> So where the old toolbar used to hint you the keyboard shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your mouse over a button, the new one doesn't

Although it is bad that it does not display the keyboard shortcuts, you can push ALT and then it will tell you which letter to push next. (I just guessed that pushing ALT might do something (possibly display a menu?), and I was correct (it did not display another menu, but it did help).) This is not quite as good as using the other keys such as CTRL, or numbered function keys, but it is possible.

(I do not use those programs on my own computer, but on some other computers I sometimes have to, and this helps, although not as well as it would to use menus and other stuff instead. However, in some cases I was able to use it because of knowledge of older versions of Microsoft Office; many of the keyboard commands are the same.)

I think the menu bar is much better, and toolbars should not be needed for most things. With the menu bar it will underline the letters to push with ALT and also will tell you what other keys to use (if any) for that command. (One thing that a toolbar is helpful for is to display status of various functions that can change, such as the current font. Due to that, you might still have a toolbar, but you do not need to put everything in the toolbar. Perhaps combine the toolbar with the status bar to make it compact.)

(Something else that would improve these word processing software would be the "reveal codes" like Word Perfect. A good implementation of reveal codes would avoid some of the problems of WYSIWYG. For spreadsheet software, arranging the grid into zones, and assigning properties (including formatting and formulas) to zones, and making references work with zones, etc, would be helpful, but I don't know that any existing software does that.)

In my own software I do try to make the display compact so that there is more room for other stuff, instead of needing to put all of the commands and other stuff taking up too much space in the screen. Good documentation is helpful to make it understandable; this would work much better than trying to design the software to not need documentation, since then the lack of doumentation makes it difficult to understand.