I'm an Excel geek - and yes sorry I've done far too much VBA in my time.
The ribbon has all but destroyed Office for me. The commands are randomly scattered about the sub-menus of the ribbon, much of the content is stuff I will never ever use and it takes up a ridiculous amount of space.
While it seems a large step backwards to folks like me who were expert users, the ribbon apparently makes it easier for "average" users.
However in helping the average Microsoft seemed to forget about the power users, with the result that my speed in Excel is slower now than it was in 1995.
Indeed there is almost no tangible improvement in Excel for over 10 years. The basic functions are the same, the program still crashes frequently and now the usability is worse than it used to be. No wonder I turn more and more to Google Docs and Scirvener.
I'm a power Excel user and I can tell you that Excel 2010 is a vast improvement over 2007. 2007 a vast improvement over 2003. There are many things you can do in 2010 that are literally not possible in 2007. 2003 feels like a barebones spreadsheet now.
There are still lots of things missing in Excel, and as a VBA developer I know you can appreciate missing things like the lack of a unified event hierarchy. But its getting noticeably better each release.
You're probably used to using the Alt-F-S type key shortcuts. The rest have pretty much been left unchanged (Ctrl+S) for example. Also don't forget the clusterfuck that was the menuing system from Office XP -> Office 2003 where every time you opened a menu, everything was in a different place.
Google Docs is no good for me when I have to deal with sensitive data that has to be kept in-shore as I have no idea where the hell in the world it's being stored.
I see that argument about the security of Google Docs often and I don't really understand it.
Speaking hypothetically, as an attacker I'd much rather see you keep your sensitive documents on your own computer where you browse flash-enabled web sites, open and edit PDFs, and download email attachments. Trying to get to your Google Docs through a Google Account with 2-step authentication would be much more painful.
That's assuming your enemy is a malicious, non-government actor. If you're hiding your documents from other threats (read: 3-letter agencies), maybe your aversion to Google Docs is more understandable.
Speaking hypothetically, if I were to have sensitive documents on my network they wouldn't be on a computer with access to anything but the LAN. Your definition of sensitive seems to differ wildly from the definitions I've seen from corporations.
In the UK, we have data protection and financial services regulations to adhere to which clearly state where the data must reside. That means we legally can't keep our data offshore in certain industry sectors and applications.
Some "cloudy" providers help us with geographical affinity (Azure and AWS for example) but Google Docs is a big bag of mud with everything stored "somewhere" so it's useless.
While it seems a large step backwards to folks like me who were expert users, the ribbon apparently makes it easier for "average" users. However in helping the average Microsoft seemed to forget about the power users, with the result that my speed in Excel is slower now than it was in 1995. Indeed there is almost no tangible improvement in Excel for over 10 years. The basic functions are the same, the program still crashes frequently and now the usability is worse than it used to be. No wonder I turn more and more to Google Docs and Scirvener.