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The Ribbon

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About this lesson

Identify the terminology and elements of the Ribbon.

Exercise files

Download this lesson’s exercise file.

The Ribbon
9.6 KB

Quick reference

Topic

Application Terminology – The Ribbon.

When to use

Use to understand the terminology and elements of the Ribbon.

Instructions

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT)

  • This is the single row of icons at the top left of the screen
  • Gives one click access to your most used commands
  • Unlike Windows, you cannot customize the QAT

The Ribbon

  • Made up of Tabs, Groups and Commands
  • Tabs are used to hold groups of similar natures
  • Groups are collections of related controls
  • Controls can consist of buttons, menus and galleries
  • TIP: Turn on group names via Excel --> Preferences --> View --> Group Titles

Keyboard Navigation

  • Unlike Windows Excel, ribbon commands cannot be activated by the keyboard

Dynamic Resizing

  • The Ribbon dynamically resizes depending on the screen size
  • Groups and controls will collapse into smaller versions so that all commands fit on screen
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  • 00:04 If you've never used Excel before, you obviously wanna understand a little bit
  • 00:08 about the user interface before we start jumping into how to build content and
  • 00:12 whatnot.
  • 00:13 And if you've come from the Windows world and
  • 00:15 this is your first experience with Mac Office, well, you're also gonna wanna
  • 00:19 understand a little bit about how this is built up as well.
  • 00:21 Because even though it's very similar to the Windows world,
  • 00:24 there's also some pretty stark differences in some places.
  • 00:28 The first thing that we want to recognise with Mac Excel is that we actually have
  • 00:32 two user interfaces to work with.
  • 00:34 The first one is the menu bar which runs across the top, and
  • 00:37 this has got all kinds of menu commands on it like file Open and Close and Save.
  • 00:43 It also has a bunch of other commands listed on the other menu items that you
  • 00:47 can use as well.
  • 00:49 Now, what's interesting is in the Windows world, we don't have a menu bar.
  • 00:52 What we have is we actually have the ribbon, and
  • 00:54 we can see that replicated inside Mac Office as well.
  • 00:57 And that's this next section down with the green header all the way through these
  • 01:00 first rows of icons up to this, where the interface turns white here.
  • 01:04 This is collectively what we call the ribbon, and
  • 01:07 it's broken down in to three main parts as well.
  • 01:10 This little set of icons here, the four icons across the top,
  • 01:13 is what we call the QAT or the quick access toolbar.
  • 01:17 And the intent of these icons is to give you one click access to some of
  • 01:21 the commands that Microsoft believes you'll use the most.
  • 01:25 Unfortunately, in Mac Office,
  • 01:27 this list is not customizable where it is in Windows Office.
  • 01:30 So if you are coming from the Windows world and
  • 01:32 you're trying to figure out how to customize it,
  • 01:33 you might as well stop because it can't be done at this point.
  • 01:36 We hope in future updates that changes.
  • 01:39 Underneath the quick access tool bar we see ribbon tabs.
  • 01:43 We've got the Home tab and the Insert tab and the Page Layout tab,
  • 01:46 etc., going across.
  • 01:48 Now, each of these particular tabs
  • 01:51 holds a whole bunch of commands that we can actually use, and
  • 01:55 these are gonna be the focus of what I'll use to show you how to work with Excel.
  • 01:58 I'm not gonna reach to the menu bar.
  • 02:00 I'm gonna generally reach to the ribbon to get things done.
  • 02:05 On the ribbon itself, it's actually divided up into several groups.
  • 02:09 And one of the things that's a little bit different with Mac Office here,
  • 02:11 is that the groups don't, by default, show names underneath them.
  • 02:15 But because it's easier to refer to items, we're going to change that right now.
  • 02:19 So, we're gonna go to the Excel menu, and we're gonna go to Preferences.
  • 02:23 I'm gonna click on View.
  • 02:26 And down near the bottom here, it says, In Ribbon, Show, and it has Developer tab.
  • 02:29 And we'll get to that in later modules.
  • 02:31 It also has Group Titles, so I'm just gonna click on those and say, close here.
  • 02:37 And you'll notice that we now have an additional row underneath our icons that
  • 02:40 tells us the name of the group.
  • 02:41 So, we have the font group, and the alignment group, the number group, etc.
  • 02:44 So, this makes it a little bit easier to follow the documentation that we provide
  • 02:48 with the course, as well as for me to teach you where to go on the ribbon.
  • 02:50 Rather than just saying, go to the Home tab,
  • 02:52 I can now get you a little bit closer with the commands as we talk about them.
  • 02:55 The font group holds a whole bunch of different pieces.
  • 02:59 There's some menus that are in here, okay, so
  • 03:01 if you click on these little drop down arrows it'll bring up a menu.
  • 03:03 There's another one right here that we can actually click on as well.
  • 03:07 It's made up of buttons.
  • 03:09 It's made up of other things as well, some other rich commands like Galleries.
  • 03:13 If we look at Format as Table and we click on that, we get some really big buttons,
  • 03:17 colorful ones, that come out.
  • 03:18 So this is what we actually call a gallery.
  • 03:21 Now, another difference between the Windows world and
  • 03:25 the Mac Office world here is that in the Windows world,
  • 03:28 we can actually navigate the ribbon by using keyboard shortcuts.
  • 03:32 And unfortunately, we can't do that in the Mac world.
  • 03:34 There's definitely keyboard shortcuts,
  • 03:35 we just can't navigate through the ribbon tabs using them.
  • 03:39 The last thing I wanna point out is that what you see on your screen here,
  • 03:44 the way the buttons are lined up, may not always match mine exactly.
  • 03:47 And the reason being is because the ribbon is adaptive.
  • 03:50 And if you look at these three big buttons right here, we can see
  • 03:53 right away that this is gonna end up changing when I start resizing my screen.
  • 03:58 You'll notice that the commands start to collapse.
  • 04:01 Everything is still there in the Format as Table, but
  • 04:03 the idea here is that as the application is resized and made narrower,
  • 04:08 it will actually collapse these commands so you can still get to them.
  • 04:11 But it wants to make sure that you have the ability to find them all, but
  • 04:15 they don't take over your entire screen.
  • 04:17 So, if your buttons look a little bit different than mine, don't worry about it.
  • 04:21 Generally, I'm gonna try and record with my stuff set as wide as possible, so
  • 04:25 they're full and big buttons,
  • 04:27 but if they do look a little bit different, that's why.

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The Work Surface
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