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