I owe Xpertdoc a big thank you. Reviewing their Word AddOn made me realize that we had done a lousy job of using the Office ribbon. We had merely moved all menu items in our Office 2000/XP/2003 version to buttons to the ribbon. To sum up our initial effort – yuck.
Ok, well once again we can hold our head up high. I think we now make full effective use of the ribbon, doing so as well as Office does. (And, in my biased opinion, better than any of our competitors.) Competition is good because it causes each of us to step up to challenges from our competitors and to not just equal, but surpass what they offer.
So here's how it works. As you move through the template at anytime you can click the tags button and then select the type of tag to insert there. At all times you can validate tags as well as move to the next or previous tags. So you have a quick way to get to any tag and insert tags without ever leaving the ribbon.
Once you have inserted a tag you then get the main properties for the tag in the ribbon. This is different from the Office approach where the specific items would be in a 2nd tab. We tried that approach also and got a 100% thumbs down from the users trying both approaches. So this is different from the Office UI, but we think it is an improvement.
For the properties that are rarely used, you click on the group button to bring up the tag builder. But for 98% of the time, everything you need is right in the ribbon. You can even get the full data tree right off the ribbon – click on the selected item to put it in the select. Same for the evaluate where clicking on it will drop down a window showing the results.
Please give it a spin and let me know what you think. You can download 8.1.3.0 here.
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