As you can see in the ribbon,
there's a number of tabs that go across the top of the screen.
Let's talk about the one really unique one, which is the File tab.
These other tabs display icons underneath them.
When I click the File tab, It opens up a whole new page.
And this page is what we call the backstage.
Now you're not going to see the word backstage anywhere.
But Microsoft refers to it this way, so we'll refer to it that way as well.
So the Backstage is a full page that allows us to do things like get
the information on the project, create new projects, print,
share, export, and much, much more.
We'll talk a lot about the features of the Backstage and future lessons.
Now when the Backstage is open, as you can see,
I can't really see the rest of the Microsoft Project user interface.
So how do I get back?
There's two ways to do that.
The first is to click this arrow icon at the top left of the screen, and
I'll do that right now.
And that brings me back to Microsoft Project.
If I click this File tab again and go back to the backstage, there's one
other way to get out, and that's to press the Escape or Esc key on your keyboard.
So I'm going to press the Escape key on my keyboard right now.
And you can see that did the same thing as clicking the back arrow icon.
Located to the right of the File tab are a number of other tabs.
I'm going to talk about the default out of the box tabs that you received first.
Those are task, resource report, project and view.
We'll talk about this format tab in just a little bit.
What's important to note with these tabs, is Microsoft tried to logically
group certain activities that you'd perform into these various tabs.
So if you want to work with tasks, you'd click the Task tab.
If you're doing some work with resources, you'd click the Resource tab.
You creating a report or modifying or printing a report,
you come to the Report tab, and so on.
Tabs are logically grouped, to focus you on certain activities.
Well, to perform those activities, you need some icons that you can select and
there's a lot of them.
You can see here just on the task tab,
there's maybe even more than two dozen icons.
But what you'll see here is that they're logically grouped.
And these logical groupings are located here.
So you can see, for example, this is a scheduled grouping and
this allows you to do things like schedule the task at 50% or 100%.
There's an insert grouping then allows you to create new tasks.
So for example, I'll just go ahead and click that icon.
You can see a new task was created.
One of the important things that you should know about the Tasks tab is
that this section over here is really focused on activities
that you might perform anywhere.
So for example, here's the copy, and cut, and paste icons,
you'd use that throughout Microsoft Project.
So you might find yourself in the Task tab,
even if you're not necessarily doing tasks related activities.
But everything to the right of this font grouping are things that
you'll be selecting focus just on working with tasks.
This is a contextual tab.
And what is that?
This Format tab here is only displaying because I happen to be in a Gantt
chart related view.
How do I know that?
If I look over here on the left side of the screen, you can see Gantt chart.
And so project knows that I'm in this special Gantt chart view.
And I'll talk a lot more about using the Gantt chart in future lessons.
But what it does know is that since it's in a Gantt chart view,
there's certain ways I might want to format the screen.
Let me go to the Report tab and create a report.
Now it no longer says Gantt chart tools,
it says Report tools and there's this Design tab.
Now you can have many contextual tabs.
So if I click on this chart area, and
if I had data inside my project this chart would be filled in.
But if I click it, you can see now we have two design tabs.
One design tab is focused on managing the report itself, the colors,
the theme, inserting shapes.
The other is focused just on the chart that I created.
So if I go ahead and click there now, you can see is just formatting the chart.
So those are contextual tabs.
There's two other areas that I mentioned are not really part of the ribbon, but
you should consider them part of the ribbon area anyway.
This is the Quick Access toolbar, which is on the left to Save, Undo and Redo.
You can actually customize this and
I'll show you how to do that in a future lesson.
And now we'll talk about two last items.
If you're familiar with older versions of projects,
you know that the Help icon used to be at the top right corner of the screen.
Now it has its own tab.
You can explore all these other menu icons that are displayed here, but
let's click on help.
That opens up the side panel.
And if I type for example, reporting and press Enter,
you can see I can quickly get to how to create a report.
To close the side panel because it does take up a lot of space,
click the x icon to the right of the word, help.
Finally, at the top right hand corner of the screen,
I want to point out this x icon.
If you're familiar with much older versions of Project,
you might be used to coming over here to the File menu and choosing Exit.
That does not exist anymore, so
you have to click the X icon up here to exit Project.