When I included MS Office as an option to my new laptop I had no idea that it was going to look or work as differently as it does. It has the feel of having been developed with ease of making the final end-product appearance taking priority over the nuts and bolts of getting the sheet/workbook to work right in the first place.
All of the Office 2007 products use the new interface, which I find extremely frustrating to use. Most of the features that are easily found are the ones I rarely (if ever) use. The ones that I do tend to use are buried out of sight.
But you can add your own buttons above the ribbon and arrange them to suit your own preferences. It's not as compact as working from menus, and icons aren't always the best answer for eyes that in my case have just entered their 7th decade of duty, but at least it lets you work around some of the "noise".
Norm