MicrosoftThis adding a toolbar seems to be part of a more general trend in software (not just Microsoft) to scatter controls (hieroglyphs, I mean icons) randomly around the page--sometimes in some randomly placed toolbar (like here), sometimes in the middle of the object (I'm looking at you, Google Maps!). And then there are controls that disappear until you touch something (Apple Maps). Not only does this make the controls hard to find, it means you don't even know whether they exist. Whereas with a real menu system, all the controls are in one place, and you don't have to go searching.
Microsoft Word is not the worst example of this, but it's pretty bad. There's the "Ribbon", of course (some of us would prefer the original menus). Most of the controls in the ribbon are in a row, but over on the right-hand end *above* the other controls are two icons, one labeled "Comments" and another labeled "Share". These remain there even if you collapse the ribbon. (The "Comments" one brings up yet another tool bar, over on the right. I'm afraid to try the "Share" control.) Why Microsoft thinks you need those icons, when you could just use the ribbon to find the capability, I don't know. I've never ever ever used the "Share" one.
And above the ribbon, on the top of the window, there are icons for autosave, undo/redo, search, and a couple other controls whose hieroglyphs I can't decipher. One of those hieroglyphs is a magnifying glass, which obviously means "bring up a search tool for words in the document." Except it doesn't; it brings up what might be a search for actions you can take. In my case, this includes two lists of "Suggested Actions", both of which are identical: "Spelling and Grammar", "Word Count", and "Print." I have no idea why those are suggested, I've never used the Spelling and Grammar tool (as opposed to the red squiggly underlines when I misspell s.t.)
Down at the bottom of the window, on what used to be the status bar, are still more controls. I can figure out what the one labeled with + and - and % is (although I find it hard to get to a desired magnification, I'm always under- or over-shooting). But I don't know what most of the others do, or whether they're controls or just labels. For example, there's a thing labeled "Page 1 of 6"--I thought it was just a status, not a control. But clicking on it brings up a "Navigation" bar, which is unexpected (for me, YMMV).
And of course there are things you can do to bring up additional toolbars. Do Home | Styles, and then click on the little diagonal arrow coming off the lower right-hand corner, and you get a Styles toolbar. This comes up as a floating toolbar, but you can get it to dock if you hold your mouth just right. If you do that, and you already had the comments toolbar open, then the latter collapses into an icon in yet another toolbar that allows you to choose which toolbar is open--a toolbar of toolbars.
Finally, if you right-click in the document, you get not one but two pop-up menus. Why, I don't know.
Can you say "Confusing"? I knew you could!
