The Ribbon

Quick reference

• 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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