Microsoft recently released Ribbon Hero. This is an add-in for Office 2007 and Office 2010, and the idea is to earn points by completing challenges (e.g. formatting a table). In the process, you’ll become familiar with the new user interface. The name is obviously inspired by “Guitar Hero”, but I think it’s unlikely that this will be quite so much fun at parties. It does sound rather Dilbert-esque… “The room is hushed. He puts the title in bold, and the crowd goes wild! Encore!”
Still, it sounds like an interesting idea. According to ZDNet: “It taps into social and adaptive learning paradigms and important research on motivation and learning.” I know that a lot of people are reluctant to use Office 2007 because it looks so different, so I’m willing to give this a go. Unfortunately, it has some pretty fundamental problems, which make it completely useless to me.
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