I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical.
The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.
Change does frighten and confuse people which is why the principle of least surprise is part of the human interface guidelines, but nobody seems to care about that anymore.
For anyone for who changes do just that, check this out, which I think is the most impressive example of data-driven UI design ever documented even remotely this well: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-...
I love the ribbon. If you don't, try one of two things. One, try double-clicking on one of the headers - it'll make the ribbon hide unless you click it. This makes it effectively work like the old menus, except more horizontal and graphical instead of vertical.
The second is to scroll your mouse wheel while hovering over the ribbon.