I spend 50% of my work time inside Excel. I'm much happier with the ribbon than I ever was with the older versions of Excel. I hated trying to find all the odd features in that labyrinth of a menu tree. I also like the stickiness of the ribbon when I do the same thing several times in a row which I often do. There are other huge improvements not ribbon related that I appreciate in Excel 2007 and 2010 such as the functions SUMIFS and COUNTIFS and the whole tables way of working with lists.

I haven't switched to W8 for work yet, but I don't particularly see why it won't work for me. I spent some time on my daughter's W8 laptop and am sure I can set it up just fine for work.

Microsoft saw the tea leaves. They have a solid desktop o/s, but more and more of their core constituency was using phones and tablets as their primary interface. MS needed to make a major move to capture that business as people were more likely to also buy their laptops etc in the same line. I see this all the time on this board. Many people who are happy with the iPad etc are asking about going to a Mac. Makes sense to me. I think MS has made some good moves in the right direction, but obviously have a long way to go to make a single o/s work well on all platforms.