Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel? I've been surprised how often that seems to differentiate between people that think finding things in a ribbon is hard/slow versus easy/quick.
Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? It has also surprised me how many people that liked the old menus because of keyboard navigation don't realize a lot of the same tricks and navigations work exactly the same (Alt, arrow keys, Esc, letters, etc).
> Did you know you can scroll through Ribbon tabs on most (every?) implementation with your scroll wheel?
> Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard?
Yes, to both of those things. Scrolling through the ribbon tabs doesn't address or ease my issue with the ribbon (which is trying to find the operation I want). The problem isn't how quickly I can scroll through the ribbon, but that finding things in it is hard. That said, a good UI solution wouldn't require me to scroll anything like that in the first place.
Keyboard shortcuts let me bypass the ribbon, which is good, but they don't help me with things that I don't do all the time because I won't remember the shortcuts. Aside from the waste of screen space, the ribbon doesn't bother me when doing the routine things.
Not just keyboard shortcuts, but keyboard navigation: you can press-and-release Alt and then "walk" through the Ribbon by keyboard: press arrows to switch tabs, move through sections of commands, drill into dropdowns, then Escape to "go back up" a level.
In terms of finding specific things, every version of the Ribbon in Office has had an accompanying search box (today labeled "Tell me what you want to do", and since the beginning labelled with a light-bulb icon, the last remnant of Clippy iconography, RIP). I still think it would be great if search results had an option like "Show me where to find this on the Ribbon next time", but the icons in the search results are the same as on the Ribbon and sometimes just seeing the icon in the search results can help you find it better the next time.
> you can press-and-release Alt and then "walk" through the Ribbon by keyboard
Ah, I see. That doesn't really address my issues, though.
> every version of the Ribbon in Office has had an accompanying search box
It does? I can't find anything like that in O365 Word at all (I haven't checked the other apps). Regardless, that just underscores how bad the ribbon is -- a search function shouldn't be necessary.
Beyond that, have you tried navigating a Ribbon via keyboard? It has also surprised me how many people that liked the old menus because of keyboard navigation don't realize a lot of the same tricks and navigations work exactly the same (Alt, arrow keys, Esc, letters, etc).