Excel greys out all the options until I save

thank you for that reminder of the days when spirits were brave, the stakes were high, menus were /real/ menus, women were /real/ women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were /real/ small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...

That being Office 2003, strictly speaking neither are those, but an office special version of menus. :-)

That's the mac version! (which retains menus, as mentioned higher up the thread)

The windows version no longer has the option (unless you install an add-on to get them back!)

(The mac[2] in general also does menus better than windows anyway since it places all menus in the same place at the top of the screen and not at the top border of the application window - so they are always in the same place, and a mouse flick away at the top of the screen where you can't[1] overshoot and miss them).

Quick, quick, woss this add-on then eh, pant, pant, pant ?!

I sometimes have to use Excel on Win11 and getting the menus back would speed up my workflow.

TIA.

What difference does it make whether the menu is displayed vertically or horizontally?

At its simplest level - the thing that Office has is not a menu (in the windows UI elements sense)

This has implications, and is a deeper question than you might think.

GUI interfaces are intended to make it quicker and easier to interact with an application, and quicker to learn a new one. In addition to the collection of "gadgets" (i.e. buttons, lists, menus, edit boxes etc) the OS will also have style guides to train developers. The intention being that each application will have a level of consistency with other applications, and will use a common set of basic controls and UI elements.

So with windows apps, if you need a menu, then there is a standard control for it. It always works the same and looks the same. Shortcuts also work the same. If you need a button bar then there is a standard format for that as well, including standardised icons for popular operations like load and save etc. If you in some way modify that UI element, then that modification is adopted automatically by all apps that use it.

So when you sit in front of a new bit of software, you can in a very short space of time get a feel for the capabilities just by looking at the menus. The menu that takes the same form as it does in every other application you use. It also remains consistent - the same tools appear in the same place in the same list of menus. If something is not available in the current context, then it is still shown, but greyed out etc. So as you gain experience with a bit of software, you can navigate to its controls more quickly.

Also a menu being a standard UI element, it means that assistive technologies (screen readers etc) understand how to deal with this UI elements.

The Office specific menus that MS introduced with Office XP, started to break those style guides. The Office XP menus looked different, and they (by default) started to hide less commonly used items - that then only appeared after a time delay. This meant people familiar with the use of menus, found this one application was now somewhat unique and different, and knowledge you had from previous experience was now less transferable. It was slower to use because navigation took longer - the option that was there last time, might not be this time etc. (until you wait for it to appear, or find the configuration option to turn off the auto hiding of options).

The button bar metaphor that came with Office 2010 moved further still from the consistency of other applications. Now being mostly pictorial you could not as quickly "read" what each function was. Some were obvious, but not all. It is also a waste of screen space and more visual clutter. Yes you can auto hide it, but then it is more visually jarring when you pop it up as it forces redrawing of the applications data space.

So in short, many long term users were upset by the loss of functionality and familiarity that came with the current interface.

Here is one:

This is a very good summary and highlights the many points that make the ribbon a PoS (I'm not as polite as John). The worst thing is that everything on the ribbon, pretty much, is now an icon, so I suddenly got 200 icons to learn. Some are familiar, most are not. It wastes vertical space, and personally I have my monitor in landscape, not portrait, mode. And these are the ONLY apps which have these Office-specific ribbons. And so on.