Before we can really get off the ground and running with Excel,
it helps to understand the user interface.
How do we use it?
Where do we go?
What can we do with it?
So that's what the purpose of this video is,
just to get familiar with some of the terminology around the ribbon.
So what is the ribbon?
Well, it's this great big piece here,
everything from the formula bar up is all part of the ribbon.
Now it's broken into two components.
The very first one is what we call the Quick Access Toolbar, or QAT,
and that's this piece at the top here, in dark green.
You'll notice that it has only a few commands on it.
One of them that's grayed-out is called AutoSave.
And as you can see from the tool tip task that pops up when I mouse over any menu
command, in this case, the AutoSave is not turned on because our file is
actually stored in a local folder on the computer that's not synced to One Drive or
SharePoint Online.
If it were, this button would actually be turned on and
automatically save any changes as I go along.
And that's really useful for
things like co-authoring which actually should be in Excel 2019 and higher.
Now you'll also notice that we have a Save icon.
And we've got the undo and redo commands, which are not
available at the moment because there's no commands that have been issued yet.
But I also have the ability under this little widget here to customize
the quick access toolbar and add other buttons.
Why would I do this?
Well, maybe I want one click access to the open functionality.
And that's what this whole little tool bar, the QAT is all about,
is getting one click access to the commands that are most important to us.
So maybe I always want to take a look at my print job before I print it out,
I'll choose to turn on Print Preview and
Print, and now on the ribbon this will always show up for me.
And if there's commands that aren't in this list, that I want, I can go to
More Commands, and at this point, I can actually find any command in Excel.
I may need to change this little drop down here to say I want commands that aren't
in the ribbon, or some different ones that are here.
But ultimately it will give me a list, and
I can add any single one by clicking on it and clicking Add.
And at that point it would show up on my quick access toolbar and
give me one-click access to that command.
So it's a very, very useful thing to be able to customize.
The next row down is what we call ribbon tabs.
We've got File, Home, Insert, Page Layout, Formulas, Data,
there's all kinds of different ribbon tabs.
This groups up commands that are in the same sort of sphere of influence,
if you will, that we may want to jump into.
Now I'm gonna go back to the Home tab for a second and
I'm gonna show you that we actually have one more type of tab that we can call up.
Notice what I'm gonna do,
is I'm gonna click somewhere down in this little blue table down here.
And when I click on it, I want you to watch the ribbon.
So here we go, and take a look, we got a new ribbon tab, table tools design.
And when I go and click on it,
it gives me commands that are very specific to working with this table.
If I click outside, the table tools Design tab goes away.
And when I click back in it again, back it comes.
This is what we call a contextual tab.
These tabs only show up when the item that can use it is in context or selected.
So there's lots of other different tabs that you won't have seen yet but
it will only show up when you actually have them available for use.
And this is good, because it doesn't clutter your user interface with a bunch
of commands that you can't use,
it only brings them into context when you actually need them.
So I'm gonna click outside to make that one go again.
Now the next thing I wanna call out is on any specific tab,
you'll notice that we have these groups.
There's the clipboard group and the font group and the alignment group and
this is where we group up like types of commands so that you can find them.
If you're ever wondering what one of them does just mouse over it and
the tool tip text will pop up to tell you.
You can go and you can change things like fonts for example, for the drop downs or
you could click little buttons to change the sizes up or down.
All of these items are available for your use.
But there's one more command on each group here that isn't as intuitive.
And it's this little box down in the bottom right hand corner.
This is called a dialog box launcher.
And when you click it, it takes you into even more advanced commands for
this particular cell group.
Some of the things that don't show in the ribbon.
So never be afraid to click on one of these,
because some of the most advanced features are actually buried underneath that.
Now, the next thing I wanna show you is, what if you don't want to use your mouse?
Well if you press the, well actually, let's go and
select something in a table for a second here first.
And now what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna press the Alt key, and you'll notice that
it pops up a bunch of information here, little letters and numbers on these tabs.
What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna press A, which is right underneath data.
Now if I go and press on that, it now takes me into the data tab and
it gives me the option to go and play around with a bunch of different things.
Notice that the icon to sort in ascending order is actually listed here with S-A.
So I'm going to type S-A and now it sorts my table.
And then dismisses the actual letters.
If I go back and
press Alt again by accident, I can press Esc to make it go away.
The last thing that I wanna show you in here is I wanna show you what actually
happens when we go and we click on my restore down.
And I want you to watch what happens to my ribbon.
And when I click it on it now,
you'll see that some of these commands have actually got a little bit shorter.
So if I go back to the Home tab, for example,
we can actually see what's going on here.
With book 1 behind, notice that my conditional formatting, format as table,
and cell styles have now collapsed into a small button.
And if I go and make this even narrower,
you can start to see how some of these things collapse down even smaller.
Under Cells, I still have Insert, Delete, and Format,
which is what's showing over here.
The reason this happens is that that ribbon dynamically resizes so
that all of the commands will fit on your tabs.
So if you're looking at my ribbon and it looks different than yours,
maybe you have a full gallery of styles showing there, or
you've got a few different options for tables.
The commands are all still there,
it's just that I'm running in a lower screen resolution than you are.
So just be aware of that, that the command is there somewhere,
we just have to find it.