And I expect it will only get worse if they stick with it in future versions. No doubt they will add new features, which means the ribbon will either grow vertically, consuming even more screen real estate than it already does, or they'll have to hide some of the features currently exposed on the ribbon into some hidden menu in order to make room for the new ones – and once again, users will have to waste valuable time rediscovering where the things they actually use have been stuffed away to make room for the new stuff they don't need but which Microsoft thinks should be front and centre.

With the old menu/toolbar structures, we could find things in a logical organized structure, and we could even rearrange them to fit with how we could most efficiently work. Evidently, though, productivity is no longer as important as looking shiny and new.

They may make me use 2007 at work, but this new [ef]Fluent interface will NOT be tainting my home PCs.

Much as I like 2007, I am sorely tempted to return to 2003, except that OneNote is sooooo bloody good in the 2007 version that it won't work unless the rest of the 2007 package is there (which is a bugger!). But I'm finding 2007 Outlook, Word, PPoint etc very slow to load and operate (Outlook has the odd crash/freeze).

Plus — and I may be the only person in the world to find this — the new Word ribbon bar is mind-numbingly hard to navigate around compared to the old File, Edit, Format etc toolbar. I find myself jumping all over the place (ergonomically), which wastes lots of time.

The other day I lost about a day's worth of productivity on a client PowerPoint presentation because I was jumping all over the place trying to find which ribbon option had the particular tool I wanted (and it wasn't clear at all).

Love some of the new stuff you can do in Office2007 — especially OneNote which just rocks with a capital 'R' — but hate the ribbon bar and the fact that you can't get rid of it and bring back the old top toolbar.