The fundamental change in the new Office is the way you interact with the main programs: this is down to the Ribbon. Gone are the standard menu bar with toolbar beneath and instead you have a series of tabs, each showing panels of icons with the most commonly-used tools and functions on them. Switching between tabs gives new sets of icons and the Ribbon is bolstered by the mini toolbar, which fades in near your mouse pointer for making format changes.
After a few minutes you start to get the idea of the Ribbon and for most functions it proves a lot quicker to use than the old interface. There are some idiosyncrasies, though. Why has the file menu become an Office button in the top left-hand corner of the screen and why is the default Ribbon tab labelled Home? These seem to be changes for change's sake.
