Okay, there are many things I like about Office 12. There are many things I'm not so crazy about. The ribbon is chief among them.

"But you'll get used to it." Really, how far beyond a year straight will it take?

To me, it suffers from the same bummer as personalized menus do… location isn't consistent.

Look below. Okay, pretend I'm John Scherer and I'm trying to tell you where to find "Insert Category". The ribbon is okay, but geez, did you have to take away the menu bar? the old school toolbar? I feel marched.

"But it's more discoverable!" Or is it? I cannot rollover to see what's under "insert" or "add-ins" or "paste", "spelling", "publish" or styles past #11.

Cannot customize it without writing code? Are you kidding me?

Seriously, was backwards compatibility that much of a burden? You kept Lotus slash commands and help for WordPerfect users for umpteen years but you won't keep _the_ way from v.Last?

"But we've maintained keyboard shortcut compatibility for you experts." Uh, no. Alt+F,V doesn't give me print preview, Alt+O, enter doesn't get my font dialog. I gave up after that.

"But it's worth it because it automatically switches ribbons to show you commands related to your action" - so, the UI becomes unpredictable... tell me, what was so horrible about the little floating on-demand toolbars?

Please Microsoft, admit failure and bring back the pdm.

There are several companies selling what looks like the old ui on the ribbon, like this one that I'm trying out now (http://pschmid.net/office2007/ribboncustomizer/index.php) but I cannot do rollover exploration of the menus in it and it doesn't fix the keyboard shortcuts - Alt+F doesn't show me the Classic UI File menu. Doesn't look like it can be drag-drop customized or support mounting / docking toolbars.

Beyond the ribbon, context sensitive help seems to be totally broken. If you can't do context sensitive help, well, fine. Google, I'm feeling lucky.

Those are my biggest gripes.