That's the problem. Toolbar buttons ought to be ONE-click shortcuts. Menus are multi-click.
My frustration stemmed primarily from having to constantly bounce back and forth between toolbar tabs to get certain tasks done (it's been a while so I can't remember the exact use cases, maybe formatting table borders and fonts/bold/etc). In those cases it legit doubled my clicks.
The ribbon essentially took my menus, and made them waste vast amounts of precious vertical screen real estate - not to mention less consistency in presentation & discoverability (particularly when other software I wasn't as familiar with began to copy the trend).
If I recall, older versions also did a better job of surfacing keyboard shortcuts (via tooltips), so you would inherently learn the ones you used most as you used the software.
That's the problem. Toolbar buttons ought to be ONE-click shortcuts. Menus are multi-click.
My frustration stemmed primarily from having to constantly bounce back and forth between toolbar tabs to get certain tasks done (it's been a while so I can't remember the exact use cases, maybe formatting table borders and fonts/bold/etc). In those cases it legit doubled my clicks.
The ribbon essentially took my menus, and made them waste vast amounts of precious vertical screen real estate - not to mention less consistency in presentation & discoverability (particularly when other software I wasn't as familiar with began to copy the trend).
If I recall, older versions also did a better job of surfacing keyboard shortcuts (via tooltips), so you would inherently learn the ones you used most as you used the software.