Several Excel users have sent me messages this week to ask about the user interface for Excel 2010. They all wanted to know whether Excel will return to menus and custom toolbars, or offer a Classic Interface option.
Compare the Paste options for Excel 2007 with the Paste options for the first beta for Excel 2010.
The answer, unfortunately, is: No chance. Microsoft’s Excel team has said they never will go back to menus. And they won’t offer an optional Classic Interface, because two interfaces would be too much work to maintain.
Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the bad news about Excel’s user interface. The Excel design team has fallen deeply, passionately in love with icons. This figure illustrates the result so far.
When you want to paste something you’ve copied in Excel 2010, you’ll need to decipher icons like the ones at the bottom of this figure. Most Excel users would find the options in Excel 2007 much easier to understand.
If you hover your mouse pointer over each icon in the Excel 2010 Paste area, you’ll see the icon’s tooltip text. So until you memorize those icons, if you ever do, copy-and-paste will turn into a game of hide-and-seek.
This is a beta. Perhaps the Excel team will fall out of love with their icons before the real product ships.
But don’t bet on it.
{ 2 comments }
The icons are very attractive, yet a priori I cannot decipher what they may indicate. Actually, a few are obvious, like Paste Formulas, Paste Transpose, Paste Link, Paste Picture, and Paste Picture Link. Five of 14, not a great ratio. I don’t know why they couldn’t have kept the list of text labels, and decorate them if they really had to with the icons.
Jon,
Here’s a test that someone ought to do:
a. Put ten decipherable icons in a dialog and ask users to click on specific functions from a random list that repeats the functions five times each.
b. Put the function text in a menu and have users click from the same random list.
c. Mix icons and function text in a horizontal array much like a Ribbon, and have them click as instructed.
Finally, compare the average click times and accuracy under each of the three conditions.
I suspect the menu would win and the Ribbon-like pattern would be last. But that’s only a guess.
Charley
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