How do I get rid of ribbons and go back to old office menus?

First, an apology for my initial vitriol. You are not Microsoft. With your followups, I know what you were meaning which isn't what came through on your initial post, which may have been to unspoken assumptions on one or both parts.

On a practical level, what you are saying is for all technical and practical purposes correct.

What has a lot of us going into fits is that what you are saying is for all technical and practical purposes correct.

It isn't about being new.  It isn't about being different.  It is about taking on significant hidden costs for something that provides nothing beneficial for the typical user.  There are new bells and whistles, but, there is nothing new that most people need or have any practical use for.  That we are asked to blindly open our company coffers and follow along just because is what is causing the harsh reaction.

Microsoft Office is the status quo monopoly program. Microsoft has enforced this with a very intentional regimen.  So, we are already pretty locked into Microsoft Office to begin with. Now, we have the extra expense of dealing with a different interface, that expense coming through productivity loss, training time, etc. With consistent interfaces, this is nominal. With such a drastic change, it is not.

As you point out, now we to have hire/train I/T staff to develop templates (or if we happen to have administrative staff who are "fluent" in word, they can do that), further I/T cycles to roll out those templates, and train staff, perhaps rollout a sharepoint server, maybe bring in a professional template developer, etc. 

These are a serious outlay of resources, which means a serious amount of money. And they are not reflected in the initial cost for the software.  That's fine for your 20,000 employee company, where it is easily absorbed.  It is onerous for your 50 employee company, or your 5 employee company. 

For my company, we have about 50 people and 1 I/T person (me).  So, hiring a person do deal with office doubles our I/T staff.  That, conservatively, comes out as $1000/user per year just to keep MS Office functioning as it had before.

We have nothing in place to deal with this (ok, we do have a domain, but that is the extent of it). We have no one on staff with the experience to do any of the other aspects.   Word template professional isn't on my CV.  There are maybe 3 people who use any function in Word that you couldn't get out of Wordpad. But everyone who gets the ribbon takes a productivity hit.

To use the assembly line metaphor.  Most users want a 1987 Honda Civic 4 cylinder, standard transmission with am/fm radio, no floor mats, a/c and in mint green.  And that is what they produce every single day.  Someone else might have floor mats, or might produce one that is blue, but that's about the sum total of variance.  So Office now is now a vast assemblly facility that can produce jets, ocean liners, space shuttles, etc; but requires extra staff to produce anything.  So to produce that same 1987 Honda Civic, your best strategy is to hire more people to do the same job?  That's a pretty bad strategy, and is the way you put yourself out of business.  Do less with more.  That is the strategy that Microsoft has put into place.  A vast market of people who's only purpose is make Microsoft products work as efficiently as they used to.  All paid for by Microsoft customers.  I fail to see the economic upside for anyone other than Microsoft and the new hires/consultants who are now required to manage Office.

My job list is already pretty lengthy.  To add presetting the various vehicles (which is really a single vehicle with limited options) our people will need, train them how to use them properly, how to do common fixes and to NOT TOUCH the assembly line means hiring another person.  Or at least hiring another person while I go off to classes to learn how to do those things.

Or hire a consultant.  What would it cost to hire a consultant to come in, setup templates, and a sharepoint server, etc.?  Tack on whatever additional costs would come with the server and licensing.  That is your base fixed cost that would apply to a 1 person company or a 1000 person company.  Then add on your variable cost per person for training and a certain amount of additional templates per different job type.  What kind of price tag would a 5 person, 50 person or 500 person company be looking at?  And how much for that person to come back every 2 years to rework the templates with every new version of Office?  At what point do those costs become unreasonable to the average company?  I don't know the answer, but to many, the choice is made to simply allow the users to muddle through and eat the productivity hit, or simply require their salaried users to absorb the cost through longer hours to make up the difference.  Which means that for every one of those companies, the answer is that the cost is unreasonable, they are just passing it on for the moment.

Microsoft missed the boat with Word (as well as other parts of the Office suite). Sure, you can do all sorts of powerful, geewhiz stuff. But you won't find 10% of companies who need any of that. And within those companies, I don't imagine that the majority of their users would have much use for it either. For the small percentage who can take advantage of it, it is probably great. But for everyone else, it is just extra time and cost.

Most people really don't know how to use Word.  They just know how to use Word for the tasks they need.  Those people don't need to know how to use Word.  This would probably be less of an issue, if any of my users were in Office all day long.  But, they aren't.  They use other applications for the bulk of the day, and Office as needed, which makes the pain of the additional cost that much more acute, and value so greatly reduced.

I struggle to come up with any model where the cost to get everything in place to make the newer versions of office as efficient as the older versions for our staff would not far outweigh the cost of the inefficiencies given that a new release occurrs every 2-3 years requiring overhauling much of that new overhead every time.   And this is something that I would guess to be true for most small to medium businesses.

You may call it whining simply because it is pointless, as Microsoft isn't going to budge. But the complaint has merit whether or not it is screaming into the darkness. That any and all criticism is met with stone faced silence from Microsoft, or "you just haven't given it a chance" or "you just are afraid of new things" from MS evangelists makes it doubly frustrating, as real and valid issues are ignored or rebuffed with personal attacks. MS doesn't even try to justify it's actions or provide a path to make it a positive to most of their customers.  And now that the third version with the ribbon is rolled out, there hasn't been enough of a move away from Office to force their hand.  From the other I/T folks I talk to, MS Office is not held out as the ideal for practical purposes, but rather begrudgingly as the standard, and being the standard is the only rationale for staying with it.   MS Office is the standard now mainly for historical reasons, not for anything positive they have done in the last decade.  It is becoming harder and harder to justify all the hidden costs that come with MS Office now.  I can only hope that means the tipping point is far closer than it used to be.

So in the end, we are told that the products we spend a fair bit of money on, and became the standard because of their relative ease and utility are now being pushed towards a small percentage of their base, and that if we (the rest) want the ease and utility we basically have to pay far more than ever before and become even more entrenched with a product that is ratcheting up the real costs.

And as long as I have experienced users who beg to hold on to their 6 year old XP boxes because they dislike the new version of Office that comes with a new box that much, I will maintain that Microsoft is going down the wrong path. Even if we are forced to go down that path, it is still the wrong path. Yes, I will do whatever I can to make that path as inexpensive and painless and possible, but it is still the wrong path.  Being forced to get used to something with no real benefit is the wrong path.

Office 2012 is the new Microsoft misadventure. So we get to force our users to use the ribbon interface and a smartphone interface to get their work done on their desktop computers. I doubt MS will be any more concerned about the typical user as they shift focus to the smartphone and tablet market.

Perhaps it is time to look back at Office Libre and the equivalents to see where they are these days. I think the CEO could use a system upgrade, and the jump from Office 2003 to 2012 might be enough to open her mind a tiny bit.

I find no fault in your going into consulting to help companies deal with Office, just as I find no fault in the doctor who treats the patient who was in a car wreck and lost both legs above the knee.  It is a valuable job and fulfills a need.  I do find fault in the logic that would inspire that Doctor to talk about the virutes of losing both legs above the knee, and even promotes voluntarily having legs removed reasoning that there are prosthetics that can do things your legs couldn't do before (post digger attachments, pogo stick attachments, etc.), and that they can hire physical therapists to eventually get back to functioning similarly to how they did before, or that they can go out and buy an electric wheelchair which provides some features that their legs did not (like a built in seat) and it still gets them from point A to point B just like their legs did.  Or the doctor that thinks that criticism/complaints about removing their legs due to the life long medical costs, or the pain of the procedure, or the lack of practical advantage is whining.

There is no choice for the person in the car wreck, but it doesn't make it something to be thrilled about either.

Templates! Don't get me started with that madness. I immediately assumed that a template for company letterhead, reports, forms, spreadsheets etc. would get us productive in ribbon ****... Only to find that "templates" are not saved into "my documents", but are buried deep in the program files where no one can find them - and they are not backed up in normal backup builds. Therefore templates disappear when the regular Windows slowdown requires a reformat of software. Yet more hours redistributing files and getting people back to work. Utter waste.

You can serve the templates at startup with scripts or during regular maintenance at night or through Sharepoint or, if you really really really want to give users a chance to screw them up, put them in their "my documents" folder and just point there (backstage, trust center, trusted location...).

I am sorry you find more enjoyment in whining than in stepping up to the plate when having some challenges spicing up your days and offering you the chance to expand your skills and know-how.

BTW, Corporate templates need to be professionally designed by either an administrative assistant who has both long time experience as a secretary and expert fluency with Word, or by a professional Word template developer in accordance with your corporate benchmarks. They are not documents saved with the .dotm extension, like you may also have immediately assumed.

The answer above is too simplistic.

We really don't have a choice.

We can use Word, in the current iteration, or try to learn a different wordprocessor that no one else uses.

Of course there is a MS Word monopoly, whether they admit it or not.

My computer crashed. I had to get new software.

I had been using MS Office 2003 and was pleased with it.

I had Office 2010 loaded, not knowing what I was in for.

If I could, I would reload 2003, but it won't let me do it.

As someone in another post says, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

To say that we should just get used to it is ****!

Why screw up something that works well?