Idea: Ribbon Bar Item Finder

As a special reward to the people with longer attention spans, I've included a joke near the end of this blog entry. I highly recommend continuing up to that point, at least, as it is certainly one of the funnier jokes that has been written since, let us say, the invention of trans-human discourse.

But first, here's a free idea which I would like to share with our old buddies, the Office Team: why not add a 'finder' at the top of your nifty ribbon bars?

Just say you're using Winword.exe from Office 2007 and you're hunting through the ribbon bar looking for something. In this case you're wondering...

"Hmmm. how do i create a two-column layout?"

Here's my suggestion:

A small textbox at the top right could act as a navigation aid, and would also search the document.

In the example, as we type "column" into the 'finder' any tabs that contain 'Column' related properties would light up in some ambient way, with an indication of how relevant they are. (In the screenshot I've got the number "2" appearing, as if to say 'There are two Column-related items in this tab right here!')

This behaviour would happen 'as you type', much like incremental find in firefox and visual studio.

I for one could use this feature all the time.

The idea is inspired by vista's start menu search box, and by the property search experience in expression blend:

(I wanted something similar in Janus property inspectors and intellisense a few years ago)

And now for my very funny joke. You've been good. Prepare for an excellent reward.

Q: Why did the retired mathematician sell his blackboard?

A: Because he had nothing left to prove.

Also here's a recent article by Paul Stovell where he suggests some changes to the designer concept for WPF. My favourite thought here is the 2.5 dimensional view of the layout. Clever stuff.

'mike' on Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:54:42 GMT, sez:

I can't decide whether this is a brilliant idea or whether it's the height of irony that one might even need a search system just to find, you know, a menu item. Mind you, as a person who's spent, what, a decade and a half navigating Word's menus, I'm not finding the ribbon particularly easy going. Where, oh where, can that item have gone? Oh, where, oh, where can it be?

'Ryan Patterson' on Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:03:15 GMT, sez:

Jeff Atwood wrote a post about this a while back :)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000887.html

'Orestis Markou' on Thu, 29 Nov 2007 13:03:26 GMT, sez:

Check out Leopard's help functionality, it pretty much does what you want in every app.

'Josh Marshall' on Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:33:45 GMT, sez:

Oretis beat me to it, but I thought I'd demo it for you:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpmarshall/2073764971/

'lb' on Sun, 02 Dec 2007 21:31:22 GMT, sez:

about the scout app which does this and more... mary jo foley has the scoop:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=237

'Matthew' on Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:18:44 GMT, sez:

Your link in the RSS feed (http://secretgeek.net/ribbonfinder.asp.asp) doesn't work. Get rid of one of the .asp bits.

'Rinat Abdullin' on Mon, 03 Dec 2007 06:44:01 GMT, sez:

I recall reading one article about that Fluent Interface of Microsoft (with screenshots). They used to have search (items were being filtered as you type) but then decided to get rid of it. Given the amount of investments in this Ribbon UI, I'm sure there was some decent reason behind.


PS: +1 for the broken link in RSS feed.

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