Talk:Ribbon (computing)

Prior art needs citation if true, doubtful though
The claim that the ribbon may not be patentable because of prior art needs a credible citation. The Slashdot article on the licensing guidelines for the ribbon interface have a few posts from Slashdot visitors claiming its similar to something incorporated in an old version of 1-2-3. But if you read what they say is similar, its obvious that they aren't the same thing and wouldn't be viewed as the same thing legally (pressing a key leads to a horizontal menu in 1-2-3, versus a combination of a menu and a toolbar system in Office, come on). One person says its similar to whats implemented in Adobe products, but all Adobe products have is a toolbar that changes per task, something Microsoft is not attempting to patent. To make this claim in the article you have to cite an expert in patent law. You can't cite angry posters on Slashdot, who are mainly objecting because they hate the idea of patenting software features and interfaces in general, and have no concept as to what is patentable.

Yes its legitimate to point out some open source advocates are attacking Microsoft about this. But the way its presented in the article makes it sound like they have a point. Also, its not clear whether any credible open source advocates are pursuing this argument, or its just a bunch of Slashdot posters. People on forums and Slashdot often just think up any arguments they can to make any point they can, whether or not the arguments are credible. Wikipedia really can't appease every Slashdot poster's pet argument even if its wrong.

Please either cite a patent expert on the issue, and if you're just going to comment on open source advocates, a credible leader in open source advocacy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brianshapiro (talk • contribs)


 * True. The obvious problem here is that nobody has seen the patent yet. I'm not even sure when or if Microsoft is going to submit an application (this claim is still tagged as "citation needed" in the article). As prior art depends on how broad the patent is going to be, I wouldn't except to see any qualified "reviews" of it any time soon.


 * I wouldn't like to throw out the entire statement. The fact is, that it's being criticized, and is controversial. The practice of licensing a patent before even submitting an application is unusual at best, and that's what is actually being criticized. I do agree that Slashdot comments are not a reliable source, but it does document the general reactions from the community. As far as WP:POV is concerned, I don't see a problem.


 * What do you think? -- intgr 19:07, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The SIMION software, when inside "View mode" (i.e. viewing and manipulating a "workbench" object), has had a ribbon-like interface for at least as far back as 1996 (version 6.0 / DOS). Version 7.0 (year 2000), which has nearly an identical user interface to version 6.0, has screenshots on and in the figures of the 2000 paper  describing the history of SIMION. In fact, contrary to the text "most of these implementations are not intended to entirely supplant an application's main menu bar and toolbars" in the Wikipedia article, this "tabbed toolbar" does supplant the main navigation in View mode. As seen, SIMION had no Windows-style "menu bar" prior to version 8.0 (see version 8.0 screenshots in ). When MS introduced their "ribbon" interface as the "next best thing", I noticed the similarity and thought SIMION may have been ahead of its time, or at least its GUI concept was not old fashioned but still trendy. Qevxb (talk) 22:19, 14 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Further, the article seems to reduce The Ribbon UI to merely a tab. Then, once the reduction takes place, half the article is chuck full of opinion, zealotry and uncited (or poorly cited) claims  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.47.86.27 (talk) 10:43, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

I wrote a "tabbed toolbar", complete with scroll animations, in VisualBasic for DOS sometime in 1993. It was used in two custom applications: a simplistic CAD viewer with powerful import/export and a logistics management package. My implementation, compared to Microsoft's, lacked icons (it was capable of ANSI character terminal control though, :-p ). Prior art is plentiful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.57.54.1 (talk) 14:28, 18 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Microsoft is excellent at plagiarising other people's ideas ;-P
 * KSM-2501ZX, IP address:= 186.220.190.67 (talk) 17:58, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Here you have Ribbon-like tabs with icon commands in Calamus from 1987. on Atari ST. Dozen of other software on Atari from that era use tabbed interface with set of commands. (you can see video how interface work here, live in action: http://milan.kovac.cc/atari/software/rsync/DTP/CAL109N.FTP/!MOV001.mp4) Calimero (talk) 19:05, 19 September 2017 (UTC)

Incorrect assertions by Microsoft
According to MS help on removing the ribbon, "The Ribbon ...is part of the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, is designed to help you quickly find the commands that you need to complete a task. Commands are organized in logical groups that are collected together under tabs. Each tab relates to a type of activity, such as writing or laying out a page. To reduce screen clutter, some tabs are shown only when they are needed. When the Ribbon is minimized, you see only the tabs."

I think that many of us may disagree with sections of this paragraph from Microsoft.

Commands are not organized into logical groups, they are merely plastered across the screen in a logic defying manner that only serves to look pretty and make conventional functions hard to find. Finding commands is not quick because the density of icons is spread out across the screen instead of gathered into a close area, so the eye must search back and forth across the screen until a poorly designed icon that is not well related to previous menu choices may be found. It is like reading the this paragraph.

The function choices are not even the same as the 2003 menu choices, so previous users have to hunt through multiple mouse menus to find what is not shown in the new Ribbon.

Tabs may relate to types of activities that do not seem to be carefully related.

The ribbon hogs screen space in an abhorent manner making the document window seem completely irrelevant. Taking of valuable screen space is especially noticeable on short screen laptops.

When I minimize the Ribbon, I'd like it to disappear completely.

Microsoft refers to it's software as "Professional." The Ribbon does not seem to meet the standards for 'professional' since it does not maintain continuity for those professionals who use it.

Is Microsoft's feedback loop completely broken? If sales are their only parameter, then they certainly are not doing themselves and their users any favors.70.89.209.81 (talk) 16:41, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

- Exactly, the software is not "professional" by any stretch of the imagination. The ribbon is designed for the "Average" user that hunts-and-pecks for every letter on the keyboard. They are used to searching whole minutes for something (like the "E" key). The Ribbon is like a keyboard in that you can spend lots of minutes searching for that letter you're looking for. But the "professional" user might actually touch-type - and familiarity with an interface is important. Instead "professional" users have been reduced to the indignity of the "Average" user and forced to hunt-and-peck for actions that were ingrained over a decade of tool use. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.228.82.178 (talk) 08:51, 7 September 2015 (UTC)


 * As an example of how the ribbon items are not organized logically, but by some other criterion, I (was forced to) use Excel today. I needed to insert a row.  Easy, that hieroglyph should be on the Insert tab, right?  Wrong.  It's in the Home tab.  I have the same issue with inserting tables in Word; I can never remember where the hieroglyph for that should be.  Wherever it is, it's not logical.  Now if I could just find some prominent review that said that, I would put it in the article. Mcswell (talk) 01:44, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Any Usability Studies Cited by Microsoft?
it would be nice to see a reference to any studies Microsoft has released to support its claim of productivity enhancement, given users' self reported impairment of productivity by 20-35%. Allowing for the bald faced facetiousness of the productivity argument, there should be discussion about other strategies justifying this massive antagonizing of their customer base, i.e. is it yet another of Microaoft's many lock-in strategies? Ensuring lock-in of new users to Office vs Open Office, by training new users in a non standard non portable unique and crippling interface. It would also seem to be potential grounds for a class action lawsuit if in fact productivity is reduced as much as the 20-35% report. if so, Microsoft should have foreseen this and conducted sufficient usability studies to defend any such legal action on behalf of its long suffering abusive relationship victims aka 'customers'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.61.142.33 (talk) 11:49, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
 * In my to-do list there's a desire to write a summary of the story of the MS Ribbon. Once you learn that the Office most used command is Paste and that users in focus groups were asking MS for new features that already existed in Office (that obviously they didn't found), it starts to explain many things about the redesign. Office 2007 was certainly designed based both on collected usage statistics and goal-based design. The designers issued a series of blog posts discussing the design process, they should be added as a reference to the article. Diego (talk) 10:09, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Damn, they're already included in the article. Guess nobody read them. Diego (talk) 10:14, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I would still like to see some usability studies quoted in the article and none of those above come close. One of the underlying merits of the classic "WIMP" interface was the number of ergonomic studies that demonstrated the relative merits of keyboard and mouse for different operations. It did demonstrate that the old diehard "command line interface" supporters were plain wrong, at least for the majority of usage. I'm prepared to believe a ribbon interface is easier for the new user and could be as efficient with practice, but as one who still prefers the drop-down menu approach I'd like to see the evidence. Chris55 (talk) 12:33, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * See this (and this if you have access to it). I don't know of other published results by Microsoft that I'm aware of, but the design descriptions above say that they certainly performed them in combination with their usage stats to arrive to the current design. Maybe you could track the papers by Microsoft Research, it's likely that they have published more of them at that venue. But AFAIK the main benefit provided by the Ribbon design is not efficiency with common actions but easier access to some of the more obscure ones. Diego (talk) 12:51, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The first one you quote is very lukewarm - more users preferred WIMP or were neutral! (section 4.1) I was amused by the user comment "I don’t like it at all. From a modern civilisation back to pictograms and hieroglyphs". I can't (yet) access the second. But they seem to be addressing marketing issues (do people like it) rather than ergonomic issues (is it more effective or learnable). So maybe the reason there isn't any research is that it doesn't show what MS wants it to show. Chris55 (talk) 18:00, 16 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I would judge my productivity with the Ribbon to be 3-5% of that with the existing menu interface. I could just do things, like change page orientation, print, configure styles, and more. Now I have to Google for anything I want to do because the smattering of icons in haphazard fashion frequently don't contain those important functions that were easily found in menus. I swear at anybody who thinks one should use the Ribbon in the workplace. There's no justification for it whatsoever. Bring back the menu. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.228.82.178 (talk) 08:54, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Is this a ribbon patent?
Is this a ribbon patent? The drawings are grainy, but the second one looks like a ribbon, and is described thusly on the second page of the description:

FIG 2 is an illustration of a computer screen display showing a ribbon shaped user interface for displaying task top level functionality tabs and for displaying a plurality functionalities available under a selected top level functionality tab.

This patent was issued to Microsoft on Feb 14, 2012.

http://www.google.com/patents/US8117542

Dbsx (talk) 18:38, 30 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Possibly. The patent doesn't use the term "ribbon" however, and I can't find any citation that conclusively identifies it as related, so it would probably be original research to make the link. Microsoft do have at least two other ribbon-related patents: and . Horatio (talk) 21:31, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Microsoft Office category?
Should this article be included as part of the Microsoft Office category? (IanWilliam20 (talk) 18:50, 10 March 2017 (UTC))
 * Hi.
 * I believe there is nothing strictly Microsoft Office-like about it. Office 2007 was the first version of Microsoft Office to use ribbons, but certainly not the first app.
 * Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 14:36, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you for responding. I understand that the term "ribbon" predates the particular implementation introduced by Microsoft Office 2007 (and present in later versions of the productivity suite), but it previously referred to a traditional toolbar. Further, while tabbed toolbars existed before the ribbon, the implementation introduced by Microsoft Office 2007 is unique, particularly in regards to its interface concepts such as galleries, to the point where the company issued a royalty-free license for non-competing products after its introduction. Further, Microsoft has several patents on this implementation including User interface for displaying selectable software functionality controls that are relevant to a selected object. (IanWilliam20 (talk) 17:58, 4 April 2017 (UTC))
 * I know. But this article is not about the unique design of Microsoft. —Codename Lisa (talk) 06:52, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Page title should not have "computing" for disambiguation.
Computing is not anywhere close to what this article describes.

Alternative title could be:

- "Ribbon (computer interface design)",

- "Ribbon (Interface desgin)" or

- "Ribbon (digital user interface")

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2a02:8106:22a:f500:6920:728:34ff:92a7 (talk) 16:42, 2019 July 5 (UTC)