names were understandable), the new arrangement isn't as intuitive.
And I work in a software company, where learning to use new applications is everyday practice.

Also, I don't really get what you base your "office is meant for the casual user" comment on. One of the major points of improvement in office07 was that they put document styles front&center, whereas before you could pretty much never find them unless you knew they existed. This is a major improvement when it comes to generating consistent formatting for most people, and I'm very happy that they've done this.

Document styles is one of the most commonly asked features, not a specialized and high-level one. Also, my comment is backed up by Microsoft Italia's CEO's words: I attend sometimes to MS meetings in which they show new products and previews, and the words they used were "the new Office interface is meant to be simpler for the common people, to make Office more appealing to the normal PC while earlier it was more appealing to experts".

Anyway, this thread has quite a few posts that seem to say "I dislike having to relearn stuff, even if the new way is ultimately more efficient/intuitive" (no offense to the posters).

As I said, where I work learning and relearning stuff is common and happens often, but you probably won't change your mind.
As for efficiency, something is efficient also if it doesn't take too much time to learn and master. If you need too much time to re-learn to do something with the same level of professionality as before, it's not efficient: it's a time waster.
The right choice would have been to allow user to choose between the old User Interface and the new ribbon: new users would find the Ribbon, and old users could switch to the old interface. With time, people would get used to the Ribbon, but those old users who needed to be productive quickly could keep the old interface until they learnt the "new way".

Microsoft already took this approach with the Control Panel, with IIS (Internet Information Services), and with Visual Studio. And it worked fine. Don't know why they didn't take this same approach with Office.

As people said, if one is forced to re-learn things, one would be better learn to use OpenOffice, which supports all the Microsoft formats (now it supports even docx, xmlx, pptx) plus the OpenDocument open format. A huge plus in compatibility.