Are menus dead?

Question

I downloaded Office 2010 and have been fiddling with Excel and found the UI to be excellent. However, unless I'm missing it, menus are nowhere to be found. Are they done?

RandomEngy · Answer 1 · 2011-03-26T15:50:17.877

6

In summary:

Office doesn't use WPF or Winforms, it uses Win32 (unmanaged C++).
The ribbon was added and menus gone in 2007.
Menus still exist in WPF.
Menus were replaced in office because the ribbon does a better job at exposing features and making common tasks easy by reducing the need to dig through menu hierarchies. Most people like the ribbon better after adjusting to it.

edited Mar 26 '11 at 15:50

answered Dec 13 '09 at 20:09

RandomEngy

442

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 13 '09 at 19:50

1

Office doesn't use WPF for UI. menus were removed in office 2007! replaced with the ribbon

answered Dec 13 '09 at 19:50

Hannoun Yassir

111

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 13 '09 at 19:52

Office has menus. It's just it uses the ribbion interface. This means everything is avaialble in the same vertical and hoizontal space.

If anything, Office is taking the route that they way we use menus is changing. Not the fact menus are dead.

Another example is Firefox. They are lookng for new ways of handling many tabs in one screen. Whatever method hey choose, it's still menus and tabs.

Are menus dead?

3 Answers3