Not all Office 12 apps get the “ribbon”

Not sure if this was common knowledge or not, but not every application in the Office 12 family will be receiving the new “ribbon” UI upgrade. Although understandable from their perspective of focusing on the most common and widely used applications, I’m not sure if this is a good idea from the perspective of trying to launch a new day in user interface design.

Here are the programs that will get the new “ribbon” UI:

• Word
• Excel
• Outlook
• PowerPoint
• Access

I would think that if you really wanted to adopt this new way of doing something, every application in the 12 family should have had the ribbon applied to it. I believe that would have helped users to embrace the format and reduce the learning curve for users that may use one or multiple applications.

We’ll see how it plays out.