[T.B. Yoits]

Yeah, I've found the large ribbon that MS Office uses to be ridiculous - it eats up too much of the top of the screen for my taste.

Ohhh, you've suffered needlessly. From day one the Ribbon could be set to only appear when you pressed the Alt Key.

[Montana_Sam]

From day one the Ribbon could be set to only appear when you pressed the Alt Key.

Yeah, but having to do it on every system (small lab with half-a-dozen computers) was more work than it was worth, especially with Microsoft's propensity for munging config files during system updates. And in real life, I found the combined menu/ribbon interface of LibreOffice Writer to fit my workflow far better than MS Word. LO was "less fiddly" for me. A side-note is that I found MS Excel useful because it was easy to generate spreadsheet reports (with charts) from inside the test code (usually C#) through the interop assembly, and that was the only feature of Office that I used much. Cheers!